Anil Dash

One of the great struggles in trying to challenge racist aspects of culture is that we've moved from overt, obvious, overbearing racist practices to things that are much more nuanced, and which are often the result of bad habits or ignorance from otherwise well-intentioned people.

This complexity makes it more difficult to fight these instances of racism because we lose a lot of time, and endure a lot of time-consuming explanations, just to get people on the same page in talking about solving the problem. Obviously, this has been on my mind since writing about Popchips' unfortunate ad campaign a month ago; Despite writing in bold that "I think the people behind this Popchips ad are not racist" at the top of my post, many of the responses came from people who could not distinguish between a company or individual carrying out a racist act and the fundamental identity of "being" a racist. Very, very few people identify as racist, but nearly all of us are guilty of racism at one point or another.

In ruminating on this point a bit, I stumbled upon what I think is the clearest way to express this idea for me: Racist culture is a factory defect. In the case of me criticizing a potato chip company for making a racist ad, it's easy to understand this metaphor:

• I believe the company has good intentions, and is run by people who do not want to be racist or to create racist contributions to culture.
• Nevertheless, the company made a cultural contribution that was predicated on racist ideas.
• It's particularly egregious to trade in racist ideas when it's not for artistic purpose or to comment on society, but to sell a product.
• Therefore, the most helpful thing I can do is to help them fix the broken process within their company that produced this unfortunate result.

On the Factory Floor

Imagine, for example, that Popchips had sold a bag of chips that contained mouse droppings in it. We've all read news stories like this, and we're familiar with how they go. The company apologizes to the person who bought the product, and optionally offers to replace it. Then they talk about how they'll look into their manufacturing and distribution processes to identify how the problem occurred, and work diligently to prevent it from happening again.

But here's what they don't do. They don't say, "We apologize if anybody is offended by the presence of mouse droppings in their potato chips". Because all right-thinking people know that's inherently offensive, and it doesn't take interpretation to do so. They seldom fire someone for these kinds of errors unless there was willful negligence, instead preferring to train and monitor their employees to ensure that such slip-ups never happen again. They don't say "We have some people on the team who keep mice as pets, and they didn't think it was that gross, so we didn't think anyone would object". Because good companies take pride in doing the right thing for its own sake.

While I'm speaking of this as a theoretical, there's a great real-world example of this in the case of Le Pain Quotidien, as detailed in this great Freakonomics podcast. The high-end bakery café faced a huge PR nightmare after a diner found a dead mouse in her salad. Though it took some time and they didn't initially get it right, the company eventually stepped up and made a no-excuses apology, but more importantly they changed the way they work to try and prevent the problem from ever happening again.

The Assembly Line

Through this lens of the "factory defect", we can look at other similar cultural insensitivities much more effectively, and focus not on blaming and shaming the companies that do these things, but on fixing what's broken in these companies which allow these hurtful things to happen in the first place.

Take Mitu Khandaker's brave and beautiful recent post about Dove's hurtful description on their packaging, which implies people of our skin tone are abnormal. In this case, Dove had built up a lot of good will over the years specifically by promoting a message of inclusiveness, so this seemed particularly inapt for the company. But Mitu's take on the issue addressed the problem specifically in terms of the personal impact it had on her, an effective and courageous way of making the company understand the impact of their error, in the same way they'd intuitively know the impact of an error that had to do with the safety or hygiene of their product:

I almost did not write this. I’ve felt apologetic about it to an extent where even bringing up my skin colour, and how angry all those experiences have made me, has felt uncomfortable for me. Writing this is uncomfortable for me. I don’t like drawing attention to it, even when it is on my own terms. I am trying very hard to get over that.

Who among us, though, would apologize for pointing out there was a fly in our soup? We know it's gross, we know a restaurant doesn't want to serve it. And a good restaurant would respond not just by being contrite, but by thanking a patron for pointing out the flaw so that they have the chance to remedy it.

