If it's the case that technology has divided rather than united the majority of people who rely on it — the popular argument that we're all "Alone Together," hyperconnected but isolated — the problem begins with the technology industry itself. Centered in Northern California, the tech elite resembles a small subset of the world that uses its products, and in an echo chamber of its own, it consistently fails to adequately imagine the plurality of its users and their experiences.

The industry does so at our peril, longtime observer Om Malik, a technology writer and partner at Palo Alto venture capital fund TrueVentures, argues in a New Yorker article detailing what he calls Silicon Valley's "Empathy Vacuum." If that vacuum yawns wider, he fears, Silicon Valley could soon have — and maybe deserve — the infamy of big banks and Wall Street elites. Writes Malik:

"We talk about the filter bubbles on social networks—those algorithms that keep us connected to the people we feel comfortable with and the world we want to see—and their negative impacts, but real-world filter bubbles, like the one in Silicon Valley, are perhaps more problematic. People become numbers, algorithms become the rules, and reality becomes what the data says."

There are instances when technology companies work hard to represent and protect their users: The dating app Tinder, after consulting with trans activists and users, opened up its once binary gender options earlier this month to acknowledge the spectrum of genders represented by its users. But time and time again, major companies like Twitter, Facebook, and Google, choose algorithms over human judgment or careful deliberation. They ignore bullying and harassment if they don't experience it themselves. That goes beyond, as Malik selects one example, sending Facebook users images of dead loved ones in their year-end highlight reel videos. It extends to companies like Uber, whose plan to automate everything from truck drivers to taxi cabs exalts displacing people from their jobs in the current economy without planning to provide alternate ones in their new world order.

"The lack of empathy in technology design isn’t because the people who write algorithms are heartless," Malik writes, "but perhaps because they lack the texture of reality outside the technology bubble. Facebook’s blunders are a reminder that it is time for the company to think not just about fractional-attention addiction and growth but also to remember that the growth affects real people, for good and bad."

That made me think of this Tweet:

Not everyone can work in the tech industry, but if the tech industry wants everyone to use its products and services — and it does — then its workers need to consider everyone, and not just as potential customers, but as potential victims. While Malik stops short of making this argument, it seems to me that he might call (again, I know) for more diversity in the industry — more women, more people of color. But at the current hiring rate, the technologists currently at the helm have to at least acknowledge the ways in which they might fail to empathize with users who aren't them. If that means fewer high-end meal delivery apps, so be it.

Similarly, writer Max Read considers the industry's reliance on automated decisions in a piece for New York magazine called "Maybe the Internet Isn’t a Fantastic Tool for Democracy After All"

[The] recent panicked focus on fixing the “fake news” problem itself seems inadequate, reliant on the belief that merely by ensuring that hoaxes and lies are unable to circulate on social networks, we can return to civil public discourse. That misinformation plagues our politics is a symptom of a larger, more existential problem: The tech industry has disrupted the public sphere and has shown neither the interest nor the ability to reconstruct it. No matter what Facebook might believe, there is no turnkey algorithmic solution that will ensure a perfect civic network. It will always be possible for people who take advantage of networks’ “dumb” nature — their inability to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate traffic — to flood them with junk.

That is, unless rational people — a stronger public sphere, as Read imagines it — stem the tide. For his part, Malik's hope is that "we in the technology industry will look up from our smartphones and try to understand the impact of whiplashing change on a generation of our fellow-citizens who feel hopeless and left behind."

It is not just Facebook. It is time for our industry to pause and take a moment to think: as technology finds its way into our daily existence in new and previously unimagined ways, we need to learn about those who are threatened by it. Empathy is not a buzzword but something to be practiced. Let’s start by not raging on our Facebook feeds but, instead, taking a trip to parts of America where five-dollar lattes and freshly pressed juices are not perks but a reminder of haves and have-nots. Otherwise, come 2020, Silicon Valley will have become an even bigger villain in the popular imagination, much like its East Coast counterpart, Wall Street.

Does that mean Twitter is going to get a bailout?

Related: Possibly Computer Illiterate President-Elect Eager To Kill Net Neutrality