Joe Toscano, once a high-flying Silicon Valley design consultant to Google, doesn’t mince his words when talking about today’s tech industry.

“We’re in the middle of the largest social experiment in the history of the world,” he tells Times of Malta, likening today’s tech industry to the notorious Stanford prison experiment run by social psychologist Philip Zimbardo.

“One day, we’re going to look back on this period of Silicon Valley and see just mass amounts of abuse of the human mind in favour of the person running the experiment.”

In Zimbardo’s prison experiment, participants posing as prison guards subjected prisoners to increasing levels of abuse, leading to the experiment being abandoned after just six days.

Toscano, a tech designer with a background in psychology, found himself increasingly disillusioned about the direction that the industry was taking while working as a consultant for Google’s user testing processes.

With each passing day, Toscano says he became more aware of how large tech companies were shaping people’s lives around the world.

“I was doing design that I knew was going to impact billions of people’s lives, with no checks and balances. There’s not an empire, maybe outside of Catholicism, that’s as large as tech companies.”

I was doing design that I knew was going to impact billions of people’s lives, with no checks and balances

The testing and design, Toscano says, was “effectively psychological research”, aimed at directing people’s behaviour to nurture a dependence on their products. He describes it as “kind of like a black magic, a very powerful thing if you know what you’re doing”.

To make matters worse, Toscano says, tech companies use flawed and biased data to “reinforce their monopoly”, deceiving regulatory authorities that do not have the technical expertise to counter their arguments.

Toscano saw that the effects of the tech world’s unethical practices are particularly dangerous in some developing countries, frequently as testing grounds for new features with little care as to how communities would be impacted.

“They were launching products in places like India and South America and they weren’t quite certain how it’s going to work. I just thought, wow, this is almost like lab rats that we’re sending stuff out to.”

Toscano found himself, aged 27, quitting a lucrative industry, selling everything he owned and living out of his car for over two years, travelling the world and campaigning for more ethical design practices across the tech industry.

The Social Dilemma

Toscano became a household name after appearing as an expert in The Social Dilemma, the Netflix film that took the world by storm in 2020 and which sounded the alarm on the manipulation, addiction and privacy issues that plague social media.

“I mostly went to Sundance (the film festival where it was first screened) to see if I needed a lawyer”, he quips. “We were number one on Netflix in every single developed nation across the world for a month straight, it was pretty insane.”

Three years have passed since the film’s release, a lifetime in the world of the notoriously rapid tech industry. However, Toscano says, the core questions that the film raised are still as relevant today as they were then.

“What we’re trying to do is to repeal addictions that were embedded globally. That hasn’t really changed.”

Nor has the doublespeak that the industry uses, he argues, bringing up an example of how industry insiders speak of ‘habits’ when what they are actually referring to are potentially harmful addictions.

Ultimately, Toscano argues, tech companies will stop at nothing to gather data about their audiences, leaving behind a trail of disinformation, addiction and dependence.

“That’s why they call it the attention economy,” he says. “They want us to pay attention because when we pay attention it turns into data, which then turns into money. It’s exactly what a money laundering scheme is.”

Toscano will be delivering a talk at Spazju Kreattiv, Valletta, at 7pm on Thursday, organised by the 3CL Foundation in collaboration with Spazju Kreattiv and the University of Malta’s Faculty for Media and Knowledge Sciences. Attendance is free but requires registration.