Companies which accidentally create exclusionary, racist, sexist or hurtful advertisements or promotions should embrace the same opportunity. A good restauranteur knows that fixing a bad service problem can sometimes make a customer more of a fan than if they had never encountered a problem in the first place. Jason Alexander is experiencing something analogous as I write this, earning the respect of organizations like GLAAD by publishing a thoughtful and sincere statement that's not just an apology, but an explanation of the process that yielded racist culture, showing that he understands why we have to talk about fixing our factories when they create defective products.

Dove made a great first step in explaining the genesis of their error. Ideally, we'd encourage personal accountability along with these explanations, with individuals claiming responsibility within companies for these errors in the same way they have to when they're responsible for financial misstatements and the like; This is only fair given the amount of vitriol and hatred that many of us face when we speak up to criticize these companies.

But until the time when they don't need to issue these statements at all anymore, the best companies can do when they make something offensive in culture is to explain the method of manufacture for their broken contribution to culture. The tedious, familiar pattern of issuing a non-apology apology ("We're sorry if anyone was offended...") and then trying to bury the entire conversation doesn't make things better, and it puts the burden on the victims of these misadventures to right the wrongs, instead of laying it at the feet of their creators, as should be rightly done.

And those of us who speak up on these issues have an obligation, as well. Too often, we fall back on the simple, lazy statement of accusing a company or institution of being racist, instead of assuming the best of the individuals within it and assuming that the inefficiencies and injustices within that organization resulted in its worst traits being demonstrated. Let's critique them with actionable complaints when we can, giving them steps to right the wrongs they inflict. No, it's not fair that we have to do it, nor should it be our obligation to do so. But we are the ones privileged with the understanding and education about these issues, and we owe it to the communities we represent to carry this burden sometimes even though it's not fair. At least until we own the factories ourselves and can make sure they don't produce defective products.

This month's Wired magazine includes a milestone I'm incredibly excited about: My first published print column! You can read Safe In Its Shell, my exploration of the long history of introducing software lockdown mechanisms to mainstream computer operating systems. I keyed on the Gatekeeper feature in Apple's upcoming version of OS X which locks down which applications can run on your computer, and how it uses a method that was first broadly described by Microsoft as part of its Trustworthy Computing efforts a decade ago.

I'm happy with how the piece came out (I've never worked with an editor before!) but I thought that, before I republish the piece on my own site, I'd share some of the key resources that I found valuable in understanding the ideas which informed by column.Put another way, if that column were a movie, these are the DVD extras.

Microsoft's History With Palladium

• Microsoft did a briefing at NIST in 2002 about the basic principles behind Palladium
• The original Newsweek launch story about Palladium by Steven Levy is still up on the Daily Beast website
• And you can still find the original "Trustworthy Computing" memo by Bill Gates (in RTF format!) which acted as a rallying cry for the troops at Microsoft. (Looks like they added an HTML version as well.)
• And of course, Gates' memo was inspired by Craig Mundie's original TrustWorthy Computing memo (in convenient Microsoft Word format), which Mundie revisited on its 10th anniversary in a retrospective writeup
• I'd written a bit about that original Trustworthy Computing memo a few years ago myself
• Microsoft still has an active Trustworthy Computing site which offers a detailed timeline on the initiative, and presages their later site about the mellifluously-named successor program, the  Next-Generation Secure Computing Base
• And though it's apparently no longer on Microsoft's site, the intense scrutiny of the original responses is evident in this cached version of Microsoft's original Palladium FAQ

The blowback to the Palladium announcement in 2002:

Lots of folks took exception to Palladium's announcement. Some highlights from the time:

• David Coursey, then of ZDNet, explains why the effort couldn't be trusted
• The Register called it an attempt to eradicate the GPL and destroy Linux
• Robert Cringely naturally deemed it "diabolical"
• Chris Hoofnagle from EPIC described Microsoft's Palladium presentation as "Orwellian"
• Microsoft exec Mario Juarez did an interview on Palladium in June 2002
• And Security Focus had a contemporary story at the time of Palladium's launch
• EPIC naturally offered some detailed resources about Palladium.
• Catherine Flick at the University of Sydney offered a detailed analysis in her June 2004 paper
• Ross Anderson's 2003 FAQ was also a seminal resource
• Microsoft then started to back off of Palladium (by then rebranded as "NGSCB"), as also mentioned Ars Technica
• Naturally, Microsoft immediately backtracked, vaguely reaffirming its commitment to Palladium shortly thereafter

