WhyTechnologyCompaniesAreNotNeutral:TheValuesHiddeninEveryProduct

The Myth of the Neutral Tool

We are told a comforting story about technology. Platforms are neutral, we are told, just tools that people use however they choose. Technology is neither good nor bad, it is what you make of it. The company merely provides the space, and what happens in it is up to the users. This story is repeated so often that it sounds like common sense, and it is false.

I have built things, and building teaches you something the story hides. There is no neutral product. Every design decision is a choice, and every choice embeds a value, an assumption about how people should behave, what should matter, and who counts. This is true whether or not the builder intended it, and whether or not the value is ever stated. The neutrality is a myth, and a convenient one, because it lets companies disclaim responsibility for the behaviour their products shape while quietly doing the shaping. Let me show you how it actually works, from Port Harcourt, because seeing this clearly changes how you relate to every tool you use.

Values Live in the Design

To understand why no product is neutral, you have to see that design is a series of choices, and that choices are never value-free. Consider the decisions that go into any product, and what each one encodes.

What gets amplified is a choice. A product decides what to show more of and what to show less of, what to promote and what to bury, and that decision reflects a value about what is worth people's attention. When a system amplifies outrage because outrage drives engagement, it has embedded a value, that engagement matters more than the health of the conversation, and that value shapes the behaviour of everyone who uses it.

What gets hidden is a choice. What a product makes hard to find or see is as much a value decision as what it makes prominent, and the things pushed out of view are being quietly judged as less important. Whose experience is centred is a choice. A product is designed around some imagined user, and that user's needs, assumptions, and context become the defaults, while everyone who differs from that imagined user is served worse. What behaviour is rewarded is a choice. Every product encourages some behaviours and discourages others through what it makes easy, satisfying, and visible, and in doing so it is shaping its users toward a particular way of being, according to someone's idea of how people should behave.

None of these choices is neutral. Each encodes a value, and taken together they add up to a product that is quietly, powerfully opinionated about how people should live, even as it presents itself as a neutral tool. The values are not announced, which is exactly why they are so effective. A value you cannot see is a value you cannot resist, and it shapes you without your consent.

The Small Room Where Decisions Are Made

Now add the crucial fact that makes this a problem of power and not just of design. The people making these value-laden decisions are a very small and relatively homogenous group, and their assumptions become the defaults for billions of people who were never consulted.

Think about what this means. A product used by much of the world is designed by a small number of people, often from similar places, similar backgrounds, similar educations, similar assumptions about what is normal and what matters. Their particular view of the world, narrow as any group's view necessarily is, gets encoded into the defaults of a tool that then shapes the behaviour of vastly different people across the entire planet. The narrowness of the room becomes the narrowness of the assumptions imposed on everyone outside it.

This is a genuine concentration of power, and an underexamined one. A handful of people, through the design choices they make, set the defaults of behaviour, attention, and interaction for a significant portion of humanity. They decide what billions of people see and do not see, what gets amplified into prominence and what gets buried, what behaviours are rewarded and what are discouraged. And they do this from inside a small and homogenous room, carrying all the blind spots that any such room inevitably has. The people affected have no seat in that room and usually no idea that the room exists. That is a serious thing, and the myth of neutrality is precisely what keeps it invisible.

Why This Hits the Global South Hardest

This matters everywhere, but it matters with special force for users in Africa and the wider Global South, and I feel this directly from Port Harcourt. The reason is simple and consequential. Our contexts were almost never in the room when these products were designed.

When a product is built by a small group in one part of the world and deployed across the whole of it, the assumptions it encodes are that group's assumptions, about language, about infrastructure, about culture, about what daily life looks like. Those assumptions are frequently a poor fit for African realities. The imagined user the product was designed around is not us. The defaults were set for someone else's context, someone else's language, someone else's assumptions about connectivity and devices and social norms. And so users here are constantly served by tools whose values and defaults were calibrated for a different world, which ranges from mildly inconvenient to genuinely distorting, quietly shaping African behaviour according to assumptions that were never ours.

This is not a complaint about individual features. It is a structural observation. When you use a product designed without your context in mind, you are adapting yourself to values and defaults set by people who did not know you exist, and the more of life moves onto these products, the more of African life gets shaped by assumptions formed in rooms we were not in. Recognising this is not paranoia or grievance. It is accuracy, and it is the beginning of a more grown-up relationship with the tools we depend on.

Toward Informed Engagement

So what do we do with this understanding? Not reject all technology, which is neither possible nor wise, and not descend into suspicion of everything. The goal is informed engagement, relating to technology products with our eyes open to the values they carry rather than accepting the myth that they are neutral.

Informed engagement begins with seeing. Simply recognising that every product embeds values, and asking what they are, changes your relationship to the tool. What is this product amplifying, and what is it burying? Whose experience was it designed around, and how does that differ from mine? What behaviour is it rewarding in me, and do I actually want to be shaped that way? These questions, asked honestly, break the spell of neutrality and let you use a product without being unconsciously ruled by its values.

It continues with a healthy skepticism toward the defaults, an understanding that the way a product is set up is not the natural order of things but someone's choice, which you are free to question, adjust, or resist. And for those of us in Africa, it includes a particular alertness to the fact that these tools were largely not built with us in mind, which should inform both how we use them and how urgently we work to build our own, so that the values shaping African digital life are not forever set in rooms we do not sit in.

The people who build technology are not neutral, their products are not neutral, and the myth that they are is one of the more consequential falsehoods of our time, because it hides real power behind a claim of innocence. From Port Harcourt, I want us to stop believing it. Every product carries values. See them, question them, and refuse to mistake someone else's assumptions, encoded into a tool, for the neutral way things simply are.