Introduction to A Revolutionary Technologist
At a Rights X Tech Event in the fall of 2023, Sabrina Hersi Issa posited, “What would Silicon Valley look like if all the product managers read “All About of Love” by bell hooks?” At the time, I had read that book two and a half times and been a product manager for over a decade. So I felt poised to answer the question. The answer is simultaneously that nothing changes and also everything changes. And I suppose this isn’t at all a satisfying answer.
But every individual contributor reading bell hooks will not change the structure of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy that underpins the technology industry of today. It does not change the fact that most tech companies are beholden to investors. And as such they must privilege revenue generating activities above all, including pro-social activities. Individual technologists are often caught in the cross hairs of this profit motive and the precarity of existing in this moment in time.
As I write this, the average home in the Bay Area costs over a million dollars. Parents spend tens of thousands of dollars on childcare. Student debt, healthcare costs and even food are ever increasing in cost. And the inevitability of climate disaster seems clearer with each passing year. With multiple wars happening across the globe, the precarity of most people’s lives is ever more apparent.
And most product managers are trying to find security in this chaotic new reality. Our jobs feel like our only lifeline to the kind of security that seemed more guaranteed in a past time. So it’s almost too easy to recreate the same structures of power and domination and financial rewards come from doing so.
And in spite of all that, reading bell hooks does have an impact. It changes how we view the work that we are doing. Our jobs may hinge on maximizing shareholder value. But bell hooks invites us to imagine our work as separate from our job. Our work is to imagine ways that building technology can be an act of love.
Echoing the work of Erich Fromm, he defines love as "the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth." Explaining further, he continues, "Love is as love does. Love is an act of will-namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love."
bell hooks, All About Love
I attempt to do my work as a product manager from a place of love. Some days, I succeed and others I fail and simply recreate the systems that came before me. I don’t have a “how to be an ethical product manager guide?” but rather a set of anecdotes of those experience. And I hope this blog can serve as a possibility model for what letting love be at the center of work as a product manager looks like.
Read a Revolutionary Technologist on Substack