The Architects of Silence: How Tech Built a World That Only Speaks English
Zach Leech had been building products for millions of international users whose voices never reached his Portland office. For three years, his team at Gamma made design decisions based on roughly twenty pieces of English feedback each week. When artificial intelligence finally translated 550 user responses on a Tuesday morning in 2024, Leech discovered patterns that would reshape his understanding of the technology industry’s global impact. The CSV file uploading to ChatGPT contained complaints, feature requests, and bug reports in languages Leech’s team had systematically ignored. German users struggling with workflows that broke during file exports. Spanish speakers requesting collaborative features for months, their requests categorized as “miscellaneous” because no one understood the specific use cases being described. Japanese users developing elaborate workarounds for font rendering issues that suggested fundamental problems with character encoding for Asian languages. ...