The term “wicked problems” was coined in 1973 to describe social problems without an isolated, identifiable cause.

Silicon Valley elites generally don’t believe in wicked problems, and see them as technical ones with a clear causal link between intervention and outcome.

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In Silicon Valley, technical solutions are borne of hybrid values of engineering and entrepreneurism - they become “big bets”, “disruption”, and “moonshots.”

Or as @fmanjoo puts it in this excellent piece, “pie-in-the-sky techno-optimism.”

https://www-nytimes-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.nytimes.com/2020/05/13/opinion/inequality-san-francisco-coronavirus.amp.html

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In the past 20 years, the pendulums of philanthropy and public policy - in municipalities, states and the federal government - have swung far towards the ethos of Silicon Valley.

That ethos is rooted in an explicit rejection of the “boring civic solutions” described here.

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But those “boring civic solutions” are what, over time, actually help solve wicked problems - those complex, multifaceted, infrastructural, institutional, intractable issues.

They can’t be reduced to a single, elegant technical solution.

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There’s a striking misalignment between these theories of change.

My question is: How can we convince tech elites to use other lenses?

To see bureaucracy & coalition-building & long-term investments not as barriers to social impact, but as necessary means to achieve it?

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