[S03E01] Beyond Conversion Rates: The Ethics and Hidden Costs of Optimization with Maren Costa

In this powerful season three premiere, I sit down with Maren Costa, featured in Netflix's "Buy Now" documentary and former Amazon UX designer turned climate justice advocate.

Maren shares her 15-year journey at Amazon, from the early days of helping build a user-friendly e-commerce site to her awakening about the hidden environmental and human costs of our digital convenience. She reveals how she co-founded Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, which successfully pressured the company to adopt climate initiatives – and ultimately led to her controversial firing.

We dive into eye-opening discussions about:

• The concentration of power in big tech and the "tech broligarchs"
• How features like one-click purchasing and Amazon Prime have transformed from convenience to climate concern
• The truth behind seemingly benevolent programs like Amazon Smile
• Why tech workers should recognize their collective power

Maren makes a compelling case for why we all need to get "radically" engaged in creating change, emphasizing that it takes just 3.5% of a population to create meaningful transformation. Her message is clear: the time for individual action is over – we need collective power to address the urgent challenges facing our world.

[00:00] Introduction to No Hacks Season Three
[00:43] Maren Costa's Life Post-Documentary
[02:12] Journey at Amazon
[05:20] The Rise of Big Tech Oligarchs
[10:20] Amazon Employees for Climate Justice
[13:54] Power Dynamics and Employee Activism
[17:46] Global Protests and Collective Action
[19:49] Consumerism and Environmental Impact
[20:27] Amazon's Strategy to Bypass Google
[22:31] The Impact of One-Click Purchases
[25:03] Prime and the Environmental Cost
[28:26] The Ethical Dilemma of AI
[32:06] Rapid Fire Questions
[39:41] Call to Action for Tech Workers

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Sani: Welcome to No Hacks season three premiere, where I had the pleasure of talking to Maren Costa, star of Netflix Buy Now documentary. Maren is an advocate for climate justice and workers right. And in this interview, she talked about the hidden costs of technology, emphasizing the importance of empathy and collective action in driving societal change.

If you want to learn about how big tech and wealth concentration shape global challenges and discover practical steps towards a better world, you have to listen to this episode.


Maren Costa, welcome to NoHacks. What a pleasure to have you on.

[00:00:38] Maren: it's really great to be here.

[00:00:40] Sani: You've had a busy few months, to say the least. So what has changed in your life since the documentary aired on Netflix?

[00:00:49] Maren: Um, almost everything.

[00:00:51] Sani: Oh, wow.

[00:00:52] Maren: Um, I have, first of all, I have like thousands of direct messages. You are one of them, you know.

[00:01:01] Sani: Absolutely.

[00:01:01] Maren: In my inboxes on every channel and I still haven't gotten through them all. I have people that are, I mean, like hundreds still that I haven't even been able to read in those came, you know, opportunities like this, a chance to be on a podcast, uh, speak in Paris at the change now climate, uh, speak in, um, Singapore for the, um, brand and marketing CMOs level of, it's like the largest conference in Asia.

Like it's just, Harvard was contacting me yesterday. I mean, it's just insane. I, and then just regular people, like with regular stories, like I spoke with a high school student. She's French, but she's living in Taiwan and she's talking about fast fashion and she's like, doing a project, trying to figure out, you know, make a difference there.

And I'll just, I just love talking to anyone that I can. And it's, it's, so my day is like, you know, I'm talking to a guy from Poland who's, Gonna do the highest jump skydive from the stratosphere and put all the money towards climate. You know, it's just like, it's so much fun.

[00:02:02] Sani: I feel extra honored now and lucky that, that you got to read my message and we're doing this now. So, um, Let's talk about a little bit of what led to you being on that documentary. So you started with Amazon in 2002. And then you've spent 15, 16 years, maybe more with Amazon.

So, uh, what changed? It must've been good and nice to work for Amazon. It must've been cool. And you're, you're, you're inventing new things. You mentioned you had a lot of patents as well. So what changed in the meantime?

[00:02:35] Maren: Yeah. Okay. I started at, you know, I started Amazon in 2002 and there was like 3000 people at the company at that time. And now I, I don't mean there are over a million if you count everybody and I would be in meetings with Jeff Bezos and three other people, you know. That was the whole story in and of itself, watching him change from, you know, sort of the geek to the,

[00:02:57] Sani: To whatever this is, let's just say that.

[00:02:59] Maren: yep. And, um, at first it was really exciting. Um, I did always sort of have this probably, I don't know, naive or overly ambitious goal to sort of change the world. And I think a lot of designers do. I think we come into this profession because we care about people and we want to understand how. People think and how to make life better for them, how, how to make life easier for them.

