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.
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.