Where There's Smoke, There's Fire
Lessons about technology from Juul
What can electronic cigarettes teach us about the nature of technology? Quite a lot, it turns out. The story of Juul as told in the Netflix documentary mini-series Big Vape is a tale of two technologies. If you believe the founders of Juul, it’s a story of good intentions gone horribly wrong. But look a bit deeper and it’s the age-old story of how we repeatedly underestimate the orientations, norms, and impacts embedded in the technologies we create.
You might think that this story has something to teach us about our future and AI, and you’d be right. But it’s got just as much to do with any technology we design or use. At the end of the day, to design technology that supports human flourishing we need wisdom and humility just as much as we need technical excellence and savvy marketing.
Beware of unintended consequences
Last week after the dust from Christmas day settled, the kids were in bed, and the dishes were washed, I kicked back with a cup of tea and fired up Netflix. Over the past few years, I’ve been building the habit of reaching for a book rather than dialing up a show, but something about the week between Christmas and New Year’s made a little bingeing feel just right.
The algorithm was desperate to pull me back in. After scrolling through some of Netflix’s recommendations, I stumbled on a documentary series called Big Vape which tells the story of the vaping company Juul. These sorts of documentaries are almost a subgenre of their own by this point, with plenty of material from the Fyre festival to WeWork to Theranos.
The story in Big Vape is gripping on its own, but it’s much more significant than it might appear at first. Yes, it’s about the wolf of Big Tobacco in new sheep’s clothing. But the deeper story is about how technology, despite the best of intentions, takes on a life of its own.
Technology is not neutral. Every technological artifact is embedded with particular orientations, with their accompanying potentials for benefit and harm. The intended impacts envisioned by the technology’s designers are only the tip of the iceberg. The impacts that should keep us up at night are the unintended consequences that are lurking beneath the surface. The story of the rise and fall of Juul is a cautionary tale that should cause all of us who play any part in the design and use of technology to take pause.
What’s the problem you actually want to solve? Juul wanted to eliminate cigarettes, not smoking or nicotine
Juul is in many ways a prototypical Silicon Valley technology company. Young, idealistic founders come up with an idea to change the world for the better, and surrounded by the appropriate conditions (e.g., money and determination), the idea grows.
Juul began as the brainchild of founders Adam Bowen and James Monsees on a smoke break at Stanford where they were both studying product design at the Stanford d.school. As smokers, they loved the social aspects of smoking cigarettes and began to wonder if there was a way to help smokers replace cigarettes. They wanted to keep the aspects they loved about smoking while jettisoning the harmful health impacts of cigarettes.
After finishing up at Stanford, Adam and James set off to turn their dream into reality. Their initial venture was called Ploom and then Pax Labs before Juul was spun out later down the line. It’s not irrelevant that Juul was not the first of their e-cigarette ventures. The mission of all of these companies in their various iterations was ostensibly to help transition adult smokers away from combustible cigarettes and eliminate them. Taken at face value, this is a noble mission. The CDC says that “More than 16 million Americans are living with a disease caused by smoking.” Cigarettes are irrefutably bad for you, whatever socialization benefits they might carry as a minor side effect.
But it’s hard for even the most sympathetic observer to take this at face value after looking with even the slightest bit of scrutiny. Sure, the mission was to help eliminate cigarettes. But the mission was never to eliminate smoking. The goal of Juul’s products was (and is) to shift smokers to a less harmful alternative. But how much less harmful is it, really? Sure, smoking is about the adverse effects of lung damage, but more fundamentally it’s about nicotine and addiction. Juul might have been about smoking, but it’s the same playbook as any of the various companies that are built upon leveraging human brain chemistry to build dependence and addiction, whether that be a social media app or a physical product.
On the one hand, Juul created a much healthier alternative to a cigarette. But from another, more honest perspective, they created a more effective system to deliver nicotine. While many of the adverse health effects might be gone, the nicotine, and thus the addiction, is still there.
