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Code & Conscience #016

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In this Issue

Short-term thinking in tech is creating massive "Societal Debt." This issue shows why leaving the old playbook behind for an ethical approach to tech strategy is the only way to build tech that lasts and drives durable value instead of risk.

How Tech Strategy Can Help Dig Us Out of The 'Societal Debt' Trap

I’m so excited to kick off this new three-part series! As many of you know, I've been wrestling with how to build tech products that people genuinely love without accidentally setting the world on fire. That wrestling match turned into my upcoming book! This newsletter series is our first in-depth exploration of the ideas inside.

This book is my attempt to give the practical guide I wish I had: one that connects Tech Strategy (what we choose to build) with Systems Thinking (how we understand its complex growth) and Equitable Systems (who it ultimately helps).

We’re starting today with the foundation: Tech Strategy–an organization’s comprehensive plan for using technology to achieve business goals. Why has this often-misused, corporate topic become an urgent ethical conversation in the industry? Because the decisions we make in our conference rooms and strategy decks are creating massive, unprecedented global consequences.

1. The Old Playbook is Broken (And It's Creating 'Societal Debt')

For years, tech strategy was all about speed, scale, and pure monetization. How do we hit market dominance fast? We’ve measured success narrowly with Daily Active Users (DAU), Time On Site, and quick revenue bumps. Concerns about ethics, the environment, or long-term social health were often shunted off to a small compliance team or, worse, ignored as "external costs."

This approach has led us right into the crisis of Short-Termism. You might recall our last issue of Code & Conscience, "Tech's Midlife Crisis," where we explored the industry's lack of strategic maturity and its transition from naive "move fast and break things" optimism to the harsh reality of global impact, setting the stage for this strategic reset.

The old approach to strategy is already a liability. We're not just dealing with technical debt that slows down our engineering teams. We're dealing with Societal Debt—the externalized costs of technology that our teams, companies, and our communities will have to pay back with interest.

You can see this debt everywhere:

• Algorithmic Bias: When systems trained on flawed data reinforce real-world discrimination in things like hiring or lending.
• Misinformation and Polarization: Business models optimized for engagement over truth, destabilizing civil discourse. This is an example of societal debt that quickly becomes legal debt, as demonstrated by recent court filings alleging Meta knowingly buried evidence of social harm.
• Environmental Cost: The rapidly growing energy consumption of data centers, AI training, and massive hardware consumption.

2. Why Strategy is Now Your Best Insurance Policy

If your strategy fails to address these negative externalities, you’re not a “disruptor”; you’re just shortsighted. And that can cost you customers and revenue.

Ethical design and sustainability are now critical risk factors. Avoiding Societal Debt is now the most fundamental part of risk management. Investing in ethical guardrails prevents a trust breach just as much as a firewall prevents a data breach.

When ethical and social concerns erupt, they trigger a costly chain reaction:

1. Reputational Damage: Consumers, especially younger ones, are actively shifting loyalty away from brands they deem harmful. This deep-seated mistrust means companies must constantly fight perception battles; for example, this week, Google had to vigorously and publicly push back against claims that it was training its Gemini AI on private Gmail data. The initial public skepticism itself became a costly strategic burden, regardless of the truth.
2. Regulatory Backlash: Governments are catching up fast, implementing major laws (like GDPR, the EU AI Act, etc.) that force you into costly, reactive, retroactive compliance.
3. Talent Flight: Top engineers, designers, and product managers want to work on meaningful problems, not just maximizing click-through rates. The best talent increasingly refuses to work on products that contribute to systemic harm.

The most successful companies will be the ones that craft their tech strategies to support ethical risk mitigation.

3. The Durable Advantage: Building Well-Loved Products That Last

Shifting your strategic focus from extraction (of attention, data, and resources) to contribution (to human and planetary well-being) is the smart move. It's how you build a durable advantage.

When you center your strategy on societal health, you unlock new avenues for resilient profitability and innovation:

• Trust = Longevity: Products built on transparent, ethical foundations earn user trust, leading to deeper loyalty and lower churn. People will happily pay for products that respect their data, time, and values.
• Innovation through Constraint: Setting tough ethical and sustainability constraints (e.g., "design a social platform that actively reduces polarization," or "build an AI model that runs on 90% less energy") forces fundamental, disruptive innovation. Take DeepSeek, which focused on efficiency and optimization to achieve significant, disruptive results in the AI space at the start of the year, by demonstrating what was possible with constrained resources and lower costs.
• Stakeholder Alignment: You're no longer just answering to shareholders, but to all stakeholders—including users, communities, and the environment. This holistic approach creates a far more resilient business that is less susceptible to public backlash and regulatory cycles.

The new measure of success in tech will not focus solely on how well your tech strategy aligns with your business goals, but will also include a foundation of trust, adaptability, and positive stakeholder impact.

In the next issue, we’ll discuss the second pillar of my upcoming book: Systems Thinking. It’s the mental framework that gives us the power to actually see and model these complex risks and feedback loops before they spiral out of control.

Until then, take a moment to ask yourself: What societal debt is your current tech strategy incurring?

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Erica Stanley Engineering Leader, Community Builder, Speaker, Contributor

Code & Conscience is my way of thinking out loud with friends (that’s you, btw) about how we as technologists–builders, creators, leaders–impact the world around us with what we choose to build and how we build it.

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