The Future of Platforms in the midst of Silicon Valley’s moral reckoning

Podcast Notes

In this episode, we’re speaking to Jeremiah Owyang, founding partner of the San Francisco based research firm Kaleido Insights, where he focuses on how disruptive technologies — such as social media, collaborative economy, autonomous world, blockchain and more — and how they impact the relevance of corporations.

Jeremiah is well recognized by both the tech industry and the media for his grounded approach to deriving insights through rigorous research.and is frequently quoted in top-tier publications, has given a TED talk and was featured in the “Who’s Who” in the Silicon Valley Business Journal. His Twitter feed was named one of the top feeds by Time. He is also the Founder of Crowd Companies, an innovation club for Fortune 500 companies.

In our conversation with Jeremiah, we explore some of the pre-existing conditions in the world — always through a tech lens — that have been amplified by the pandemic and other recent disruptive events, leading to some sort of awakening in Silicon Valley about the moral duties of tech companies and more in general what companies are actually supposed to produce for the world.

Here are some important links from the conversation:

Find out more about Jeremiah’s work

• Jeremiah’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jowyang
• Kaleido Insights, “Applying Covid-19 Urgencies to Kaleido Insights’ Five Research Themes”: https://www.kaleidoinsights.com/applying-covid-19-urgencies-to-kaleido-insights-five-research-themes/

Other references and mentions:

• The Verge, “Amazon bans police from using its facial recognition technology for the next year”: https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/10/21287101/amazon-rekognition-facial-recognition-police-ban-one-year-ai-racial-bias
• Ben Evans, presentation at the WEF 2020 and an update June 2020: https://www.ben-evans.com/presentations
• Participatory City, http://www.participatorycity.org/the-illustrated-guide
• Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture: https://www.amazon.com/Unsettling-America-Culture-Agriculture/dp/0871568772
• Reporting 3.0: https://www.r3-0.org/
• Wisdo: https://wisdo.com/index.html
• Clubhouse: https://www.joinclubhouse.com/, https://www.wired.com/story/what-is-clubhouse-why-does-silicon-valley-care/

Find out more about the show and the research at Boundaryless at https://boundaryless.io/resources/podcast/

Thanks for the ad-hoc music to Liosound / Walter Mobilio. Find his portfolio here: www.platformdesigntoolkit.com/music

Recorded on June 19th 2020

Key insights

1. Current turmoil in the US — to a backdrop of extreme weather events triggered by climate emergency, the pandemic and its uneven consequences and the recent killing of George Floyd — has gradually led to an ethical reckoning among tech companies in Silicon Valley about the role and systemic effects of technology in society. As Amazon and others deny police force to use its face recognition technology due to potential inaccuracies, Jeremiah suggests that Silicon Valley is just going through adolescence, realising their responsibility towards society. And he’s happy that the former taboo around issues like racism and the digital divide is broken by recent events.

2. Jeremiah looks soberly on the fact that most supply chains remain global and that shipping has not stopped. While it might have been easy — if only for a brief moment — to get overly enthusiastic about the positive impacts that the world forced into standstill had on climate change, he sees the struggle that as e-commerce booms, products keep being assembled overseas and put on big ships or aeroplanes. To localise supply chains (where it makes sense) cooperation between all actors — government, citizens and businesses — is needed. While there are cohorts of consumers who have sustainability focus, economic crises tend to bring consumers’ focus on price rather than sustainability, as witnessed in previous research.

3. In terms of technology “futures” in society, Jeremiah foresees automation to happen much faster in knowledge industries than in industries with physical supply chains, like real estate. Installing cloud software to systems and use chatbots and machine learning is getting faster and cheaper as companies like Salesforce, Google, Microsoft and Automation anywhere and beyond offer such services. He’s also looking forward to audio-based technologies to help teams collaborate — without having to “pretend” to pay attention in video calls — inspired by the recent Silicon Valley star “Clubhouse”.

? Boundaryless Conversations Podcast is about exploring the future of large scale organising by leveraging on technology, network effects and shaping narratives. We explore how platforms can help us play with a world in turmoil, change, and transformation: a world that is at the same time more interconnected and interdependent than ever but also more conflictual and rivalrous.