And at first there was so much low hanging fruit at Amazon. I mean, it was, if you look at the way back machine or whatever you wanna do, go back to 2002 and you can see where I started. You know? And um, so it was really exciting and, and, um, and fun and, and, and am. Amazon wasn't the big evil that it sort of is today.

And so. I didn't feel so much like I was compromising my values to work there. I felt like I was making the site more accessible, um, for a wider audience, uh, less sort of white male geek. Like that's kind of what it was, you know, like Jeff Bezos literally wanted the homepage to be a search box where you could type in Boolean queries.

Or just a dense page of blue links, not even organized. And then he would say things like, make it ugly. People notice ugly, you know? So this is what we were dealing with. We were like, wait, this is like, it's hard to imagine that, you know, UX design and UI and UX design and interaction design and whatever, it didn't even really exist much before this, you know, like the, the experience.

[00:04:35] Sani: plus years ago. Of course.

[00:04:37] Maren: yeah. And the extent of sort of interactive, interactivity was Blue Links. There was

[00:04:42] Sani: Mm hmm.

[00:04:42] Maren: Ajax. There was no, you know, there was no animation. There was all, you know, so yeah, it was really fun at first and just. Moving fast, getting the big salary, getting the patents, drinking the Kool Aid, you know.

[00:04:56] Sani: It felt, it felt good to be there. Like basically it felt, felt really, really cool to be a part of something. You don't even know what, but something

[00:05:04] Maren: Yeah. It was, yeah. It was so experimental and thinking big and everything seemed impossible. It seemed impossible that anyone would ever buy a pair of jeans online. You know, people were saying they wouldn't even buy books online. Cause you have to pick it up and you have to feel it and you have to, you know, and so it was recreating all of the existing shopping behaviors and, and, you know, the things that you need to make a decision online in the virtual world instead of in the physical world.

[00:05:32] Sani: And it also led to transformation of e commerce in general, because the changes you pushed at Amazon. Have been moved over to all kinds of e commerce websites big or small you you were just Amazon I'm not gonna see you Amazon was just one of the pioneers in the e commerce space obviously, which is why they're a giant now, so Let's talk about the influence Big tech companies like like Amazon and all those I've been hearing the term Broly garks For, for those CEOs, like it's been used by media lately, especially around the inauguration.

Let's talk about the influence that they have on the world. Uh, and maybe if the people are even aware of the influence they have, or maybe it's kind of hidden in plain sight. Right.

[00:06:17] Maren: yeah, I say Tech brolegarks, just because if you look at the top 10 on like Forbes billionaire list right now, eight out of 10 are from big tech. And there's a massive concentration of wealth and power happening. Um, at, uh, in big tech, you can see obviously Elon Musk, richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos, somewhere in that easily somewhere in that top 10, the, the two founders of Google, um, Oracle, et cetera.

So it really is. Uh, you know, shifting from as, as, as it always does, you know, um, shifting from big oil, which was the power source and the energy source of the world, and hence the high, the most important, highest thing. And now tech is really just becoming embedded in everything we do. And so it's naturally going to become, you know, the, the powerful force in our world.

And then the people who own it are going to become the oligarchs. So, um, um, yeah. I think it's, it really is impacting us in every way and we right now have seen how, um, you know, big oil needed big tech previously because big tech was supplying the AI that would enable big oil to, um, dig up more oil, more efficiently, um, expand oil production.

Et cetera, et cetera, billions of dollars heading that way from, from big oil to big tech. And now big tech has an equal need for big oil because the data centers that they plan on powering are going to use, um, more than the, any amount of the resources that any grid has. And they'll have to be bringing, they're bringing coal plants back online and bringing, um, you know, three mile Island here in the States, which was a nuclear disaster site, uh, back online.

So, um, Yeah, it's changing everything. And then, and then of course, Elon Musk buys our presidency essentially. And so now you can see how their effect, you know, big oil, big tech and our government, one of the highest offices in the world, if you know, if you know, like right up there with the other big countries and forces in the world.

But, um, you know, it's, uh, Their fingers go very far and deep.

[00:08:31] Sani: You don't sound very optimistic when you talk about that. Neither am I, to be clear. But, uh, the difference between, let's say, something a few centuries ago, several centuries ago, you know who the guy in the castle was, or the woman in the castle was, and you know where they were. And if something goes bad, well, people rush there and kind of settle the score.

Let's just use a nice phrase, a nice enough phrase for this podcast. Now, you don't even know who they are. You know who they are, because they're kind of mini celebrities, They want to be, but you don't know where they are. You don't know what they're doing, what the extent of they're doing is. And I think this is a huge problem about all of the in plain sight, hidden in plain sight, things that are happening all over the world,

[00:09:13] Maren: Mm hmm.

