Utopia, I’m surprised to learn, comes from the Greek word for “no-place” — an imaginary community too perfect to exist in reality. Sir Thomas More coined the term back in 1516 but since then, More’s original vision of utopia (a place that cannot exist) has been confused with eutopia (the good place). Now that it’s five centuries later and given our recent history, should we even be holding out hope that The Good Place is possible to achieve?
Pre-pandemic, another popular work of speculative fiction warns us about The Bad Place. Black Mirror successfully captured our imagination with cautionary tales about how human instincts, impulses, and conveniences coupled with apps and technology, are only a push of a button away from taking humanity to a bleak dystopia. Yet, the events of 2020, and their immediate aftermath — including the global pandemic, the threat of our democracy’s collapse, and cataclysmic weather — have redefined the world in the image of the very dystopia that we all thought was pure fantasy. Charlie Booker, Black Mirror’s creator, even speculated that another season of the show seemed infeasible during a grim time where viewers certainly didn’t need more “stories of the world falling apart.”
Black Mirror’s episodes, like Nosedive and Hang the DJ, portray a number of uncannily familiar apps: dating apps, social credit-scoring apps, and apps that meticulously record the everyday minutiae of life.
Booker’s intuition (that the world doesn’t need more fantasies about terrible apps) seems spot on: we’ve just watched Facebook groups multiply pseudoscientific misinformation into nightmarish public health consequences, Twitter hashtag campaigns call a national election into a Constitutional crisis, and gig economy cornerstones like Uber and Instacart optimize the exploitation of workers.

Instead of fantasizing more about the world falling apart via our tech innovations, maybe we should think about the elements and principles that should be included in an app that can make the world better.

A place where goodness — made up of ethical decisions, concern for moral consequences, care for the well being of the community and individual rights, empathic actions and equity are factored into the algorithms developed. We need to create — The Good App.
In this eutopian start-up fantasy…
The Good App would operate under the following principles:

1. Content has consequences. Let’s acknowledge this from the outset and not screw it up (again).

The Good App is not content agnostic. On the contrary, the Good App is deeply invested in the data that it circulates on its platforms because it is aware that content has consequences in the world. Let’s avoid the trappings of looking for massive scale numbers to the detriment of quality content and strong brands that actually mean something to the audience/consumer.
It is clear that these apps are not benign places. Other apps have laundered their responsibility through the thick legal language of their Terms of Service or through platitudes about community and connection. The Good App understands its responsibility for deploying content into the world; it knows that platforms promote perspectives and predispositions in the world — intended or not. Instead, The Good App promotes and recommends, with intention, the content that mobilizes users to be empathic, informed, and engaged for the collective good.

2. Everybody is a moderator. Yes, even you - so we all need to do our part to keep the good in the good place.

Moderation is too important a job to outsource or offset to a community standards department. This essential function is all too often thrown under other business objectives like brand growth or public relations. On The Good App, moderation is everybody’s responsibility — every designer, engineer, executive, and user must also be a moderator. Together, this convergence of willing participants creates consensus not only about the activities that are allowed, but also the behaviors that we desire from each other.
Current moderation practices on platforms like Facebook and Instagram seem inadequately and unevenly applied. Algorithms and machine learning comb through content and supposedly flag or remove harmful material. However, voices that benefit the most from free expression are often silenced while the most harmful and dangerous proliferate.
When we radically rethink moderation as a responsibility, rather than a chore, we can achieve the ultimate goal: self-regulation. We create a space that (not unlike a beloved National Park or the grounds of a Buddhist temple) generations of people can appreciate because each individual is entrusted to preserve it — each visitor understands their own responsibility to the place while passing it off to strangers they will never meet.
The Good App fosters a sense of communal stewardship: a shared commitment that makes the app even more valuable than any one designer, executive, or visionary can claim ownership.

3. Ethics are designed. Big Data, this one’s for you.

Good design is a constant ongoing process. In tech, tons of time and research is dedicated to optimizing the user experience: the smoothness and shape of a button, or the placement and click-appeal of an advertisement. All of these data-driven calculations are meticulously measured and focus-grouped, A/B tested, and incorporated into version updates that hopefully shave microseconds of friction off in the quest for user attention and engagement.
The only problem: we aren’t trained to think of ethics itself as its own design problem deserving of this same rigor. Time and time again, the internet’s major controversies and scandals reveal that we have barely beta-tested our own digital ethics: despite advances in cloud computing and natural language processing, our own diverse and plural communities continue to be marginalized in different ways by big tech.
Despite big tech platform’s promises otherwise, we continue to be enraged, misinformed, and disconnected from each other. On one extreme, we still face harassment and hate speech; in subtler ways, we feel constant forms of anxiety and alienation from superficial encounters and languish because of the twitchy nature of these platforms. And we know big platforms understand — and in some cases, design — this.

What if we treated the political, cultural, and social worlds of our users like the big data problems that they truly are?

Each of our worlds is complicated, idiosyncratic, and influenced by innumerable inputs. A small design choice (say, a revision to a content suggestion algorithm, or a new batch of terms added to a moderation filter) multiplied by the millions will affect users disproportionately; when this happens, do we know why? I’ll admit, I don’t (but I want to).
Luckily, a cadre of digital ethicists, scholars, and activists have been working on these problems for years. It’s our job to move their voices and their work from the margins to the center. This is the time when ethics matter most.

4. Goodness is a virtue. So let’s be good.

What is the point of imagining a new place if it isn’t going to be a good one? Why make an app without a roadmap that guides it and its users towards goodness? Crappy and bad places are abundant and honestly, not that hard to design.
The Good App is asking to be developed. The time has come for designers, technologists, and thinkers to acknowledge the gaps between most apps’ mission statements and their impacts on the world. Old KPIs pushed on us by a Silicon Valley gearing up for global domination, or KPIs measuring the wealth that line advertisers pockets, or soulless numbers pointing to massive scale need to be weighted less in our decisions. Instead, The Good App will operate under a framework that leads to goodness - technology and algorithms that weigh moral decisions, human dignity, ethics, empathy and equity above other factors - creating a place that generates good content, shared communal ethics and meaningful value exchanges. Eutopia awaits.

This is the latest piece in an ongoing series where we explore challenges in content creation and the need for better platforms, technology, and companies that focus on human values.