Wafa Ben-Hassine

The mass layoffs planned at Amazon, Meta, Twitter, Lyft, Salesforce, Microsoft, and Stripe, will impact society as we know it. Why? First on the chopping block are the teams in charge of ethics, accountability, safety, accessibility, diversity and other vital issues.

For years now, we have allowed digital technology to become unmoored from any societal vision for it. We’ve waited until the damage is done to ask how society can remedy tech’s harms in part due to outdated beliefs about the economy, technology, and its inevitability. But also due to our tendency to think of technology as simply a “sector” rather than something bigger.