An essay by our new CEO, Viivi Lähteenoja.
On the 21st of July this year, something in my world shifted. It was the Sunday when Joe Biden announced he would not be the Democratic party’s candidate for the presidency of the US. Shortly after this announcement, Biden went on to endorse his Vice President Kamala Harris as his party’s nominee. And in seemingly no time, the entire party and its supporters seemed to have formed an orderly army behind Harris. And out here in Finland, on the other side of the world, I could feel something suddenly shifting.
It was hope.
The opposite of hope is not despair. The opposite of hope is apathy, numbness. And wherever you stand on the political spectrum, the buzz of new energy was palpable on that Sunday and the days following it. The memes, the videos, the jokes, the fundraising calls – people were suddenly acting who had not done so for a long time until then, or indeed ever. They had been shaken out of their apathy of ignoring yet another deeply predictable turn of the political machinery whose reverberations are felt, for better or for worse, around the whole world.
I was jealous.
“That is what I want to feel like.” Because the field where I work is in desperate need of hope, of a Harris moment. My field is broadly “the digital” and how it could be so much better for so many more people than it currently is. Sometimes it feels like things are only getting increasingly worse for more and more people. Algorithms that discriminate. Data sets that exclude. Technologies that kill. Only it’s not the algorithms, the data, or the technologies. It’s people who discriminate, exclude, and kill. The digital is merely a new vehicle for people to carry out these impulses.
But the absence of pain is not pleasure.
There are countless tireless and invaluable individuals and organisations out there who are drawing attention to how the digital, and tools like AI, are currently harming real people in very real ways, and how this could and should be stopped. They are trying to stop the pain. But I’m not one of them. We need the absence of pain to feel pleasure, but it is not enough on its own. That’s why I focus on studying, imagining, and asserting that good which is possible with the digital: with algorithms, data, and technologies. I’m trying to bring the pleasure. And for that work, I – and we – need hope.
So let’s look inside the box.
I’ve always been intrigued by the very end of the story of Pandora’s Box. When Pandora opens the box, sickness, death, and untold other evils escaped and entered the world. But there was a but – hope alone remained in the box. Frankly I don’t know the deepest meaning of it all, but I do know this: there’s something special about hope, and we can find it in the same place as where the pain and evil came from. If people discriminate, exclude, and kill using algorithms, data, and technologies, can these things not also be used to empower, include, and nurture people? This is the hope inside the box: yes, yes they can.
This is not techno-optimism.
This is human optimism: the belief that people can and will do good. I believe that humans are by default and fundamentally good. This flies in the face of many of our experiences of the world, but I need to believe it to stay sane, to stay working. Fundamentally, I believe that people want good things – for themselves and for others. The size of a person’s moral universe may vary: that is, who (and what) is counted as belonging to the “others” for whom we wish to do good. But we do wish that.
So what now?
“Things don’t have to continue the way they have always been.”
People want good for each other. They can use algorithms, data, and technologies to do some of that good. But will we? I hope so. And that is what my career is built on, that hope. It is certainly not always unwavering. I need moments, moments like the 21st of July this year, that remind me that things don’t have to continue the way they have always been. It was in one of these moments that I took the latest step in my career and accepted the appointment to become CEO of The MyData Company. Margaret Mead famously said: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” At the helm of this company, this small group of thoughtful, committed citizens, I dare to hope that I can be part of such change. And in the words of another great wordsmith, Lana Del Rey, “hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have”.