[00:09:13] Sani: it's not going to get any better anytime soon from what I, from everything that I've seen.

[00:09:18] Maren: it's, it's so complex now. There's no transparency, and it's almost too complex for somebody who isn't Totally plugged in to even see, like you say, it's, it's hiding in plain sight.

[00:09:30] Sani: Why are the governments not regulating any of these or most of this?

[00:09:35] Maren: And that is great question. And it's, it's, um, it's something we should all be asking ourselves. And I would say it's because there is so much money in politics and the money comes easily from people like Elon Musk. And there's a lack of, um, you know, for at least in a democracy here, our voter base is uninformed and it, because democracy is.

At such a size have never really been tested and used to require getting everybody in the same room together to have a single conversation. Now we have this polarization of. Of truth, um, via social media and algorithms. It's intentional divide and conquer. Um, and we have the, you know, the, the power of, um, big tech and Vince influencing our government and the, our, our politicians wouldn't get reelected or they would get ousted if they didn't obey.

And so we can't wait for our governments to swoop in and help us. You know, we can see right now, they're not going to.

[00:10:45] Sani: One thing you told me when we had the first call preparing for this is radicalization is, is the answer, uh, by the common people. And I absolutely love that, but let's talk about one thing you helped start and you did with the Amazon employees for climate justice. And this is what got you in trouble in the first place with Amazon, at least.

So tell me about that. What was the role? What was your role in starting, uh, that is it organization? How do you call it?

[00:11:09] Maren: Yeah, it's a 501c3, uh, charitable organization, uh, nonprofit, I guess, nonprofit organization. Um, uh, so, uh, you know, I, when I came out of college, I was like a women's studies major feminist. I was son of a, uh, you know, feminist nonprofit. Then Seattle became a tech town. All of a sudden I'm in big tech. And, um, I, and then increasingly I started to really care about, you I started to see Alexa coming in and starting to realize how crazy that is.

But then I realized how urgent the climate crisis is. So I sort of went from women being my women and girls being my main focus as far as making the world a better place to ethical AI to climate, because I figured if we don't have a planet to live on, you know,

[00:12:01] Sani: Nothing else matters.

[00:12:03] Maren: yeah, nothing else matters. And so, um, I started, you know, Initially trying to work from the inside and trying to, um, you know, convince the, all the VPs that I knew and go to the top and, and pitch an idea.

And in the past at Amazon, when I had pitched ideas, oftentimes it would be, that's a great idea. Let's patent it, here's money, here's a team, we'll rewrite their roadmap, go do that. And it, it was, that was part of the, the fun, exciting part of being there. And you could just felt like you could make big change fast, you know, and then, um, but the minute I started trying to pitch climate ideas, like, Hey, why don't we have a, you know, why don't we expose the externalized costs to our customers?

Let them know this one's coming from China. So it's going to have this much of a carbon footprint or whatever. This one is made by, um, you know, six year olds in Bangladesh, whatever. You're just expose it. If you still want to buy it for 2, that's your choice, you know, but just let customers know because eventually they're going to know.

And. It may be a big trust buster when they find out that this whole time we also knew, you know, so I'd try to make the business case and try to make the customers focus on the customer case but it was like a complete different response. It was just like dead silence, you know, talk

[00:13:27] Sani: Which means, which means they knew they did, they knew this

[00:13:29] Maren: They absolutely knew. And, and they knew that that wasn't going to make them money. And that is the bottom line. I was having ideas that I thought were making the world a better place, and they were helping me execute on those ideas. As long as they made money. And climate, and you know, sustainability, at this point it's getting better and better.

But, you know, the prices are coming down of solar and wind or whatever. Um, but at that time it was going to cost money, and they don't want to do anything that's, you That brings profits down and they, that's the nature of capitalism working exactly the way it should. You have to bring the cost of labor.

And production down so that you can keep the price of products low so that people are encouraged to buy more and more. And then your share price stays high. And

[00:14:22] Sani: basically means the system works exactly as designed. Uh, it's not a, it's not a matter of system breaking. It's a matter of system being too good.

[00:14:31] Maren: yep, it's not a surprise. They know exactly what they're doing. They know exactly how it's supposed to work. It's benefiting them. And they aren't interested in changing it. And so in order to change the system, I had to go outside of, you know, it's like we say, you can't ask for permission. You can't, or you can't use persuasion.

[00:14:51] Sani: Mm hmm.

[00:14:52] Maren: Uh, because if persuasion worked, we would have already. Had every, we would have already had,

[00:14:57] Sani: exactly.