Move fast, break people
What Juul didn’t recognize or appreciate early on was the need for the final part of their current mission statement. It’s now tacked onto the end, a fitting place for an afterthought. That phrase? “To combat underage usage of our products.”
If you are in a particularly generous and empathetic mood you might be tempted to give them the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they really didn’t see the way that the Juul vaporizer would catch fire among teenagers. But this narrative gets harder and harder to hold onto the longer you look (and it doesn’t take much looking). The teenage vape crisis catalyzed by Juul was at best negligent and at worst malicious.
Unfortunately, designers of technology often only loosely feel the burden of responsibility for all the potential impacts of the technology they develop. As engineers and designers, we are rarely trained on how to think through the potential side effects and unintended consequences of the artifacts we develop. A narrow understanding of the ethical responsibilities is not enough. It’s not just about developing a device that operates safely within some narrow intended operating conditions. Any device or technology is part of a system and that system contains many other stakeholders and incentive structures that must be considered. Any technology needs to be intentionally designed to guard against the ways that it might be used incorrectly outside of the intended use cases.
What is missing in the famous Silicon Valley creed “move fast, break things” is that often what’s being broken is not a thing, but a person or a community of people. In the push to bring ideas to market and be first in an ultra-competitive environment, it’s easy to overlook whatever obstacles are in the way. If only things were being broken, that’s one thing. But whenever we ship a product, it will create ripple effects beyond just the immediate context. We must consider these impacts.
If You’re An Engineer, Don’t be Juuling
If you are at all involved or aspiring to design technology, the story of Juul should leave you with a sense of uneasiness. Resist the urge to jump to quickly to stoke the fire of condemnation. Juul is in so many ways a cautionary tale of how quickly and easily things can go very wrong if you blindly hold on to your vision and dismiss anything that stands in the way (and also a poignant example of how important the marketing, messaging, and narratives around your technology are).
The one line that is lodged most firmly in my memory from the documentary was when one of the interviews labeled the Juul co-founders as “earnest and naive idealists.” It’s not that being an earnest and naive idealist on its own is the problem. It’s fine to start there. Almost all of us do. If you’re going to create anything meaningful in the world, you’ll almost by definition need a strong dose of earnestness, naivety, and idealism. But you better accompany those character traits with wisdom and a tenacious determination to consider as thoroughly as you can the ways that what you create might create harm.
Clearing the air
I’m not going to defend Juul or argue that they were dedicated to the good of humanity save for one ill-considered advertising campaign. The path for a product like Juul to have a positive impact was a narrow one from the start. On a purely utilitarian basis, the impact from the people it would have needed to help wean off cigarettes needed to outpace the negative impacts of any number of people for which it served as a gateway to nicotine addiction.
But we need to guard against our urge to put Adam and James in the stocks and begin throwing rotten food in their direction. In many ways, any engineer should sympathize with Adam and James. For those of us trained in STEM fields, much of our undergraduate training is geared toward helping us develop the skills to go out and make an impact.
The problem isn’t the tools and skills we have to build technology, it’s the lack of wisdom and thoughtfulness to consider what might go wrong and the knowledge of history that would help us understand the ways these technologies have gone wrong in predictable ways in the past.
What ultimately led to Juul’s downfall was a failure to consider and successfully mitigate the potential negative side effects and external influences of its technology. The harmful parts of most technologies are not their intended impacts. What comes back to bite you are the questions that lie in the dark along other possible paths along its evolutionary trajectory once it is released in the wild.
To be good engineers or designers we need to be thoughtful and reflective humans. We need to realize that whatever we create will have an impact on people and that we have a responsibility to consider and design for both intended and unintended impacts.
This is one of the reasons I am so passionate about teaching engineering within the broader framework of the liberal arts and in light of discussions about human flourishing and stewardship. I am a strong believer in the power of technology to improve the quality of life for humans across the globe. But at the same time, technology, because it ultimately is an incarnation of power, has the potential to do great harm.
