Ignoring the harm is the pattern 📝Judy Estrin identifies in industries whose incentives reward growth over consequence: executives rarely set out to do damage — they ignore early signals, dismiss externalities as outliers, and believe their vision of the future is better for everyone.
On "📝Don't Be Evil" (Everything They Know, Ep. 1, cited with permission of host Ari Andersen), Estrin places tech in a lineage of harm-blind industries — tobacco hearing early problems, pharmaceutical companies hearing about opioid addiction, the sugar industry — and distinguishes degrees of culpability: the Sacklers "absolutely recognized it and went for it," while others were wrong for "ignoring the harm, not paying attention to the externalities, convincing themselves that it's an outlier." Her verdict on Facebook follows that shape: the signs came before 2016 and were ignored, and "unless you have the values, ethics, integrity to say, I'm not going to take that step — you end up where we are today."
The blindness is manufactured by incentives, not malice. Investors reward growth and momentum over everything; companies manage to metrics, and as she puts it on "📝While We Were Looking" (Ep. 2), "you actually can't measure goodness... when you're driving a company and the metrics are measuring growth or measuring success, you sometimes don't see these signals." Privilege compounds it — living where you neither see nor feel the harms — and "if you don't look for harms, then you make different decisions."
Her remedy points outward and inward at once: "The companies can't solve this. They can be part of the solution, but what we need as a society is to incentivize them to participate in a solution" — and unless we start "teaching and training our entrepreneurs and leaders and rewarding and having the incentives be something different," the same culture simply rebuilds itself as "surveillance capitalism 2.0."
The operative discipline we take from this: look for the harms on purpose, because the metrics never will — and design the incentives before the incentives design you.