Apple resources on Gatekeeper

Meanwhile, Apple's rollout of Gatekeeper has been very deliberate, and fairly low-key:

• A characteristically understated consumer explanation of Gatekeeper offers up Apple's only real customer-facing description of the feature:

"Advanced features in OS X already help protect you from malware no matter where you download apps. Gatekeeper brings you even more security options — and even more control. For maximum security, you can install and run only apps from the Mac App Store. You can choose to install and run apps from the Mac App Store and apps that have a Developer ID. Or you can install all apps from anywhere, just as you can today. You can even temporarily override your setting by Control-clicking, and install any app at any time. Gatekeeper leaves it all up to you."

• Rich Mogull (what a great name!) offered a detailed overview of Gatekeeper's functions and also summarized the feature in Tidbits
• Steven Frank had a thoughtful take on Gatekeeper

"I have a personal flaw in the form of a small conspiracy theorist who lives in my head. He worried that this may have been created as just a temporary stepping stone — like Rosetta for the Intel transition, or Carbon for the OS 9 to OS X transition — and that one day, the Mac App Store-only option might still be enforced.
But I can’t find it in me to disparage this goodwill effort that Apple has undertaken to not turn every third-party developer upside-down with regard to app distribution. To me it’s a great sign that they’re aware and at some level sympathetic to our concerns, while remaining committed to a high-security experience for users."

Update: I just got off the phone with Popchips founder Keith Belling, who was sincere and contrite as he offered a thoughtful, apologetic response that indicates he understood much of what I was trying to say here. I'm cautiously optimistic to see the company's response, and willing to give them time to do it properly. Maybe we can get a good result.

I like Popchips; I probably eat them once a week. Well, I used to. But they stopped that habit, and revealed a much larger, more complex problem with their company and with the ecosystem of people and companies that they partner with.

Popchips asked their celebrity spokesperson (and Popchips investor, if this Quora thread is to be believed) Ashton Kutcher to make a series of advertisements for their product. Pretty standard stuff, though the idea of tying the campaign to his status as a newly-single man is a bit odd since he went through a fairly prominent divorce that ended with a noticeable amount of public drama. Tastelessly cashing in on one's personal life is the stuff of celebrity, though, so let's sell some potato chips!

I've always wanted to have very positive feelings about Ashton Kutcher — he's a totally mainstream celebrity who seemed to have sincerely embraced the tech startup world that I spend so much of my time in, and that should be a validation of our impact. Then I saw this shit right here:

Don't watch it; It's a hackneyed, unfunny advertisement featuring Kutcher in brownface talking about his romantic options, with the entire punchline being that he's doing it in a fake-Indian outfit and voice. That's it, there's seriously no other gag.

Naturally, a bunch of us (initially mostly Indian diaspora members whom I follow on Twitter) started complaining about it, and a number of like-minded allies also registered their offense as well. I can't imagine I have to explain this to anyone in 2012, but if you find yourself putting brown makeup on a white person in 2012 so they can do a bad "funny" accent in order to sell potato chips, you are on the wrong course. Make some different decisions.

We Can Do Better

Here's where I want us to do something different. I don't want to merely say "Indian people in the U.S. are going to boycott Popchips!" Or to just get the usual mumbled apology for the company where they offer the bullshit non-apology apology of saying "We're sorry if anyone was offended" and then take the ad down, but continue on with the campaign, padding out the apology with a few generic tweets to a contrite blog post.

We've all seen that shit before, but I want to do better.

I think we can attack the process by which these broken, racist, exploitative parts of our culture are created. I think the people behind this Popchips ad are not racist. I think they just made a racist ad, because they're so steeped in our culture's racism that they didn't even realize they were doing it. (If you don't quite follow what I mean there, you need to learn about Jay Smooth's How To Tell People They Sound Racist.)

