Alumni Q&A: Jenn Louie, MRPL '23
When Jenn Louie, MRPL '23, applied to Harvard Divinity School, she said she was facing a “crisis of conscience.” She had spent her professional career in the technology sector, overseeing large teams at Facebook that were responsible for content moderation and risk mitigation. She felt that she was in the middle of an epidemic of immorality. “What happens to us on the social webs is a reflection of our human suffering,” she concluded. Watching people spread violent content and misinformation led her to wonder about where and how morality is formed. Louie decided to investigate these questions at Harvard Divinity School through the MRPL program.
Shir Lovett-Graff: How did you first connect with the MRPL Program, and how did it shape your time at HDS?
Jenn Louie: I heard about MRPL on its very first inaugural day through orientation. It felt like the most applicable space for the types of questions I held and the problems I was trying to solve in my profession. I am so grateful for the program, because I loved being in a cohort. We were such a diverse group of people. We came with many different professional experiences and because we knew we would have such a short time together, our discussions were very much grounded in the immediacy of the moment and what we believed was coming next. It was both challenging and enriching to see how we could each apply the theories that we were learning to our professional lives.
SLG: How do you see religious literacy emerging through the work you are doing now?
JL: Everything we see in technology reflects human relationships. I don't know if I always saw it that way, but I certainly see it that way now. We struggle with our moral literacy. For me, religious literacy is integrated into the ways I talk about ethics and morality, the implications of those things, and the considerations we need to have as we approach building new technologies. We need to broaden the scope of what religious literacy means. There's very little in our moral histories that has not emerged—language-wise and principle-wise—from a religious context. It's valuable to see how technology and tech culture is religious, and replicates many of the same kinds of symbols. None of this is neutral. Religious literacy helps ground me in knowing that the problems we face [in the tech world] are deeply human and have pre-existed all of us. We need to contextualize these problems in the larger framework of how humanity and its relationship to values has evolved over time.
SLG: Thinking about the future of AI and big tech, where do you see opportunities for just peace and how do you see, if any, connections between the RPL frameworks and what that just peace could look like?
JL: Opportunities for just peace exist in every single problem that we see with AI. The fundamental problem is inequity, and then injustice happens because we create these hierarchies that believe there are some people whose privileges are worthy of preserving over the life and dignity of other people. Artificial Intelligence—especially in the ways it will be used for business—will exacerbate the divisions and polarizations and hierarchies that we already see. It will accelerate some people’s careers and make them phenomenally wealthy. It will increase power in some countries. We already see these divisions and gaps widening.
It's super important to know that there's an opportunity here. As scary as that is, every problem is an opportunity for us to consider how just peace could inform the ways that we would alter or change that technology or govern it differently. We are not truly innovative if we are merely replicating systems of oppression into the technologies we build.
Jenn Louie, MRPL ’23, works as a product manager at the Applied Social Media Lab. She is an affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, and is a former resident fellow at the Integrity Institute.
by Shir Lovett-Graff, MTS '24