[00:14:57] Maren: you have to shift power. It's about power. Fundamentally. It's about power. Who has it? What do they want? What are their values? You know, and how do you, if you don't, if your values don't align with their, their values, you need to find a way.

To force them to give up power because nobody's ever going to just give up power voluntarily. So I had to find a way to make Amazon do something they didn't want to do.

[00:15:23] Sani: how did that go?

[00:15:25] Maren: Well, it went really well, actually. So we, we founded, uh, you know, we got together as a collective, um, you know, a collective voice, uh, when, know, when almost 9, 000 of your, of your highest paid, most valued employees come together and say, Hey, Amazon, we want you to have a climate plan. You don't have anything on the books right now.

You're way behind your competitors. We like working here. We believe that Amazon should lead. Why aren't you out in front with a climate plan? And when they hear 9, 000 employees say that all of a sudden they can move very fast. And that's what got us the climate pledge. That's what won us the 10 billion Bezos earth fund is that pressure.

You know, we knew that, that, that Jeff was responding. In fact, when he announced the climate pledge, he used Our language that we had said, you know, like we want Amazon's in the middle of the pack. We want Amazon to lead. We, you know, we want Amazon to push its competitors to, to follow. And that's exactly what the climate pledge did.

So it was extremely powerful. Um, and they knew it that that's, they know that, that, that, um, employee pressure can be incredibly powerful. And that's why they are so interested in union busting because they don't want it. Employees to have strength in numbers, and that's actually why I ended up getting fired was, um, that are our same group when things got bad during Covid and Amazon was treating the warehouse workers like disposable, um, numbers, you know, just just numbers.

Um, we, you know, our group set up a town hall so that warehouse workers could talk directly to tech workers, which is completely legal and protected. But within two hours of us setting up that town hall, I was fired.

[00:17:20] Sani: Oh, wow. So it was that, that, by the way, people talking to their colleagues, like there's no, let's talk even North Korea. There's no country where this can be illegal or even

[00:17:33] Maren: And that's why the National Labor Relations Board here, jumped in, took our case to court. You know, they brought Amazon to court and, um, settled in our favor and Amazon had to publish everywhere internally that what they had done that was illegal. Yeah.

[00:17:50] Sani: And when you say in your favor, it is it's all 9, 000 workers that were on the How

[00:17:54] Maren: No, it was only, there was only two of us that were fired and that's, and we were the most, we didn't send personally, send the invitation. Um, for the town hall. We were the most visible leaders of the of Amazon employees for climate justice. It was me and my colleague, Emily Cunningham, who I don't think it's a coincidence is also a UX designer.

Uh, it's like, you know, I don't know. We get it. We see the bigger systems. We see the patterns we see. I don't know. We're, we're good at predicting futures or better than the average humans. I think. Um, um, anyways, yeah, they wanted to fire two people in order to silence everyone.

[00:18:39] Sani: That's so horrible. That is And also, I'll just use my background. I'm from Serbia. We have A huge wave of protests going on right now. It's, it's starting to make international news today. It's, it's like top news in England and whatnot. It's very similar to what you're describing at Amazon. They busted all the unions when they came to power in 2012.

They, they, they wanted to silence everybody, but people have risen and the strength in numbers thing really, really works when you have a hundred thousand. People in the streets for 24 hours, blocking roads. You have to listen. So today. Prime Minister of Serbia has resigned after that huge protest that went on yesterday.

So people listening to this podcast, strength in numbers is a real thing. And even if you think I should stay quiet,

[00:19:27] Maren: of the people.

[00:19:28] Sani: the will of the people and, and well, radicalization, Serbia has not reached that yet, but hopefully it doesn't lead to that. It doesn't, it's not even necessary, but Honestly, if you believe in a cause, if you think something should happen, just speak up because there's many, many thousands of people just like you who are quiet because they think they're alone.

And that

[00:19:48] Maren: yeah, and don't speak up alone like right like don't speak up alone like be strategic about it Like at the same time that that we were fired. There was a guy who we heard was Protesting within his own organization by himself He was an engineer and he was just standing up and saying I'm not gonna write code until you guys You know, get, you know, get a climate pledge and he just, he got fired, but he didn't have, there was no impact in him getting fired.

Nobody knew that he got fired. Press didn't know that he got fired. You have to have, you have to build the momentum and build the case so that when you stand up, you have a whole bunch of people behind you. You're united. And we still need leaders that have to take the bigger risks, you know, that put themselves in, you know, there's, you have to decide how much you're willing to risk.

