I was once fascinated by new technology.

It has been painful for me to write about the tech industry, because as a kid, I was drawn to the very aspects of technology that I now find exploitative and oppressive — Internet, data, cameras, microphones, audio and video. Twenty years ago, a life devoted to building the future of the Internet was an alluring proposition. In 1996, when the web was exploding, I couldn’t get enough of the Internet. I can remember my parents yelling at me to get off the phone (back then, you had to connect to the Internet via phone line). I’d stay up at all hours of the night so I could chat with people from all over the world. I’d build webpages and learn about topics I had no exposure to. Best of all, the early days of the Internet had an affinity for terms like ‘open’ (as in open source, open architecture, open access, etc.), ‘free’ (it was very common to see ‘Free Download’ buttons on Geocities websites) and ‘all’ (every web service talked about the ubiquity of the Internet). I was hooked on the utopian tech vision of a world that was more connected, more futuristic and more digital.

In 1996, the idea of sending a piece of mail, electronically, to anyone in the world was a life-altering, revolutionary concept. I had watched my father and grandfather make long-distance phone calls to family in India where they had to yell on the phone in the distant hopes that some subset of their words reached their families on the other line. The idea of instant communication was, at that time, unheard of.

I do not romanticize the web. It was slow. It had an ugly interface. My parents hated how difficult it was, and they were scared that I would do something that would damage the computer, reveal our home address or otherwise lead to our untimely deaths. They saw the problems with technology, but I was convinced they were wrong, because I had seen the future in a way they couldn’t.

“I just listened to my childhood dreams / I can’t think like that no more, all young and naive / Not after the shit I’ve seen and the things I believe.”

After I started working at Microsoft, where I worked three floors down from Bill Gates at Microsoft’s world headquarters, I started to engross myself in the business of technology. I came across writings by Paul Graham, Steve Blank, Gary Varnerchuk, Jason Calacanis, Paul Greenberg and Michael Arrington. I followed early Silicon Valley startup successes like Mark Zuckerberg, Joel Gascoigne, Peter Thiel and others. I followed Big Tech venture capitalists like Fred Wilson, Marc Andreeson, Sean Parker and Dave McClure.

I really believed these middle-aged white men were changing the world in a way that I wasn’t. I aspired to their level of freedom. I gravitated to their optimism and their vision of a more hopeful world. I thought they were like me — they truly wanted to make the world a better place. I felt I had found a global community that watched the explosion of the Internet and believed it would unlock a world of possibilities for connecting the people around us.

As technology rapidly changes the world we live in, today’s web, digital, these tech leaders have indeed made a global impact, and enriched those of us who work in technology. But these tech leaders have a vision problem: they have deluded themselves, and they have been made to believe that they are immortal Gods, entitled to build the future they envision. They are sustained by an industry that is fiercely unaware of its blind spots. The tech industry has reluctantly embraced diversity and inclusion, but its leaders and champions — myself included — still remain poorly educated about how race, disability, sexual orientation and class affect the way we produce and consume new technologies.

As a society, we might have been able to forgive the tech industry’s imperfections in the past. But today, when global giants like Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple are the most profitable corporations in the world, there is no excuse for ignorance or poor education. It is bad when you don’t listen. It is worse when you pretend to listen.

A decade after Microsoft, I took several years away from the tech industry to stop and listen to people who weren’t involved with the tech industry in any shape or form. Their visions were all different, but all of their futures were free of the tech vision problem. I spent time with democratic, socially conscious, political advocacy organizations who had a radically different vision for society: a higher minimum wage, a minimum guaranteed income, stronger right to strike laws, more money for education and job re-training, stronger unemployment benefits, stronger health care provisions, more child care benefits, real pension plans and more. I began to openly question why a technology vision wasn’t integrated into these larger visions of a just, modern society— didn’t we fundamentally want these things, too? I thought we were the good guys.

The new me is about teasing out the parts of technology that I love from the things about technology I hate.

To call ourselves technologists of a strong moral bend, we must start from the premise that all people should have equal access to information, as a universal human right, and any absence in this information access is an injustice. Furthermore, this injustice is not an unfortunate accident; it is a known and preventable externality perpetrated by our institutions of power. By calling this for what it is, we can begin to unravel the mystery of why certain people are “better” at technology than others. We can begin to deconstruct ideas around race, class and gender in technology. Most importantly, we can begin to heal these divides by taking meaningful action in service of a better vision for the future: a neighbourhood, a city and a society free of injustice and pain, removed from perpetual technological control.

They key question for people of conscience who work in the tech industry remains: How do we retain the positive emotional feelings we have about technology — its optimism, boundless hope, child-like curiosity and tenacity — while at the same time ridding ourselves of the things we hate about what the technology industry imposes — injustice, digital divides, class warfare, hatred for dignified labour, capitalism, authoritarianism, and arrogance.

I’ve started a list of sites that I think are onto something, and I keep following their journeys. I document them publicly, and I try to integrate their ideas into my life, my work and my family. I am not successful all the time, and my opinions may evolve over time. But I’ll let you in on a secret: the quest to correct the tech vision problem has made me happier. I still have panic attacks and insecurities, but I’m calmer. My wife and my daughter give me enormous purpose, of course. But the tech industry, for all of its faults, has been financially good to me. So even if I’m angry at how we got here, I’ve been enriched by the tech industry — and that’s why people like me owe it to the people who aren’t enriched, in the tech industry and outside of it, to leave the future, and its technological progress, in a better human place.