Here's what I want to have happen instead:

• Popchips should not pull this ad down: Instead, they should leave it up and link to not an apology, but an explanation of how their process failed and resulted in this racist ad being created. I think this company doesn't want its culture to be racist, and they can best demonstrate that by showing how they learn from examples where it happens despite their best efforts. It's like if rat droppings were found in a bag of Popchips: You wouldn't solve it by saying "We threw away that bag of chips!" You'd solve it by saying "Here's what we're doing to clean up things at the factory."
• The firm which led the creation of the ad, should name the team members who participated in its creation: Zambezi, which made this ad, should let its staff own the mistake and talk about how they'll prevent it in the future. Don't falsely feature the one or two people of color who undoubtedly were part of the team, but show them all together, talking about how they came up with this idea, and what the responses were in the room. If someone said, "I don't know, this might not fly!" then share that with people so others in the future can better learn to trust their instincts on this. If your team isn't very inclusive, and everyone thought it was okay because they come from similar cultural backgrounds where these kinds of offensive things aren't considered hurtful, then talk about how it's something you need to learn. It's fine to say something like, "Our creative director is Brian Ford, and he grew up in Oregon where he didn't get exposed to very many Indian people who could explain how hurtful this kind of media can be." But don't sweep it under the rug.
• The PR firm which promoted this campaign should acknowledge its failure: Alison Brod PR, which proudly proclaims its investment in, and promotion for, this campaign and for Popchips, also bears a lot of responsibility here. At a fundamental level, a good public relations firm is supposed to protect its clients from communications mishaps and errors in judgment that are obvious or preventable, like this one. But putting that shortcoming aside, the firm likely had a hand in coordinating the Popchips Twitter presence where other celebrities such as Diddy and Kim Kardashian and Ryan Seacrest had their accounts used to promote the campaign. Now they are tainted with being associated with tweeting links to racist ads, which probably jeopardizes future relationships they might have had with Brod PR. Again, this is something that's addressable by talking about the culture of the company, and what changes will have to be made so that there's enough knowledge (and courage!) to identify when clients have the potential to send out a racist message, and to stand up to those clients to make sure they don't do so. Alison Brod needs to be the person who acknowledges the failure of responsibility on this campaign.
• Ashton Kutcher should personally apologize: And not just for the jokes on Two and a Half Men!
  There are things any celebrity shouldn't do, regardless of the paycheck. This is of particular importance to me because, oddly, Ashton Kutcher and I cross paths professionally in some ways.He advises or invests in a lot of startups, including notable ones like Foursquare and Square and Flipboard and AirBnB, if you believe this crowdsourced Quora list. We even share some mutual advisorships as I understand it, with companies like Vox Media and Votizen (both of which I advise) and the UN social media campaign against malaria (which I support) all being areas of common interest, though I've never encountered Kutcher in those contexts. I met him once at a conference, and he seemed nice and pretty smart; Friends who've talked to him about their companies indicated that they genuinely felt he had something to contribute aside from his celebrity. Because he's of unusual prominence in the tech space, and because so many of those technical companies have key employees or founders of South Asian descent who've given pieces of their own company to Kutcher, the onus is on him to respect his business partners. This begins by communicating specifically about what he did wrong. But frankly, Kutcher's apology would be the easiest and most obvious part of this process, and thus the least valuable.
• The media who covered this campaign should admit their blindness to the obvious offensiveness of this campaign. Stuart Elliott in the New York Times and Sarah Anne Hughes in the Washington Post notably covered this campaign with no note of how obviously offensive the featured ad is. While Hughes has since updated her post to reflect some of the blowback, it's astounding that this wouldn't be obvious on first glance to those who are paid to understand media and culture. Worse, the fawning and non-critical coverage in venues like the New York Times lets PR firms like Brod and ad companies like Zambezi count this sort of campaign as a success. "Look how many media impressions we got!" There's also an egregious abdication of critical duty in not pointing out that this ad campaign doesn't make any sense. If Kutcher is the "President of Pop Culture" (which he obviously can't be, because I am), then why is this series of ads about dating? If the site they're encouraging people to visit is about a premise that you're "dating" these potato chips, why is Kutcher trying to promote a title for himself? And why would someone who just went through a messy, acrimonious public divorce be a positive image for a brand that wants you to get involved romantically with its chips? I'm no New York Times or Washington Post writer, but I caught these subtle errors in the campaign, even as an amateur.

