I was recently the victim of a crime for the first time. It was just property crime - everyone was safe - but it still had a profound effect on me. "So this is what everyone is so upset about," I thought. In San Francisco, Nextdoor is flooded with people complaining about property crime. Some see it as the biggest problem facing the city, despite homelessness, police use of force, gentrification, the list goes on. It was certainly upsetting when it happened, but after some time I couldn't help but think, "what if they really needed it?" or "what if they are a modern Robin Hood, stealing from the rich to give to the poor.

I recently asked my girlfriend Emily, "If someone goes around wealthy neighborhoods, stealing packages from porches and selling them on Craigslist to donate to homeless shelters and food banks - is that good or bad?". Emily said, "Good and bad". I thought it was a profound answer. Sometimes good and bad things need to coexist without canceling each other out. In school, we're taught arithmetic and how to use it to count apples, the basketball score, your bank account. It seems like everything that matters can be counted with numbers. Positive numbers are for good things and negative numbers are for bad things. Got three A's and one C? Don't worry, you still have an A. Forget your friend's birthday but get them a great present? Don't worry, you're "good".

It's tempting to use this kind of thinking for everything, but it can be very dangerous. I recently re-watched Spotlight. The film follows The Boston Globe's "Spotlight" team, and its investigation into cases of widespread and systemic child sex abuse in the Boston area by numerous Roman Catholic priests. There are several scenes in the film where protectors of the status quo invoke some version of the following to justify it: "Think of all the good the Church does for the city". Moral arithmetic. They are saying that because the benefits of the Church are going so big, the drawbacks get "cancelled out". It's entirely clear by the end of the film that this kind of thinking harms the survivors of sex abuse.

Just after spotlight, I watched "The Social Dilemma" - a documentary about how social media, and recommendation algorithms in particular, lead to polarization and social isolation. It struck me that a similar kind of moral arithmetic is being invoked here. "Yeah the polarization is bad - but think of how people can find information so much easily now. We can't go back". People can find organ donors, or get their gofundme's fulfilled. The arab spring is often cited as something that would not have happened without social media. The only difference here is that we haven't fully seen it play out yet.

My hope is that we don't need to wait for that to play out before we wake up to the drawbacks. I honestly think that civil war is becoming more and more of a possibility. What's the solution? I'm not sure. I think it's to hold tech accountable for the kind of content on their platforms. They say it's impossible - there's too much content. But we know that companies who said it was "impossible" to shift to remote work somehow made it happen overnight. I don't what the solution will be - thousands of Americans employed by the government to flag conspiracy theories on YouTube? Maybe.

What I do know is that the benefits of tech do not outweigh the harms. Nothing can outweigh the harms. They don't exist on the same number line.

Update: I have realized that what I did here is stumble upon a critique of "Utilitarianism" (Google John Stuart Mill) that is probably a couple 100 years old.