On “Unintended Consequences”

Notes to a teacher.

A teacher wrote an article titled “Unintended Consequences” which discussed a plan by one of their students to put cars with LED advertising on the freeway during rush hour.

It was ethically weak. It missed the point entirely. So I wrote them this note.

—

Dear teacher!

Until it bothered you personally, you didn’t see anything wrong with a project to drive advertising screens around during rush hour.

Once it did, you managed to figure out just one of the many, many things wrong with it — that it might distract drivers — and then told yourself a deliberate lie about how it wouldn’t happen, because the LED billboard was at right angles to the cars — as if a car going by with a red LED sign wouldn’t distract people because the sign is on its sides!

And then — you stopped! Stopped at the one thing that personally annoyed you. You didn’t go even one step further to any of the many other unintended consequences that mean that this is a horrible idea:

• These cars waste fossil fuels and the world’s resources, not to get people from place to place, but to advertise more consumer crap.
• The company is deliberately targeting people stuck in traffic jams, which means they are deliberately putting cars into traffic jams just to advertise to people — thus making the traffic jams worse.
• It subverts a public good — the highway — for individual profit, without giving anything back to the community except a few dead-end, minimum wage jobs.
• Americans are already exposed to hundreds of thousands of ads a year. It it just wrong to be trying to find the tiny times and places where there aren’t advertisements and fill them up.

You unskeptically present marketing-speak like “the company features useful content to neighborhoods” including “a diversity of smart city data along with great brands”.

“Smart city data” — like what? The weather? Census reports? If I were interested in those things, I could look them up myself. Presenting “great brands” is useful to those brands, not to the people.

And because you have not thought through any of the unintended consequences, you’re perfectly willing to end the article with some ridiculous bandaid like, “Maybe we don’t show moving content when the car goes over [a] certain speed?” which of course addresses none of the essential problems at all.

And you end with nothing. No judgement, no evaluation, nothing. The impression you give is that this terrible wretched no-good horrible idea could be fixed with a few tweaks. You consider only one of the unintended consequences promised in your title — and then you just wave your hands over it. “Come and talk to my class!”

This is a morally vacuous stance. You should have taken a much stronger stand when you first heard about, and you should right now. The correct evaluation is, “It’s a rip-off idea, it’s probably illegal now, and if it isn’t, it should be.”

It’s a bad idea, and the originators should feel bad. In a rational society, activities that consume already overburdened essential public resources to benefit a few “great brands” would never be allowed.

When in future I wonder how Silicon Valley can continue to grind the world without any of the participants getting twinges of conscience, I will tell myself, “Because they were taught that unintended consequences were unimportant.”