But back on topic: We need to change the way companies respond to the constant stream of racist and sexist advertising campaigns that they launch in the media. The rote, scripted response when an offensive ad faces complaints is to have the featured star (Kutcher, in this case) and a PR spokesperson for the brand both put out tepid apologies. The ads get pulled off the air or off YouTube, and then they wait for the dust to clear.

What Will Make Them Change

Those superficial corrections don't change the process. Back at the office, the Chief Marketing Officer knows that all the people who hate that brand followed them on Twitter for the day to see how they'd respond, so they later crow to the CEO, "We got a 12% bump in social media metrics, looks like I get my bonus!" The PR firm says "Well, aside from the tiny minority of people who complained, we actually got a ton of media mentions, so I can still use this to pitch ourselves to our next client!" The advertising firm says, "We can still talk about making an ad that got millions of views on YouTube, and having worked on a multimillion dollar campaign for a national consumer brand".

And the end result is, nothing actually changes. Nobody is made to actually understand what they did wrong, with the lesson instead usually being "Well, you can't please all the people all the time."

Understand, Keith Belling and Pat Turpin and Brian Ford and Chris Raih and Alison Brod and, yes, Ashton Kutcher: Right now you're making the world worse. Not just for me, or a billion other Indian people, but for my son, who I am hoping never has to grow up with people putting on fake Indian accents in order to mock him. Maybe people won't be familiar with that stereotype if you, yes you personally, can refrain from spending millions of dollars and countless hours of your time on perpetuating that stereotype in order to sell potato chips. Potato chips! You're hurting people and demeaning them in order to sell your chips.

Here's the thing, Popchips: I think you want to do the right thing. And I believe you can. I think you can say honestly, "We made a mistake, and didn't realize how serious it was. This is how we're changing the way our company works, and the way we listen to people and value inclusive perspectives, so that we don't make these mistakes in the future." Because you have a good product! Remember that? I know it's old-fashioned, but sell your product on the virtues of being a good product! I promise that'll work, and be more sustainable long term, than hitching your brand to the public's knowledge of the dating life of a recently-divorced celebrity who's willing to perform in brownface.

Go make things right, Popchips.

If there were one lesson I'd want to impress upon people who are interested in succeeding in the technology industry, it would be, as I've said before, know your shit. Know the discipline you're in, know the history of those who've done your kind of work before, understand the lessons of their efforts, and in general look beyond the things that are making noise right now in order to understand bigger patterns of how technology works, both literally and socially.

This is a difficult challenge, because today's media about the technology industry will not teach entrepreneurs and creators what they need to know about the history of the technology industry.

I don't just mean this in the obvious way — nobody thinks you can earn a PhD in computer science by reading a tech blog. But I mean the broader landscape of sites that attract attention from technology developers and startup aficionados are woefully myopic in their understanding and perspective of the disciplines they cover. [Disclaimer: This post mentions lots of sites that write about tech; I write for Wired (ostensibly a competitor) and advise Vox Media (parent of The Verge, mentioned below), as explained on my about page.]

Open For Comment

Let's take one example from a month ago. A blogger named Saud Alhawawi reported (judging by Google's translation) that Google is going to introduce a blog commenting system powered by their Google+ platform. If you work at a company which makes tools for feedback on sites, or if you care about the quality of comments on the web, this would be important news, so it's a great thing that it got picked up by WebProNews and TheNextWeb.

Given that Google generally refuses to comment on such pronouncements, and therefore would be unlikely to confirm or deny Alhawawi's blog post, the burden is thus on the rest of the tech blogosphere to explain to their readers the implications and importance that such a product would have, if Google were to launch it.