The questions that need to be asked of technology to forecast its potential impact on the world are not within the domain of the scientific or technical enterprise. I was reminded of this while reading Mustafa Suleyman’s excellent book The Coming Wave (thoughts coming soon in a future post) where he quotes John von Neumann speaking about the development of the atomic bomb.
What we are creating now, is a monster whose influence is going to change history, provided there is any history left, yet it would be impossible not to see it through, not only for military reasons, but it would also be unethical from the point of view of the scientists not to do what they know is feasible, no matter what terrible consequences it may have.
The question of whether or not to build it is not a question that scientific inquiry can answer. The answer from science and engineering is to build what is feasible, as von Neumann says, no matter the terrible consequences.
That is just one more piece of supporting evidence for the importance of philosophy, history, religion, literature, and the arts in the life of the engineer.
As you’re continuing to slowly re-enter after the holidays, I would highly encourage giving Big Vape a watch. I think you’ll find it well worth your time.
As you reflect and think more about this, I want to close with two passages of the Bible that have been resonating with me over the past few days as I’ve been reflecting on the story of Juul myself and considering what our reaction to it should be. The first is from the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 7. Jesus warns us that we will be measured by the same standard that we measure others against. With this in mind, he warns us not to be too quick in calling out the wrongdoings of others without first examining ourselves.
Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when there is the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye.
In a similar vein, in John 8 we read about Jesus stepping in to defend a woman who has been caught in adultery. There is no doubt of her guilt. And yet, Jesus stands up to the leading questions from the religious leaders of the day and challenges them to consider their own standing before they act.
Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.
None of this is to say that we should not challenge and confront the wrongdoing and harm that we see in the world today. It’s just to say that we ought to approach these issues with humility and closely examine our own perspectives and influences.
Got a thought? Please leave a comment. I’d love to hear your perspective.
If you know of someone who might learn something from this article, please consider sharing it with them!
Want to read more? Here are a few additional pieces that are worth a look if you want to explore these ideas in more depth:
The Book Nook
This week’s book is the latest from our murder mystery book club: Iron Lake by William Kent Krueger. This was the second book that we’ve read from Krueger (the first was Ordinary Grace).
While this one wasn’t nearly as good as Ordinary Grace, I still enjoyed it. It’s always interesting to read an early book from an author after reading something from much later in their writing career. In this case, many of the same themes appeared in both books, but the plot and character development were much tighter in Ordinary Grace compared to Iron Lake.
The Professor Is In
The professor remains out until 1/17. In the meantime, I’m working on revamping some parts of our experimental engineering course, E80 for the spring. Looking forward to integrating more alternative grading strategies like what I did in MicroPs this fall. If you want to see what I did there, check out these two posts.
Alternative grading cultivates intrinsically-motivated learning
Leisure Line
This Christmas was the first where I did a lot of baking. Making pizza was only the start it seems, and now I’m PhD Bakes in addition to PhD Pies. I’ve written about this sugar cookie recipe before, but it’s really good. Icing is also dead simple and tasty too.
Still Life
I love watching the Rose Parade every year. The floats are spectacular, but it’s pretty hard to beat the B-2 Spirit Stealth Bomber flyover. Grabbed this image yesterday at the start of the parade. So cool. If you look closely, you can also see the Goodyear blimp in the bottom right, doing its best to stay out of the way!
Great post and always useful to add a case study to the tech library of unintended consequences. Did the series provide any *practical* lessons? What should the founders have *actually* done?
To merely prescribe more "wisdom" or more "thoughtfulness" is the vague advice that engineers find unhelpful at best and sanctimonious at worst. Clearly we can't expect omniscience in our tech founders. The are often operating in high pressure competitive situations within larger systems that impact underage consumption/addictions.
The bigger task with stories like these is to translate them into practical wisdom that can be generalizable and thus something that can be realistically incorporated into some version of a startup toolkit. Otherwise they are easily dismissed as "just so" stories that make sense only in retrospect.
Moral duality in technology is a b*tch. There will always be someone to put a technology to 'ethically bad' use, given enough time to come up with the how and enough incentive (money) to do so.