Why is tech news coverage so negative?
Why is tech news coverage so negative?
It starts and end with tech.
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Consider the opener of this CNN article on SpaceX’s Starship rocket launch on Nov. 19th.
“SpaceX’s gargantuan deep-space rocket system, Starship, safely lifted off Saturday morning but ended prematurely with an explosion and a loss of signal.
The Super Heavy booster and Starship spacecraft successfully separated after liftoff, as the Starship lit up its engines and pushed away. That process ended up destroying the Super Heavy booster, which erupted into a ball of flames over the Gulf of Mexico…”
Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starship rocket and spacecraft lost in second test flight | CNN
Reading this + the hyperlink title, you’d think we’d gotten nowhere! Not until solidly in the second half of the article does it contextualize what the launch was designed for.
“SpaceX had already said it would consider the mission a success if Starship made it past hot staging.
But after hot staging, the Super Heavy booster began tumbling out of control and exploded over the Gulf of Mexico just moments later.”
Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starship rocket and spacecraft lost in second test flight | CNN
Sooo, the point of the launch was to test a particularly difficult process of building a rocket that can go to Mars (aka the hot staging process) and the rocket achieved that, so the launch was a success?
Why then is the hyper link title : Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starship rocket and spacecraft lost in second test flight instead of One step closer to interplanetary life?
Oddly, it’s become fashionable to condemn, poke fun at, and tease technological progress; we’ve fallen into this bit where technology is treated as this pie-in-the-sky thing that’s meant for the rich and detached from the real workings of the world.
Where does this come from?
Why do we do it?
Let’s peel back this facade and see what’s underneath.
STEM is taught and practiced separate from communication.
STEM is typically taught as a pure discpline; absent of real world constraints. It’s wonderful to learn of & practice mathematical theorems, complex physical machines and computer system designs without worrying what your local HOA would think of building a supercollider in your neighborhood.
We can allow human imagination to run wild; dreaming of flying cars, multiplanetary life & tectonic shifts to day-to-day life without getting caught up in the mundance.
This abstraction enables greater freedom to think, and all great inventions today are downstream of great thoughts.1
Another is the emphasis on solo work in STEM education, from elementary to college; you take a class, do projects, and get a grade. Collaborative projects typically are the exception as opposed to the rule; the skills needed to facilitate collaboration, such as communication, becomes an after-thought.This converts into software engineers aiming to be “cracked” and the much-mythologized “10x developer”.2
Once you graduate and enter the workplace, among software engineers, it’s relatively common to do documentation (a form of async communication) after a project ends, delay doing so or simply leave it incomplete.3
Geography shapes tech culture.
As one of the major global hubs of innovation (if not the most), Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Peninsula have massive influence over tech culture.
From the notion of a startup to the existence of venture captial, much of the way in which tech culture is described today was created & shaped here.
Therefore the design of such places has immense weight on technology processes, thought and culture.
For example, San Francisco Peninsula and Silicon Valley are both:
a) an expensive to live in &
b) a places that lacks serendipity in the way in which people get around.
With rent being $2-3K/mth for a studio, only people who earn six-figure salaries can afford housing.
And who tends to make that kind of income? Either finance or tech; you are self-selecting what kind of people are in the environment.3
Since everyone around you is in tech or the same income level, why would you think any differently? Why would you explain what a Python script is or consider how expensive a meal is?
But the second reason is just as big.
Car culture is huge (my SF peeps know about those parking tickets), public transportation is limited in adequate/speedy coverage and the walking environment is less than ideal. The messy intanglement of all three with subpar parking, bus stops and walking conditions lead to inefficiencies all around. If a machine learning scientist lives in Mission Bay and a chemist in Outer Sunset (a 2hr 30 min walk, 51 min by bus, 24 min by car), what’s the likelihood they’ll meet? Without overlapping social circles bringing them together at a particular time & place, they may as well be on different planets.
With this one-two combo, you see a lot of tech hackathons where many of the same things get built. As a friend put it, “Why are we working on delivering sushi faster?”.
With such little influence encourages people to have interactions with others different to them, you end up with groupthink on a sizeable level.
Therefore, tech’s communication style goes relatively unquestioned and on a meta level, you have a serious lack of contextualized communication between the scientific community and the general public.
Enter the Mainstream Media.
The media news cycle for scientific advancements follows something like this:
An incremental scientific advancement occurs.
It gets picked up, reworked and posted. A little of the nuance is removed. No results becomes sub-optimal, sub-optimal becomes OK, OK becomes good.
The new piece gets picked up. A little more of the nuance is removed. Sub-optimal becomes OK, OK becomes good, good becomes great.
The new hyped version gets picked up, reworked and posted. OK becomes good, good becomes great, great becomes fucking awesome.
Someone catches the new, new hyped version and it goes viral.
Massive overhype follows, which then leads to peak excitement. The future is here! We’re going to have room-temperature semiconductors and build wonderous new technology.
Given the hype, scientists fact-check the claims and their reciprocal experiments reveal a small increment of progress and many more hurdles to meaningful invention. The emerging progress fails to meet the absurdly high expectations.
The hype crashes and converts into disappointment & disapproval with fingerpointing at researchers, scientists and entrepreneurs for misleading the public. Where did our LK-99 room temperature semi-conductors go?
Disillusionment with science as whole follows. “It’s such a scam!” People then relate to technology as pie-in-the-sky initiatives that is completely detached from society’s needs. Technologists then reject the general public as negative Nancies who want to regress to the Stone Age and who clearly cannot see the utility of emerging technology.
An incremental scientific advancement occurs…
A massive tug-of-war emerges where communication and progress are viewed as being diametrically opposed. To speak of technological progress, in any capacity, is to give ammunition that will be used against you.
