Silicon Valley isn’t just consumed by youth; often, it’s blinded.
Look at Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg created the social network for college students, but Facebook has been struggling to hang on to young users for more than a decade; usage by people over 25 has steadily grown over that time, and along with YouTube, Facebook has become the internet’s most popular social network among people over 50. This wouldn’t seem terrible for a company that makes money from advertising, as Facebook does. After all, older people are the future of business: According to a recent analysis by AARP, people over 50 now account for more than half of the world’s consumer spending, and their share is projected to grow to 60 percent by 2050.
So is Zuckerberg rejoicing that he owns the preferred online destination of the planet’s wealthiest and fastest-growing consumer demographic, tomorrow’s whales of consumerist desire?
He is not. Instead he seems embarrassed by it. Documents leaked by a whistle-blower in 2021 showed Facebook product managers obsessed with reversing the app’s unpopularity with teens and young adults. In an earnings call with shareholders that year, Zuckerberg promised to refocus the company toward improving its services for young adults “rather than optimizing for the larger number of older people.” Right — why optimize for a larger number of wealthier people when you can be cool with the kids?
This is how it goes in Silicon Valley’s youth bubble. From Meta to Snap to TikTok, the tech industry’s picture of its customers resembles that of the famously exclusionary fruity cereal: Silly rabbit, tech is for kids! Wunderkind founders are revered here, growing old is considered a disease in need of a cure, and ageism is barely concealed. In 2007, a year before he became, at 23, the world’s youngest self-made billionaire, Zuckerberg said the quiet part out loud. “Young people,” he told an audience at Stanford, “are just smarter.”
They aren’t, actually. The tech industry’s hostility to aging “continues to violate common sense,” Joseph Coughlin, the director of M.I.T.’s AgeLab, told me. His lab conducts research on how an aging population is changing business. He said that companies in the auto industry, financial services, retail and other sectors are coming around to the emerging opportunities of the “longevity economy,” the 1.6 billion people around the world who will be 65 or older by the year 2050.
Silicon Valley remains a glaring exception. America’s tech giants are among the world’s largest and most innovative businesses; if they took a more open-minded approach to aging — if they considered solving the problems of older customers as eagerly as they chased teen fads — they could establish a model for aging in a tech-besotted world. Through advances focused on health care, home assistance, transportation, robotics and artificial intelligence, technology will be crucial to address the problems emerging from demographic imbalance. If there are not enough younger people to care for and cater to the needs of the old, we will increasingly lean on tech to add convenience, independence and perhaps even companionship to our lengthening sunset years.
Analysis: This article emphasizes the importance of my project by calling out the need to include older adults in design, technology and business. It brings up many great points and questions I have, such as why don’t businesses rush to solve the problems of older customers as fast as they do for younger customers? Older customers hold a great deal of the nation’s wealth, so why don’t we take them and their business so seriously? If young humans do not make time to care for older adults, how do they expect future generations to care for them? What if there are not enough young people to take care of the growing amount of old people? As much as this reading got my thoughts flowing, it also provided examples of how technology is being used to replace the need for as much human care/interference for older adults. For instance, biometrics are being incorporated in the health field to remotely monitor health, so humans do not have to. While I do think these technological advances are amazing, I want to nudge people to shift the focus from using technology to improve end of life care for older adults and think about ways to include adults in technology that will improve their enjoyment of life while they continue to age.
Citation:
Manjoo, F. (2023, September 6). They love tech. they’ve got money. why does Silicon Valley ignore old people? The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/06/opinion/seniors-tech-silicon-valley.html?searchResultPosition=3
