Listen out

Erin Kissane’s four-part piece on Meta in Myanmar is required reading for anyone working in any part of the tech industry right now. Her in-depth analysis makes plain how culpable Meta was—and still is—in accelerating genocide in Myanmar. But in reading it I was also struck by the ways that ordinary organizational design can create such a gulf between (1) the product managers, designers, and engineers working to build a product, and (2) the people who are being actively harmed by that product—such that the harm stands little chance of being interrupted. There are no easy solutions to this problem, but Kissane notes that we have the obligation to listen out: “[Listen] out for signals that we’re steering into the shoals. Listening out like it’s our own children at the sharp end of the worst things our platforms can do.”