You know, how much privilege do you have? How much can you afford to take whatever risk? Everyone has to decide what is your capacity for risk risk. And then, and then do as much as you can because it's, it's kind of all hands on deck. I love hearing that story about the people in Serbia. That's just,

[00:20:50] Sani: haven't been this happy about news from Serbia. My life, I think,

[00:20:55] Maren: Oh, that's

[00:20:55] Sani: feels like this feels, feels special. Uh, let's talk about how companies like Amazon, uh, do what they're doing, trick people into buying more, spending more without even considering what happens. And this is what the documentary is all about.

What happens when you are done with what you just bought. And you told me earlier, there's no a way. That Away is on planet Earth and, and we're headed towards, uh, Wall E scenario, which is one of the best animated movies ever made, I've seen it at least 20 times and that is not an exaggeration. So, give me some examples of, of Dark Battles, actually I'll ask you about one, the Amazon Smile example that you talked about in an interview, uh, uh, in a TV interview.

I really hate them for this and, and I, I'll let you, I'll let you explain what it, what it is.

[00:21:41] Maren: Yeah, so this was pretty early on when, when most people who went most, you know, average, whoever's shopping where you think you're, you have an impulse to shop online, right? People would go to Google first, they would go to Google, search for whatever book, and then you'd see a whole bunch of options and you might choose Amazon or you might not.

We wanted people to come. To Amazon first. We wanted them to think of Amazon first. We wanted them to type in amazon. com, not Google, you know, and this seemed impossible at the time because the river of traffic, you know, it just seemed impossible to even get there, but that was our goal. And one of the things that Amazon did to, um, make that happen was they, they had, they created the URL, uh, amazon.

smile, no, smile. amazon. com. And, um, you had to type that into your browser, but if you went in that way, Amazon would put money into your chosen charity. And it felt like I was, when I first heard about it, I was like, wow, are they actually doing something. Good for like the sake of just doing something good that doesn't sound like Amazon and I was actually mentoring the designer who was working on this.

So then I was very, pretty close to it the whole time. And that's when I found out that the real reason why they were, um, were why they were having people type in smile. amazon. com was Because they would then not have to pay Google the ad clicks for people to go to Google first click on Amazon And they took those just those pennies and put them towards your charity.

There was no it was it was only benefiting Amazon, actually. I mean, when you get a small amount of money for your charity, but it was not about that at all. It was about trying to shift people into thinking of Amazon first.

[00:23:34] Sani: It was basically Google paying those charities, if you look at it, if you just do the math. It was Google money going to charities, not Amazon's money. Because the money that Amazon would

[00:23:42] Maren: Yes,

[00:23:43] Sani: just went somewhere else. Um, another thing that you talk about a lot in the documentary is being there in the shoppable moment.

I think that was the exact phrase. So, that was like the big goal. From a tech standpoint, from, from UX and experimentation, all that standpoint, I get like, this is a goal that you want your company to achieve, but being there. So basically when, when anyone thinks about, I need to buy this, you want Amazon to be the first company in the first place they think about.

So to do that and to make that easier, uh, Amazon has designed, uh, the one click purchase, which, you know, brilliant genius, but, uh, as you said in the documentary, if you want to buy something, leave it in the cart for a month and, you know, if you want to buy it, buy it after a month, uh, they still have the one click purchase, right? Can you try to get even a guess what the, uh, the impact of that one button was on, on climate change?

[00:24:45] Maren: my God. I could not possibly

[00:24:46] Sani: 1 to 10. No, of course,

[00:24:47] Maren: but it is a new, and it was a million things in a way. Like there was,

[00:24:51] Sani: Right.

[00:24:51] Maren: You know, first it was just Jeff would always Jeff Bezos would always talk about, um, you know, removing the friction between, you know, the customer and the purchase. And so first it was like looking at opt out all of the paths that you could to buy an item.

And how can we remove one or two clicks? How can we surface more information, you know, using, um, progressive disclosure or whatever, you know, good, good, good. Patterns to help people quickly make a decision understand which item is the one that they want, you know, all of those things were Developed to, you know, the customers who bought also about the, you know, all of these things were originally designed in, you know, in what felt like the, you know, good trying to just do actually create a good user experience, but it became more and more about, you know, building the massive Amazon machine.

And pretty soon those customers who bought also about were no longer. Things they were paid placements and so it just and that's how I felt and I would caution people going into these companies Now it was like this death by a thousand paper cuts like my values were being whittled away Almost so slowly.

I, it was like a little compromise and I would be like, Ooh, that didn't feel good. That felt like a dark pattern. And then it would be like, Oh no, that's definitely a dark pattern. Oh, now you're requiring me to do a dark, to create a dark pattern. You know, it's just like one thing after the other. And pretty soon it became, I just, I couldn't, couldn't do it anymore.

