Man Made Mess
It's about technology, ethics, and how to make things better
[Update: July 22, 2025]
The groundwork for this Substack was laid back in 2019, but a lot of things have happened that got in the way. I became a part-time carer/caregiver for my partner after her first brain hemorrhage (in San Diego, California), then graduated to being a full-time carer/caregiver after her second haemorrhage (in Coventry, England, hence the different spelling).
Over the past six years I have slowly learned how to keep on researching and writing within the time and resource constraints of being an unpaid carer, the preferred term here in England. However, it has taken me longer to come up with a coordinated strategy for publishing my research. I have put out multiple articles on Medium, LinkedIn, YouTube, and my blog. I have spoken at a couple of conferences and delivered some online classes. My thinking now is that I will pull stuff together here on Substack.
Welcome to Man Made Mess, a periodical publication, created and produced by me, Stephen Cobb. My goal with this project is to make the case for fundamental changes in the way that technology is created, funded, and deployed. I believe that these changes are urgently needed to prevent our planet choking to death on a surfeit of poorly conceived and badly executed technology. It is time to fix the mess we’ve made of technology, and by ‘we’ I mean men.
Who am I to talk about this? I’m a technologist. I even have an award to prove it. The son of an engineer whose father and brother were engineers, I was born within site of a car factory in the heart of car-making country. I started working with computers in the late 70s and I’ve spent four decades in the digital technology industry, heavily focused on predicting and mitigating the risks that it creates, while helping people achieve the benefits it can bring.
In the course of my research and advocacy in cybersecurity and data privacy, I’ve worked with many people whose job it is to protect information systems from criminals. In recent years that job has been getting much harder. Each new wave of technology fails to fix the problems with old technology, even as it creates a whole new set of problems. And when I step outside of cyberspace, I can see that this has always been the way of things with humans and technology, not just for decades, but for centuries.
The history of technology has generally gone like this: Some men perceive a problem and invents a new technology to solve it. Other men decide this technology has great potential. They put up the means to develop and deploy it, despite some early warnings about its possible shortcomings. As deployment gathers pace, more warnings are sounded, but the technology now has traction, the financial upside is in sight, and male egos — including those of the inventors, investors, developers, and early adopters — are on the line.
Over time, the warnings increase but they are dismissed; critics are derided as weak, nervous, lacking in the right stuff. They are labeled Luddites. Despite all this, when things start to go wrong — often in ways predicted by those Luddites — many men remain eager to invent even newer technology to solve those problems. Inevitably, the new inventors and their backers ignore warnings about the downsides of these inventions, creating yet more problems. And I am certainly not the first person to look at technology like this.
Back in the 1930s, H.G. Wells was talking of the consequences of tech like automobiles and aircraft. Those inventions and powers are still with us, along with so many more, from nuclear power and weaponry to plastics and genetic engineering, computers and databases to communications networks and artificial intelligence. And yes, “every one is fraught with consequences,” the risks of which are cumulative.
My research into the root causes of this mess revealed one consistent factor: men. By studying male attitudes to technology it is possible to see how patriarchy has made a mess of technology. I began to research this aspect of the history and ethics of technology around 2015 when I was studying for my masters in security and risk management. That research effort is ongoing and in this newsletter I will share past lessons and new insights, free from outside influence, as an independent researcher, not beholden to any employer.
If you’re still with me at this point, let me be clear: when I talk about men making a mess of technology, I’m talking about the consequences of a set of attitudes and behaviours found predominantly in men, especially in a certain sort of man, but definitely not in all men. However, as a man I feel that all men have a responsibility to identify and address those attitudes and behaviors.
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In the mean time, tell your friends!