Labors of Love, Algorithms of Betrayal

If you asked me, “What drives you to create?” I’d respond, somewhat facetiously, “Insomnia and rage.”

But only somewhat facetiously. The truth isn’t far off. When I’m inspired or driven, sleep goes out the window. Not just sleep, but pretty much everything and everyone else disappears from view. As in the story, I see the eye of the bird and nothing else.

In 2016, after 10 years in the tech industry, I was furious. What infuriated me was having the veil lifted from my eyes to the experiences of women and underrepresented minorities in tech. Despite being a woman myself, I’d been blind to the entrenched and widespread issues that prevented true equality in the workplace. What truly angered me was my own sense of shame – how could I not have seen it before?

The answer to that, too, has been known for a long time. We are often blind to the information we might need to know, when it goes against our beliefs, disorients our sense of self, or is disconnected from our motives. This phenomenon has been called all sorts of things (thank you, Gemini):

• Motivated Reasoning: This is a broad term referring to the process where our desires, goals, and emotions influence how we reason and evaluate information. When we encounter information we don't want to believe, motivated reasoning can lead us to dismiss it, find flaws in it, or interpret it in a way that aligns with our existing beliefs.

• Confirmation Bias: This is a specific type of cognitive bias where we tend to seek out, interpret, favor, and recall information that confirms or supports our prior beliefs or values. Consequently, we may unintentionally or intentionally overlook or downplay information that contradicts them.

• Selective Perception: This refers to the process by which individuals unconsciously screen, select, and notice aspects of their environment. People tend to perceive information in a way that aligns with their existing attitudes, beliefs, and goals, potentially filtering out unwanted information.

• Information Avoidance: This term directly describes behaviors aimed at preventing or delaying the acquisition of available but potentially unwanted information. This can range from physically avoiding situations where the information might be presented to simply not seeking it out.

Okay, but how do we get past these things? The answer is, and always has been, story. Storytelling allows our minds to increase empathy and expand perception. It’s how our ancestors taught us not just what we needed to know, but how we needed to learn to see beyond what we needed to know. In my HBS class, a professor talks about how he tried to explain systemic racism using reasoning and data, and nobody understood him. Then one person shared their own personal experience and everyone in the room finally got it. He was frustrated: why didn’t reasoning work? In the end, he had to accept that story beats logic, every time.

So, in 2016, when I was angry with myself and everyone for their blindness, I set out to write a story. At that time, diversity, equity and inclusion was the purview of only a few isolated experts. Susan Fowler had not yet written her blog post about Uber, and the #MeToo movement had barely begun.

I wrote a story about all the things I could see that I hadn’t before. And then, silenced by my own doubts and anxieties, I hid the story. I shared it with a few select people, who said they were blown away by it and it opened their eyes. I was glad, but also still blind, this time to the value that sharing a story can have. I talked to my agent about publishing the story, but she said it was too short – novellas, she said, aren’t profitable, especially not from newbie authors.

In 2018, a friend encouraged me to put the story online. She also insisted I share it with an acquaintance who had a huge audience on Twitter. I did, and he loved the story so much he shared it to his followers. The story went viral. Over 6,000 people read the story. The Medium staff did an audio version of it, and it got republished in a magazine. Story, once again, had opened people’s eyes to information, and expanded their capacity for empathy.

Story makes it safe to learn about issues without immediately needing to fix them or assign blame. It enables the kind of richer understanding that then allows us to recognize real-life events as part of a familiar pattern. And it gives us the tools to navigate the new, terrifying thing that’s happening now, because we have seen (in a story) how someone else navigated something similar.

None of this should be a surprise to a writer, and yet, we somehow still feel as if our stories are not worth sharing unless they are (a) good enough to meet some imaginary bar (b) likely to sell and be profitable.

I’m trying to change that, at least for myself, by sharing my stories more freely. In that spirit, I have two announcements to share.

The story I referenced above? The one that went viral, and was written in a cathartic rage? It’s now available in paperback and Kindle.

To explain why I felt, as I approach 20 years in the tech industry, that it was time to share this story more widely, I’ll quote an excerpt from the Afterword of the book.

The woman who put the story on Medium in 2018 played within the rules of the game, accepting the world’s resistance. She had not yet realized her potential to change things in the workplace, nor did she truly believe her voice had power. I know better now. I accept, with fear and humility, that people look up to me, both at work in tech and as a writer. And the themes in these stories are still relevant, unfortunately. The need to dissociate gender from sex and to dismantle binary thinking has never been more urgent, when abortion rights are being destroyed worldwide and the extremely rich and powerful are dismantling not just DEI initiatives but the basic support structures of society.

Someone on Substack said being an author was like leaving messages in a bottle. You never know who might receive it or when. This week, someone approached me and my former agent about film rights to Driving by Starlight. Before everyone gets excited, this usually means nothing. People frequently option rights just to sit on it forever. But it reminded me that good stories have a long shelf-life, and you never know who might be, finally, ready for what they have to say.

Which takes me to the second announcement: Algorithms of Betrayal is ready for pre-order! No story of mine is more indicative of “insomnia and rage” than this one, in which five unlikely allies laid off from an AI-based tech company decide to go up against it in a wild revenge scheme, poisoning the model with erotic fan fiction. If you’d like to read and review and advance copy, you can either do so at NetGalley, or leave me a comment and I’ll email you the ebook.