But, um, but yeah, it's, and then the, the one click was just, and the other thing was Prime,

[00:26:31] Sani: Right.

[00:26:32] Maren: was the big, uh, machine. So the free, fast and free shipping. Uh, And then when that happened, that exploded, you know, the, um, we were telling ourselves at Amazon and the executives were telling themselves, and I believed this at first.

And I think it was maybe true at first that Amazon shopping at Amazon or shopping online was more efficient and therefore better for the climate. It was greener than. Everybody driving their individual cars to the store. But once we get into this two hour, you know, delivery, then Amazon started contracting out, um, all of those deliveries to multiple, you know, uh, driving, you know, driving, you know, groups or whatever, and then you're not, you're no longer actually coordinating.

You don't have a system that's looking at all of these different companies and You know, and optimizing the driving. And so now you'll see an Amazon truck go by your house four times a day. And, and then not only that, sorry, we start buying one item in one item at a time, and normally when you would go to the store, you'd buy 40 items.

You'd wait a week and buy 40 items. So it just changed.

[00:27:41] Sani: green. That's number one. It's not green anymore because of how the delivery works because it's a two hour delivery, which is no one needs to our delivery unless it's an organ or medications like no one in the world needs to our delivery. I mean, let's just be honest here.

And number two, because of how easy it was, like you said, you're not buying. Things once a week and having deliveries once a week, you can buy five times a day and get one item delivered five times a day for free. Again, no one in the world needs that. And I guess most people, if they knew what the impact of that was, would probably think twice before they did it.

[00:28:18] Maren: And that's the

[00:28:18] Sani: point is that they don't know.

[00:28:20] Maren: Yep, it's, we, we hide the actual externalize, we externalize the costs and customers can be conveniently uninformed about it. Even though, you know, I think a lot of, when you see the movie, if you see the documentary, I don't think a lot of people are seeing something that they had no idea was happening.

I think it's just hitting in a new way. And it's, it's by excellent design. I think the filmmakers did a great job. It's combining the visuals and the music and the storytelling. And it becomes a more, it lands harder than just knowing that there's factories in Bangladesh that, you know, burn

[00:29:01] Sani: I love what you said there because it really is not, none of that is new. And especially for most of the audience here works in, in conversion optimization, experimentation. So they know this, they do this for living. But to see it like that, explained in such a way, uh, I told you before, when I saw the trailer, October, when the trailer first came out, I wondered, oh my god, we are, like, we're the worst, we're the bad guys, we are the bad guys here, we're doing this.

I went to a conference in November, two days or three days after, uh, the premiere, after it started airing on Netflix. It was the talk of the conference, like a lot of people who saw it, that was the only thing they could talk

[00:29:38] Maren: Oh, wow.

[00:29:39] Sani: Yep, so that's how big it is, that's how important it is. Uh, the worst part, like you just explained, is we all know this. It just takes a slap to the face or whatever it is. The documentary was for us to take notice and hopefully start taking action, goddammit. Uh, but I want to ask you about AI as well. Uh, there, there was big news with a new, with a Chinese, uh, deep seek, right? There was an out, yeah. Jeeper whatnot. And people are complaining about, uh, worried about privacy.

There's the other one that's more expensive, that's ours, that's from the west. What about privacy with that one? So, let's talk ethical AI. I think ethical AI is like the biggest thing. Will it ever happen? Is there a chance?

[00:30:26] Maren: you know, no, I mean, it won't, you know, technology is inherently a neutral tool and it, and we will, humans will define how it will be used. And we've seen how we've used every tool in the past, you know, a screwdriver can screw Uh, screw into a wall or it can stab somebody in the heart, you know, it's like, it's the same thing.

So, but, but that said, we need to do as much as we can to move cautiously. We are currently building the most powerful weapon. This will be so much more powerful than the nuclear bomb. And we are racing just headlong into our own oblivion because The people who are doing this are not, actually, they don't share the values.

Like there's the people in power and they don't share our values. They, their values are taking a small number of humans, interstellar, you know, that's Elon Musk's, and not

[00:31:34] Sani: Hmm.

[00:31:34] Maren: It's not about saving this planet. He never cared about saving this planet. Jeff Bezos never cared about selling goods online and making it super convenient for people or customers for that matter, even though they say, you know, they wanted to build businesses that had budgets, big enough.

To compare to NASA and then be able to, uh, build our own, which now we see they did, they achieved.

[00:31:58] Sani: it's funny how in, in, in Terminator two, which is to me, this is the best AI movie ever made.

