When Tech Forgets What It Means to Be Human

The Orchid Interview and the Importance of Communication for Building Future Societies

Polis-Labs

"The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place"
– George Bernard Shaw

This piece feels more personal than usual.

Over the past year, through conversations with people inside and outside the network society space, I have concluded that if we in the movement want to attract more people, we need to alter how we communicate our vision for the future.

Drop the “Normies” Talk

First, a personal pet peeve. Because so many people in this movement have roots in tech and/or Silicon Valley, too much jargon has become integrated into how we describe the movement. This needs to change. For example, I loathe the casual use of the term “normies” to describe people outside of our world. It is condescending and reinforces an unnecessary “us vs. them” divide. If the goal is to persuade or invite people into a new way of thinking, beginning with an air of superiority does not strike me as constructive.

The Orchid Interview That Went Viral

We must also understand that our descriptions of new technologies and social ideas can seem disconcerting or frightening to those not tinkering with emergent technologies. I do not want to pile on to the criticism she has already received, but Noor Siddiqui exemplifies how not to communicate tech products.

Here is some background. Siddiqui founded Orchid, a biotech startup that offers advanced embryo screening, allowing prospective parents to select embryos with fewer genetic risks. She was recently interviewed by Ross Douthat of The New York Times in a conversation titled: “The Next Parenting Trend Starts Before Conception For as little as $2,500, you can choose your future baby. Should you?”

The exchange I want to highlight is a perfect example of two worldviews talking past each other. Toward the end of the interview, Douthat, illustrating concerns about the cultural and emotional consequences of decoupling sex from procreation, reads aloud a Galway Kinnell poem that beautifully captures the intimacy of family life created through love and chance. With tears in his eyes, he asks Ms. Siddiqui:

“Do you worry about removing or diminishing from human experience that aspect of being a husband and a wife, in a relationship, with a child?”

Siddiqui looked slightly confused for a split second before replying with a flat “What do you mean?” followed by a lighthearted remark that “sex is for fun, Orchid and embryo screening is for babies.” The moment went viral (on X in particular) because it was so jarring for many non-tech people. Fellow tech founder Amal Dorai probably summed it up best:

“A guy who can be moved to tears by a poem tries to interview a Silicon Valley founder, results are predictable.”
— @amaldorai

I do not think Ms. Siddiqui intended to appear flippant or glib in the interview; it is just that they were speaking two different languages. Douthat was speaking in deeply emotional registers of love, intimacy, poetry, and tradition. By contrast, Siddiqui came off as speaking in the impersonal, utilitarian logic of Silicon Valley, which prizes efficiency, optionality, and optimization above all else.

polis-labs

A DAO Conversation Gone Wrong

I recently saw this same pattern play out in myself when I tried to explain the idea of a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) to a philosopher friend. The context was a broader conversation about Web3, Bitcoin, and the emerging interest in alternative governance structures, particularly the network state and parallel society concepts. I wanted to use DAOs as an illustration of how digital-native communities can experiment with governance and human coordination, but she interpreted them as prescriptive blueprints for how all of human governance should and inevitably would evolve.

I tried to explain that DAOs are primarily governance systems designed for blockchain communities rather than entire societies, but the more I emphasized their limited scope, the more her position hardened. Already a tech skeptic, in her mind, the very fact that technologists were building such systems implied that they believed this was the destiny of all governance.

After that conversation, it occurred to me that if I cannot clearly explain how experiments in digital governance could help eventually solve coordination failures in real life to someone trained to interrogate ideas critically, then I am clearly failing to frame the issue correctly.

Why Systems Sound Like Prescriptions

My personal experience is that many, if not most, tech people think in systems and sometimes struggle to consider human elements like values, stories, traditions, and identities. However, to non-tech people, technology signals how we see ourselves in the future, and sometimes this imagery paints a portrait of an Orwellian hellscape.

As with the Douthat-Siddiqui discussion, my DAO conversation illustrates that in any exchange about the future where some people speak in tech-framed terms of systems, protocols, and optimization, others may misinterpret this as value-laden prescriptions about how human life should be organized. To a non-tech person, a DAO looks like criticism or even rejection of liberty. Embryo screening looks like a slippery slope towards eugenics and the dystopian future portrayed in the film Gattaca:

A Crisis of Governance, A Chance for Dialogue

Before I close, I’d like to emphasize Sterlin’s last post on the governance crisis.

We are increasingly beset by coordination failures, value traps, and institutional breakdowns. To address this crisis, we need more than new systems; we need a new way of speaking them. Suppose we learn to translate system-centric thinking into stories that connect with ethics, traditions, histories, and lived experiences.

In that case, we can create space for understanding and collective agency. Only then can our experiment with alternative futures, whether in digital parallel societies, DAOs, or biotech, succeed. We need to invite openness, not dread, angst, or anger. To achieve our quest to solve the governance crisis, we must not adopt Silicon Valley’s heartless pursuit of progress at any cost.

The future of humanity and our flourishing depend on it.