In Tech We Trust… Because What Choice Do We Have, Really?

Two weeks ago, I had an early morning cross-country flight booked from San Francisco to my home in NYC. My flight was on a Saturday, and as I was packing my bags the morning before, the world’s IT systems were melting down. Hard. Since I wasn’t scheduled to fly on the day of the incident (caused by a bad patch from tech security firm CrowdStrike), my flight was mercifully not impacted, but I saw firsthand the aftermath of those who weren’t so lucky the next day at SFO. Scores of people whose travel plans unexpectedly went kablooey were still begging for help 24 hours later from overworked gate agents, and those exhausted agents were doing their best to try to be helpful, but their ailing tech systems weren’t doing them any favors.

I’ve worked as a technologist in the vertical of Live Entertainment for roughly a quarter of a century. When I entered the workforce in the late nineties, almost everyone already had their own desktop computer in the form of a giant CPU and equally enormous CRT monitor, but the internet was something we took turns using by dialing up on a single copper phone line. We all had email accounts, but since the mail server only dialed up to send and receive every fifteen minutes (using the same shared phone line), we knew we’d have to wait at least a half hour to get a reply from anyone we were communicating with digitally. If we asked anyone working in 2024 to be productive under the same conditions, they’d throw up their hands and incredulously ask how they were supposed to get anything done.

I’ve long been an advocate for bringing more technology into our industry and have been on the front lines of ensuring it worked. I’ve encountered my share of catastrophes, to be sure, but I’ve always believed the benefits of an increasingly connected world have outweighed the potential pitfalls. As a society, we’ve placed an enormous amount of trust in technological systems and allowed them to dominate every facet of our lives. It’s how we talk to our doctors, it’s how we travel, it’s how we book and consume entertainment, and for many, it’s how we get food into our homes. It’s absolutely how we pay for all of the above. The quote from the 1986 movie Platoon that concedes “when the machine breaks down, we break down,” has never felt truer to me than it does today.

So what are we to do when the trust we’ve placed in all of these systems seems shaky at best? The old axiom “trust but verify” seems nigh on impossible to do when it comes to our technologically dependent existence. How is the average consumer supposed to “verify” modern systems exactly? The best and brightest global companies, the ones that have spent the most on data privacy and security, have recently conceded that one of their trusted data partners left the back door open, and virtually everyone’s data is for sale on the dark web to the highest bidder. It’s tempting to let a sort of techno-nihilism creep over us and retreat to our cabins in the woods. 

But what about our parents, our siblings, and our kids about to start their first year in college? The cabin’s not big enough for everyone, so we have to find the courage to stay plugged into our modern world and find a way to fix it. In order to make our digital systems more redundant and more deserving of our collective trust, we need to:

• Resist rolling our eyes when the company-mandated security training videos need to be watched, silly as they sometimes feel. Do the work, I promise you will learn something.
• Make it a priority to understand what the currency of personal data means, both for ourselves and when we ask for it as part of our next marketing campaign. It’s no longer acceptable to assume that “the security stuff” will be handled by a member of our Operations department.
• Be curious and continue to upskill around new technology. As someone who has worked at a digital-first agency for a dozen-plus years, I’ve learned that our clients expect every single member of our team to have a higher-than-average competency with all things tech. The stock answer our younger team members are told to give when they encounter a client question they don’t know the answer to is, “I don’t have that information, but I know who I can talk to on my team to get it for you.” 
• Be honest and transparent when things go wrong (and it’s always a “when” here, not an “if”). Fix issues with humility and speed, and never take joy in the misfortunes of your competitors. It’s likely your turn next.

Earning and retaining the trust of your client base is time-consuming and needs to start from day one of the relationship. We want our clients to trust we know what we’re doing around technology and understand that we won’t give up when things get dicey. It’s a safe bet to think that meltdowns are going to continue to happen in every facet of our digital lives. It’s how you roll with the punches that will define who you are and will make you an attractive partner in times of uncertainty. We can’t go back, the only way out is through.