Three things I believe, before the work begins

There is a question I get asked, in different forms, in most rooms I work in. Sometimes it sounds like what's your methodology. Sometimes it sounds like what's your angle on AI ethics. Sometimes it sounds, more honestly, like why do you keep saying it that way.

I've come to think the question underneath all of those is really: what do you believe, before any of this starts. Not the framework. Not the case study. The thing the framework rests on.

I want to try to say it plainly, because I think the work I do is harder to read — and easier to dismiss — when these commitments are left implicit. There are three of them. They aren't entirely original, but there might be a bit of originality in attempting to hold them together. I'd rather hold them in the open than let them get smuggled in under the cover of methodology.

The world is made of choices, and nothing is inevitable

Every arrangement we live inside — every market, every institution, every technology, every distribution of who counts and who doesn't — is the residue of decisions made by people. Often long ago. Often in rooms most of us were never in. Sometimes by people who might be uncomfortable with how much weight their decisions are still carrying.

The language we use to describe these arrangements tends to obscure that. We say trends. We say forces. We say dynamics, the market, the technology, innovation, progress. The grammar of these words places the agency outside any particular human hand. They don't do anything. They simply unfold. Things become inevitable in the narrative, and once a thing is inevitable, it stops being answerable to anything or anyone. It just is. I try to ask, “Who chose, and how might we choose differently?”

I don't believe any of it just is. Markets were built. Technologies were chosen. The internet looks the way it looks because specific people made specific design and business decisions, most of which could have gone differently and, in some other part of the multiverse, they have. Even the things that feel most like physics — supply chains, attention economies, platform dynamics — are the accumulated weight of recent choices stacked on top of older ones. All of them are, in principle, alterable.

The weight is real, but the inevitability is rhetorical. And that rhetoric is convenient for those that those choices serve.

I take this seriously because these narratives defend arrangements that shouldn't be defended. That's just how markets work. That's just human nature. That's just the cost of progress. That's how technology functions. Each of these sentences does the same magic trick: it converts a set of options into a settled fact, and then asks you to argue with the weather. If something is inevitable, it can't be unjust. It just is. You can be sad or mad about it, you can mitigate the worst of it, you can perhaps adjust at the margins. This story says that you can't fundamentally object to the world, because there's nothing and no one to object to. There's only a cynical shrug, dressed up as analysis.

So before anything else, I begin from the position that nothing is inevitable. Everything is changeable. The arrangements we have are the choices we have made, and the choices we have made we can also unmake — slowly, partially, against resistance, and never as cleanly as we'd like. But some step in the direction of better is always possible. The first thing I am trying to do, in any room, is refuse the nihilism that mistakes challenge for impossibility.

The measure of a system is how it treats those with the least power within it

Not average outcomes, aggregate efficiency, or the experience of the median user, worker, or citizen. The people the system serves least are the measure of the system, full stop. If the arrangement works beautifully for most and grinds a few into cost, the arrangement is failing. The vulnerable few are not an externality. They are the measure of success.

The standard framing measures systems by their averages and treats the worst-off as a regrettable but acceptable cost of doing the larger thing. The framing has the advantage of making most systems look pretty good, which is convenient for the people who designed them and the people who benefit from them. It has the disadvantage of being morally incoherent. A system that works for most by working catastrophically against some is not a system that works. It is a system that has decided, quietly, who it is willing to expend. And who is expendable is alarmingly predictable.

I am more interested in who gets disposed of than in what gets produced. Most of my professional life is spent asking variations of one question: who is being treated as a justifiable cost? Whose labour is invisible? Whose data is harvested without consent? Whose lack of safety is the residual accepted risk after every other consideration has been satisfied? The question is rarely welcome, because the answer is almost never flattering to the system being asked given the world we’ve inherited. But the answer is the truth about the system. Everything else is, at some level, effective marketing.