[00:32:04] Maren: In which one?

[00:32:05] Sani: Terminator two, even though he didn't guess anything about AI, uh, you know, to talk about robots killing people and, and all that stuff. And the shape shifting robots, actually it's tech pros. It's it's tech pros who cannot even talk to people.

So, uh, It's very weird how, how wrong that movie got it. But yeah, this is where we are. So you, you think it's very unlikely or almost, almost impossible basically because of the people pulling the strings with AI,

[00:32:31] Maren: We ha we, we, we need to mitigate. The consequences of AI, but without power, we don't have, we don't have a countervailing force. So right now they get to set the agenda for how they're buying our government. They're, you know, Elon Musk is prom or, I mean, Donald Trump, for example, is promising to remove all of, all the regulations that would slow down AI.

And now we're even more panicked because China obviously jumped ahead. And um, yeah, so it's just, it's just an all out arms race and they're, you know, cutting costs, cutting jobs, cutting anything they can to, to marshal all the resources towards AI. The market may have a balancing effect here. We can't rely on markets to, to keep us safe.

That's for sure. But for the moment their profits might be low because they aren't getting the returns that they. with China, you know, leapfrogging.

[00:33:26] Sani: That's what I've noticed. The AI hype has definitely slowed down. Not, not even a little bit because the promise was you'll get flowers and rainbows within six months. It's been two years and we're getting, uh, Email copy generated by chat GPT and stuff like that. So, It's there, but it's not where it was supposed to be.

But this time I have a, uh, the next segment is called rapid fire questions. Well, not a cool name, but it's just a basic name. Uh, I have a few questions for you. I would like to respond to them in 10, 20, 30 seconds. Most per question. So let's start with the first one. What is the one thing online shoppers, uh, should know, but often they don't.

[00:34:07] Maren: The extent that their purchases are impacting people and planet.

[00:34:14] Sani: Yep. It's a sad answer, but it's a great answer. Uh, uh, what is a dark pattern in online retail that frustrates you the most?

[00:34:22] Maren: I think, um, ads masquerading as content. That is one of the most frustrating things. And, and that's been going on forever. You, there used to be, you know, a lot of times you'll pick up a magazine and you'll think you're reading a really non biased article and then you see in tiny print. You know, paid by advertising that customers just are, it's happening to us all the time in our social media feeds.

It's just, it makes a biased source be seen as a neutral source

[00:34:53] Sani: that is a, that's a great one. I wouldn't have thought of that, but that, that is a problem as old as sharing information in any, any way. Uh, what is one change that companies can make today to be more ethical? Is there one?

[00:35:10] Maren: mean, are they willing to, you know, they, let's find the changes that don't cost money and that don't impact profits. And now those are the changes that they can make, that they will make,

[00:35:22] Sani: That's a very good answer. Uh, what is this? The final one, what is the one thing a tech worker, uh, or tech workers underestimate about their power?

[00:35:32] Maren: uh, tech workers think that they are on the same team as the power holders. So, you know, the, their bosses, the C suite, whatever we were, we've, we were in this, you know, ivory tower and we felt, um, Like we were special and tech workers are not, they are going to be as disposable as like Amazon warehouse workers are currently, and the people in power will have no qualms about mass layoffs.

And, um, you know, just. Treating, treating tech workers like numbers the same way they've treated other groups of employees.

[00:36:12] Sani: And we've seen it happen already, right after the pandemic window, when the tech layoffs were happening, uh, or towards the end of the pandemic, we we've seen it. They have no regard. They, they, they just don't care. And like I said, tech workers are numbers just like any other workers and living in an ivory tower can kind of.

affect the way you think and, and your perspective of what the world is. Uh, so how do we make the world a better place then? How do we foster empathy between people and better understanding that people should be working together, radicalized or not working together against the, the few individuals who really want their personal gain and nothing else,

[00:36:53] Maren: hmm. I mean this, the most powerful thing that an individual can do is stop being an individual. Talk to your co workers. Talk to your family. Talk to your coworkers. School talk to wherever you are, wherever there's already an organized group, educate that group, raise awareness, do everything you can to, to raise awareness of what we're facing and start to bring people together to, to begin to build a countervailing force.

A union is just, It's just a force to make companies come to the table to negotiate. And without, especially if we don't have jobs. If we're losing our jobs, we have, we no longer have that power. We will have no lever by which to make these big companies come to the table and negotiate about anything.

Whether it's jobs or salary or climate or anything else. And so we have to start negotiating. force now. And then you start by just talking, you know, raise your own awareness and then talk to the people that you know.

