Dear Designer: How to Explain to Your Kids That You Work at Facebook

millions of students across the United States, across all grades, walked out of their classrooms for the March For Our Lives. This was specifically in response to the Parkland High School massacre, where 17 kids were murdered, but also generally about the country’s inability to address gun control. (In 2019, 776 teens and 209 children were murdered by guns in the U.S.) Kids were marching to solve a problem adults had failed to address.

On September 20, 2019, three days before the United Nations Climate Summit, roughly six million people, in over 4,500 locations in 150 countries, participated in the Global Climate Strike. This was the third global strike of the school strike for climate movement. It was organized by children and spearheaded by Greta Thunberg, who was 16 at the time.

This morning I woke up to a tweet about grad students at California College of Arts coming up with their own code of ethics for design. The first point in their code is “If you can’t make it better, don’t make it worse.” The last point is “Design with your grandchildren in mind.” Everything in between those two points is just as great. I encourage you to click through and read them all. While grad students can hardly be described as children, many haven’t yet entered the workplace, so I’ll include them in the wave.

What I’m getting at here is pretty simple: One, the kids are alright. Two, the kids are angry. And they have every right to be. Not only are we handing them a broken world, but there’s a very solid chance that we might not be handing them a world at all. And we’ve destroyed the world with the full knowledge that our actions were destroying the world. We did it anyway.

Going back to Thunberg for a second — the amount of hatred being hurled at a 16-year-old by world leaders and captains of industry (including business leaders like Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg, who not only allow their platforms to be used to harass a 16-year-old but also profit from it) is not only shameful but also incredibly telling: We have no answer for what she’s saying. She’s right. And since we can’t argue with the truth, we belittle the messenger.

Here’s the thing, though. While Thunberg is the most well-known child in the climate crisis movement and is deserving of all the praise she is getting, she is not one of a kind. She is just the most visible part of the wave. She’s the child the media has focused on, and she’s risen to the occasion, for which she should be lauded. But she’s hardly the only one who’s angry at our actions. And she’s hardly the one you should be the most worried about.

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