How Setting Defaults Shapes Culture

What if ‘ethical business’ was business as usual, and the rest had to qualify themselves by calling themselves ‘unethical’?

A few days ago, I went down a rabbit hole while following Google’s firing of Timnit Gebru, the co-director of its ethical AI program, known for raising questions about bias in Google’s large-scale AI systems. I found a great review of Gebru’s research paper on language models that Google had demanded she retract.

The review, from computer scientist Suresh Venkatasubramanian, brought up the idea of ‘exnomination’. While not a new concept, I hadn't considered its implications for the moment in time we’re in.

Exnomination describes the act of setting the default or exnominating as an act of power that forces any currently non-default position to justify itself. In the context of language, you can see this in person vs. black person, politician vs. female politician, and so on. The author of the review argued that in the context of language models, the values of largeness and scale have been set as the baseline, and now any other concern e.g. diversity, fairness, inclusion, concern for low-resource languages and so on, becomes a ‘political position’ that needs to be justified.

I couldn’t stop thinking about this in the context of ethics and social responsibility.

Why do companies aspiring to ethical practices call themselves “ethical businesses”? Why do investors that hold themselves responsible for the wider impact of their investments call themselves “impact investors”?

These qualifications have always bothered me, because — what does that tell us about the default? That it’s unethical. And that unethical is so familiar that it's lost its power to shock. Shouldn’t every business be ethical and social — by default? Is it ever okay to build a business that is blind to its societal impact or harms the planet?

There’s never been a more clarifying moment in time to show that businesses and platforms are never neutral. After 15+ years of allowing Facebook to center themselves as ‘neutral’, the world is waking up to the fact that they were, in fact, never neutral. The profound harm they have caused stems from irresponsible practices and the company’s blindness to its wider societal impact — both of which were deliberate choices rooted in value systems, business models and algorithmic decisions from the company's early days. There is nothing neutral about taking the position that Facebook’s leadership--and that of numerous other businesses--has consistently taken as they continue to endanger our society, planet, values, freedom and very lives.

Norms get set, behavior gets shaped and culture is created by the default. These qualifiers create a convenient level of abstraction, relegating accountability to "ethical" businesses. They normalize, strengthen and give impunity to a baseline that is unethical. They create a world in which "business" implies "unethical business". Qualifying the good apples instead of the bad ones means the former will always be on the fringe, singled out, watching from the sidelines as the rules get set by and for the default — the unethical default. The idea of grounding our business practices in ethics will continue to be seen as rare, minority, moonshot, and in conflict with society's default playbook for the creation of value and success.

This exnomination has crept into everything we build and consume. Think about healthy food, responsible journalism, cruelty-free fashion and fair-trade coffee. If we are aspiring to a world where all—or a majority of—food is healthy, and journalism is responsible, then the burden should be on unethical businesses to justify their role in the world. Instead of using the label "social business", maybe we should use the term “anti-social business” for the current default majority.

Of course, changing language and cultural norms is slow and complex. It starts with recognizing that neutrality is an illusion, that every business has impact—either negative or positive—and that scaling responsibly is a deliberate act, requiring conscious effort. If nothing else, these labels should make us reflect—on how we got to a place where shouldering responsibility for the impact of our actions, policies, and work on others became such a radical concept. It should make us think about why 'ethics' has become a loaded concept, reflexly dismissed in the limiting recipe for success that we have come to glorify.