[blog]Round Tables, Square Men

To be fair, I would have gone with “Citadel” for our name, as there are heaps of men who think technology happens in towers of wizardry — but round table appeared more agreeable at the sticky square table we sat at, over a bowl of garlic bread. We had met almost exactly a decade ago.

In the ten years it took us to get to creating the Digital Round Table, a lot of stuff happened. People learned how “algorithms” were something sinister, because they made Trump win presidency and lured people into purchasing shallow goods. Entire communities forgot disagreements are an essential part of the human experience, not personal attacks; some forgot disagreements exist at all, by locking themselves into echo chambers. Technology became dark and sometimes scary. People took to the streets and burned things. If technology were a religion, we had entered the crusades.

COVID, albeit a global tragedy, showed hope and unity in the digital world. One could talk to loved ones — even those afar, but especially those who were geographically close, yet isolated; could order medicine and rapid testing kits right to the doorstep; could join endless meetings from the comfort of one’s home. We learned how to stare directly into each others faces for hours on end and developed an entire culture of proper video call lighting.

It was on one of those calls, somewhere around the second or third wave of the pandemic, when I said “so why don•t we simply start our own agency”. It was a strange time, as literally all of us remember, and Crystal and I had both resigned from the same company. Disillusioned with the world, society, medicine, technology and transcontinental supply chains, we took a wary oath to one day start an organisation that would be brave, wise and instead of slaying dragons, learn to fly them.

Our aim was deceptively simple: to speak. To speak about technology without reprise or superiority. To empower those who listen, identify and share best practices, use words to build things. I once spoke at a school in Noumea, New Caledonia — a fantastic place — and as I rushed out to catch my flight, I noticed a gaggle of students with heaps of mindmaps strewn around them, discussing something in elevated French.

We didn•t think all of this was possible, they said, referencing my modest keynote on how to use zeroes and ones to govern countries, optimise systems and build networks. To include communities, empower individuals. To be a better human.

I realised then that, as seemed to be the trend, Norbert Wiener was right yet again. Speech truly is mankind•s greatest achievement and is never to be taken lightly. The words we put out there become narratives, narratives become philosophies, and philosophies define the ages. If we, as so many have said, live in the age of technology, we have the ultimate responsibility to carefully choose the words we use to speak about it.

We can choose to obscure and exclude — to become priests to a religion, having their disciples hypnotised by pieces of radiant glass, losing sight of the real world, being told they simply cannot understand it. Or we can choose to enlighten and include — to become trailblazers and guides, helping to adapt and apply technology where it’s often overlooked and providing tools to those who need encouragement.

Digital Round Table was born to do the latter. We strongly believe that any sort of digital transformation, at its core, is fundamentally a societal, rather than a technological process, and must be treated as such; a dance of equals. Everyone gets a seat at the round table.