There is a corollary I hold, which is harder to defend in some rooms than in others. I believe the world has enough. Scarcity, in most of the contexts I work in, is not a fact about the material world. It is a fact about how unequally we have decided to value people and the order in which we consider their needs. There is enough food. There is enough housing. There is enough time, attention, money, care — if we were willing to count every person as fully as we count ourselves. The shortage we describe as natural is, on closer inspection, distributional and ideological. We have manufactured the impression of scarcity to make the unequal valuation feel like prudence rather than cruelty.

I know how this sounds. It sounds utopian, and "utopian" is a word that mostly functions, in professional discourse, as a polite way of dismissing an idea without engaging with it. So let me be precise: I am not claiming we live in a world of unlimited material abundance, or that nothing is constrained, or that no hard tradeoffs exist. I am claiming that most of the scarcity we organise our institutions around is the artefact of an unequal valuation of human lives, and that the question of enough would look profoundly different if we were honest about that. This is not a utopian claim. It is a refusal to accept that the present cannot be meaningfully improved with the resources we already have.

We each have an obligation to contribute, and the form of that obligation depends on where we stand

This is the commitment that takes the most ongoing work, because it is not a position one arrives at. It is a practice. And it is the one I am most likely to be caught failing to live up to.

I believe each of us has a moral obligation to contribute to building a more just world. I take this part to be, if not uncontroversial, at least defensible without much elaboration. The harder part is the rest of the sentence. The form of the obligation — what specifically you or I are called to do — is shaped by who we are and where we stand. It is not the same for everyone. It cannot be the same for everyone, because we do not occupy the same positions, hold the same identities, carry the same institutional power, or get read by the world in the same way. The power, and thus the obligation, we carry is determined by all those factors.

What I am rejecting is two competing versions of obligation that I think are both wrong. The first is the universalist version, which says everyone owes the same thing in the same way. This is appealing because it’s simple, but it ignores the fact that some of us have access to rooms others don't, are heard when others wouldn't be, bear costs in speaking that others don't, and have institutional power that others are systematically denied. To act as though these differences don't exist, or that they are not material, is to ignore how the power operates.

The second is the essentialist version, which says where you stand is fixed by who you are. This is appealing because it's even simpler, but it ignores that positionality moves. The identities we hold are not stable in their meaning across contexts or time. The institutional power we carry shifts as we change roles, rooms, and countries. The way we are perceived is not always the way we experience ourselves, and neither of those is always the same as the actual structural position we occupy. To pretend any of this is fixed or fully true in isolation is to give ourselves a script we can perform without requiring us to actually pay attention.

The version I try to hold is harder. It says that the work of ethical integrity is the continuous, embodied labour of keeping three things in productive tension: how I understand myself, how others see me, and the actual position I occupy inside the systems I am trying to transform. When any of these shift — which happens constantly — the work is to notice it and recalibrate.

I find this commitment quite challenging. This commitment asks for ongoing attention to myself, in a way that is tough to squeeze in when I’m busy and emotionally inaccessible when I’m tired. There are times when gaps appear between what I am enacting in a moment and what I would do if full integrated. The gap is where I become, briefly, the kind of person I am professionally trying to make less common. That’s not really a confession, it’s just a fact of the way I’ve chosen to do this work while also being a fallible human.

This commitment isn’t a position I’ve secured, and not something I really can. It’s a practice I do my best to inhabit, and one that I carry with a significant amount of weight. Part of my ongoing practice is learning to give myself grace when I notice the gaps, and patience as I work to close them. Put another way, I have to work hard to treat myself the way I strive to treat others.

These three together are what I bring into a room before I bring anything else. They are why my work tends to sound the way it sounds, and why it asks the questions it asks — about who is being treated as cost, what we are calling inevitable, whose voice has been preemptively determined to be irrelevant. It’s often about who I am in a moment, and whether that’s someone the situation needs.

I'm putting this down because I think it’s worthwhile to being legible, for even a brief span of time. This isn’t a manifesto, but more of a way of saying: if you are working with me, or reading me, or wondering why I keep returning to certain questions and not others, this is underneath it all. The work is downstream of these things.