Fortunately, we have a very good record of how the major tech blogs covered this story, if they did. Techmeme has admirably preserved links to the many pieces written a month ago about this story. As you might expect, most were regurgitating the original stories, with a few mentioning Alhawawi's source post. These reposts showed up all over the place: 9to5 Google, BetaBeat, Business Insider, CNET (which oddly credits ReadWriteWeb but links to TNW), DailyTech, MarketingLand, Marketing Pilgrim, MarketingVox, MemeBurn, SlashGear, The Verge and VentureBeat.

Lots of linking with just the barest amount of original reporting, which is actually a fairly efficient way of getting a story out. But while I admire many of the smart people who work at a lot of these outlets, apparently no one who was linking to this story has more than the slightest bit of knowledge about the discipline they were covering.

What's Missing?

As you might expect, nearly every story mentioned that Facebook has a commenting widget similar to what Google is presumably creating. Google and Facebook are competitors, so that's a wise inclusion. Most also mentioned DIsqus, and sure, that's relevant since they're a big independent player. I don't expect that these stories would be comprehensive overviews of the commenting space, so it's fine that other minor players might get overlooked.

What is ridiculous, and absurd, is that not a single one of these outlets mentioned that Google itself had provided this exact type of commenting functionality and then shut it down. Google provided this service for years. And that last Google commenting service, called Friend Connect, was shut down just three weeks prior to this news about a new commenting service being launched.

That's insane. Whether you're a user trying to understand if it's worth trusting a commenting service, a developer judging whether to build on its API, an entrepreneur deciding if you should incorporate the service or worry about competing with it, or an investor who wanted to evaluate Google's seriousness about the space, the single most salient fact about Google's attempt to create this new product was omitted from every single story that covered it.

Worse, the sites themselves suffered for this omission — when everyone is covering the exact same story, if one site had gone with a headline that said "Google's New Commenting Service: The Secret History of How They've Failed Before!" they could have actually gotten more page views and distinguished themselves from the endless TheNextWeb regurgitation.

This isn't a case where a few lesser outlets omitted a minor point about a headline. It's a case where a story that was interesting enough to earn a full Techmeme pile-on was lacking in coverage that would be necessary for understanding the story at even the most superficial level. As you might expect, a few of the larger outlets have big enough audiences that their commenter communities were able to add the missing salient facts to the story, but on both The Verge and Business Insider, the comments which mentioned Friend Connect were buried in their respective threads and, as of a month later, not highlighted in the original posts.

Do Your Homework

Fortunately, whether or not Google makes a commenting widget isn't that big a deal on its own. Maybe they will or maybe they won't, and maybe it'll fail again or maybe it won't. But the key lesson to take away here is that we know a few things are wrong with the trade press in the technology world:

• In tech financial coverage, there is a focus on valuation, deals and funding instead of markets, costs, profits, losses, revenues and sustainability.
• In tech executive coverage, there is a focus on personalities and drama instead of capabilities and execution.
• In tech product coverage, there is a focus on features and announcements instead of evaluating whether a product is meaningful and worthwhile.
• Technology trade press doesn't treat our industry as a business, so much as a "scene"; If our industry had magazines, we'd have a lot of People but no Variety, a Rolling Stone, but no Billboard.

There are many more examples of the flaws, but these are obvious ones. What we may not know, though is that there's another flaw:
* For all but the biggest tech stories, any individual article likely lacks enough information to make a decision about the topic of that article.

Imagine if Apple launched a new version of the iPad and a story did not mention that any prior versions of the iPad existed. This is the level of analysis we frequently get from second-tier tech stories in our industry. And that's true despite the fact that technology trade press is actually getting better.

We need a tech industry that values history, perspective, and a long-term view. Today, we don't have that. But I'm optimistic, because I see that people who do value those things have a decided advantage over the course of their careers. One place to start is by filling in the blanks on the stories we read ourselves, perhaps by making use of a comment form?