[00:38:00] Sani: the world we're in today, uh, Maybe not by design, but you have, and this is also from documentary. You can scroll social media and they played the videos of cats in the documentary, you can, you can numb your brain using social media, uh, uh, social media also, well, we're all connected, but we've never been more alone as, as humans.

And that was not, I'm guessing that was not by design, but this is something that really,

[00:38:27] Maren: think it was by

[00:38:28] Sani: think it

[00:38:28] Maren: Divide and conquer is the oldest rule in the book for taking power. So I don't think it's an accident. I,

[00:38:37] Sani: designed a website, like Facebook, to rate high, uh, college students wasn't thinking that far ahead, but it was probably introduced later as a feature. Yeah.

[00:38:47] Maren: yeah. And you know, that's, that's the way. That's the thing is we need to we need to see these structures for what they are and see how they're changing us as As human beings and we are we are so we are so isolated. No, and it doesn't make us happy

[00:39:01] Sani: It is very sad, uh, I mean, the state of the world right now. The world has never been

[00:39:07] Maren: someone first invented the cigarette they didn't think about it They didn't think this is they weren't trying to be evil. It was just something but once we found out That they, that they were killing people. The people who had, that were making the money off of those things did not want you to know that.

And they did everything they could and they

[00:39:26] Sani: high, yeah.

[00:39:27] Maren: and then they would do sneaky things like making, you know, the ads for cigarettes be cartoons so that it would appeal to a younger generation and start a new generation of addicts. And that's the same method, the same model that, you know, that consumption, that

[00:39:43] Sani: worse because social media doesn't even need ads anymore. People just want to be there. I mean, I guess people just wanted to smoke without ads because if everyone around you smokes, you're more likely to be a smoker, but even that was like 70 80 percent of people smoking. Social media,

[00:39:59] Maren: yeah,

[00:39:59] Sani: a hundred percent of people are there.

[00:40:01] Maren: And it, and same with smoking. It took people to get mad, to wake up and get mad. And, and, you know, we have these despondency and fear of, of, you know, people feel like it's hopeless or they feel afraid to, to make change or they feel, you know, and the thing that gets you over fear and despondency and depression is outrage.

And so we need people to get mad. And when you get mad, you get motivated. When you're motivated, you take action. When you take action, you experience hope. And then it starts the beneficial cycle. And one of the things that somebody said, some wise person said to me recently, What if it's not as hard as we think it's gonna be?

Mm

[00:40:44] Sani: That is so good and that reminds me of Serbia once again, because if there's enough people on your side and just working together, not on anyone's side against the bad guys, but just whoever the bad guys are, if there's enough people just standing up and saying enough, you've done your damage, just go away now,

[00:41:04] Maren: And there's, there's one statistic that can, that can be debated, but um, that it only takes 3.5 of the population Standing up and being active. And when that has happened, significant change has, has never failed to happen. So it's not as many people as you think.

[00:41:23] Sani: Yeah, because if you have the 3. 5 percent there's going to be 20, 30 more percent who are going to support the 3. 5. And, and, and, and that's when I, this is amazing. It there's hope there's hope there's not a lot of hope, but there's hope

[00:41:35] Maren: I, yep.

[00:41:36] Sani: just need to take action.

[00:41:37] Maren: I call myself an optimistic pessimist.

[00:41:42] Sani: that's a good one. Final question.

What is your call to action for the listeners of this podcast? And that's probably. Almost all exclusively tech workers working in digital marketing, UX, and similar professions. What should they do today to ensure we have a better world in 20, 30 years?

[00:41:59] Maren: I mean, it would, it would be two things within your profession. Be wary of. You're of compromising your values. Notice when these little paper cuts happen and, and know that understand the power structure and why it's happening. Open your eyes to the power that, and notice when you are contributing to that.

And then the other thing is talk to your coworkers. Keep it underground, you know, like start to build power with your coworkers so that you can call at the, when the time comes that you need to, you will have enough power to call your company to the negotiating table.

[00:42:42] Sani: That's it to everyone listening to this podcast. Just, just follow this advice. Maren, thank you so much for being on the podcast. It was such an honor to have you on.

[00:42:49] Maren: It was an absolute pleasure to be here. 

[00:42:51] Sani: Wow. That was amazing. Uh, I hope you enjoyed this conversation as much as I did, and I hope you'll learn that. There is a better world. We just have to fight for it and we should not be doing it alone. So if you enjoyed this episode, please consider sharing, rating, reviewing it. Uh, the best way is to go to nohackspod.

com slash follow and just choose your social channel where you can follow nohackspodcast to get, uh, all the updates we have. There's a lot of other episodes coming up in this, uh, season three that I'm sure you're going to love until next one.