Melanie Says I'm Being Too Nice
A couple weeks ago, Melanie Ensign and I had a hard look at the Product Safety Resistance Playbook.
Melanie had two seismic insights:
- It's not just a list of clever corporate stratagems, it's a list of ways that people who lead companies systematically reinforce an immoral agenda and fortify their comfortable status quo. It's a list of corporate behavior "dark patterns", deliberately designed to mislead, deceive, and evade accountability for safe products. As I write this, it strikes me that we have (i.e. this version of industrial capitalism has) normalized corporate domination and bullying of customers and employees. And these are choices deliberately made by corporate leaders.
- We criminalize individual behavior but we almost never criminalize corporate behavior when it comes to product safety. Given the magnitude of harm that digital products are capable of, one wonders if it's not time to radically rethink governance entirely– not as a call for new laws, but applying existing laws and existing precedents to digital products.
I've also noticed that the tactics outlined in the playbook are deployed by anyone in a position of relative power who wants to maintain the status quo of dominance– whether it's a person in government, a company, or a domineering partner. In fact the whole top part of the list of tactics is classic DARVO (deny, attack, reverse victim, and offender). These are the tactics deployed by abusers. And I think this is why Melanie felt the naming of the Product Safety Resistance Playbook was too kind.
So I'm starting to consider renaming it. Maybe to Corporate Accountability Avoidance Tactics. Probably still too benign...