Optimism is viewed as naive at best and misleading the public at worst.
Good ideas then die or become so massively miscontextualized so as to become meaningless in the eyes of others.
The toxic back-and-forth has more than just ideas as its victim.
As all of progress lies downstream of great ideas, the greatest tragedy lies in progress being delayed or halted.
The father whose stuck in traffic instead of home with his son to see his first steps.
The planets that we never step foot on.
The stairs that cancer patients never climb.
The cost is real and extends far beyond rocketships and space billionaires; technology’s inherent purpose is to give people greater control over their lives.
And when you unjustly limit technology, you limit people’s freedom to live great lives.
To prevent this, we have to shift how we operate.
As much as it’s important to be able to dream of world without constraints, the real world is ultimately where technology is deployed. And one of the greatest constraints is the coordination of people to a goal.
Now to some degree, individual competency is important; I have to be sure that you meet a certain standard on a specific subject.
But beyond individual comptency, you have to be able to convince others to work with you and coordinate on a level beyond your own head. Overall effectiveness on a team, department and company-level matters more than the effectiveness of just one-person.
The work of one person is one small part of the overall process.
At my company, I remember we were designing a product when we realized we weren’t on track to deliver a properly built safety system, of which I was prototyping. Since wireless power transmission via high power radio frequency beams can result in surface burns, a failure to shutoff power in presence of humans was a major health concern. When the leadership realized this, it skyrocketed in importance to be the company’s number one priority.
They put 13+ engineers, product designers, senior management and industry specialists in a room and put everyone’s heads together that to figure out how to ensure our safety system was meeting the requirements and delivered on time.
Fortunately, the prototyping and testing was complete for the version 0 that went out the door for field testing.
And what I discovered is that a) constant communication ahead of time would have resolved this issue and b) each person has unique strengths and weaknesses to bring to the table.
One person may be better at understanding one technical component in a larger system. Another may be better at organizing people and distilling a core, common concern out of a mess of chatter. The other person may be good at questioning the customer and understanding the current regulations surrounding a product and how that translates into engineering objectives.
Team work makes the dream work but there is no team work without great communication.
People are not mind readers and not matter how many strengths people have, it won’t matter if they don’t know what problem you’re facing.
By fundamentally shifting engineering culture, I strongly believe that this will results in a bubble-up phenomenon.
A person communicates better —> teams communicate better —> companies communicates better —> The world gets contextualized news.
Additionally, our teams, are also shaped by our environment.
Housing affordability affects who we meet, what ideas get thrown around, what companies get started and general tech culture.4 Making SF peninsula + Silicon Valley (San Mateo,Palo Alto, Mountain View, Redwood City) more accessbile to all kinds of people thru lower housing costs (i.e. building more housing) would increase the kinds of interactions and ideas that generate Good Quests.5
And beyond that, improving regional-wide transportation system (not unlike the density of coverage of Tokyo’s subway) would be wise. It’s the same reason why colleges are powerhouses of innovation. Yes, students have a lot of time and little financial constraints but the sheer serendipity of being surrounded by a lot of people and easy access lends itself to the conditions of innovation.
You want the chemist and the ML engineer to bump into each other at a train stop and launch a hackathon around creating life-saving drugs.
You want the physicist and the middle school teacher to catch each other at the grocery store and discuss how STEM education is taught in middle school.
You want the statistician and the web designer to play tennis together and then create beautiful ways of communicating data to the world.
Ultimately, these foster better exposure and interactions between people from different thought piles & walks of life. Instead of a tug-of-war, we should treat communication as a new vector to technological progress that better aligns the work with what the world needs.
When heard, people not only get a say, but a stake in the vision.
Maybe then we'll see some better headlines.
- Kiran
This is partly why technologists are a bit detached from the “real” world. Sometimes a little distance to dream helps
Interestingly enough, in some circles, it’s become status-worthy to signal being “cracked” via various associated activities: working late nights, high caffiene consumption, social isolation, long hours, & odd sleeping hours. Some people geniunely are obsessed and for better or worse, sacrifice their health to an idea/dream. But I do wonder a) how much of it is “monkey see, monkey do” and b) how much more could be accomplished with a longer time horizon, set sleep hours, regular exercise, decent social interaction and intense focus?
Working at a startup where things move fast, raises hand, guilty as charged.
Imagine the kind of innovation you’d have if anyone of any walk of life could quit their job, afford housing and have time to experiment. What might we see?! Tragically, this isn’t the case anymore, the garage startup mythos is quite dead.
And this awareness is slowly growing in SF. You have movements such as GrowSF, TogetherSF, AbundantSF, people like Micheal Lai, Scott Weiner running for office, initiatives like the Neighborhood, each in some way aligned with encouraging the development of more housing and/or generating more community. As Garry Tan, the President of Y-Combinator puts it, “Even if you are not interested in government, government is interested in you.”
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Kiran’s Gems 💎
Looks like El Segundo (just south of LA) is the new Palo Alto for hardware.
“Competitive math was just one piece of it. We started school at 8 and went until 4:30… None of it meant anything… The worst part was knowing that it was all going to be extruded into a few lines in an application form, that a committee would review for about ninety seconds before moving onto the next perfectly interchangeable application from some other straight-A tryhard.” Benedict on his high school days and pressure of applying to Ivy League colleges.
"Low social interaction was reported to be similar to smoking 15 cigarettes a day and to being an alcoholic, to be more harmful than not exercising, and to be twice as harmful as obesity." I’m incredibly grateful that I spent this year stepping into finding community & friendship. Turns out there’s a serious measurable cost to not doing so.