I recently started reading Dan Wang’s book Breackneck and it got me thinking about the role that data rights professionals play in the current tech eco-system.
Th first chapter is titled ‘Engineers vs. Lawyers’ and Wang uses this frame to convey the contrast between progress in China and progress in the US. China is an engineering society, while the US is a lawyerly society.
Engineers are focused on building things. Wang cites the building that China has undertaken ever since 1980s when the direction of government policy was dictated by engineers occupying top government ranks. Even today Xi Jinping has “filled the Politburo with executives from the country’s aerospace and weapons ministries.”1 As a result, China “has built an expanse of highways equal to twice the length of the US systems, a high-speed rail network twenty times more extensive than Japan’s, and almost as much solar and wind power capacity as the rest of the world put together.”2 In effect, new public works, from roads to tunnels, from dams to power plants, and even building entire new cities, are “the engineering state’s solution to any number of quandaries.”3
Contrast this scene with a lawyerly society, which, according to Wang, is dominated by lawyers focused on blocking things. Many of the US government ranks are filled with lawyers; half of the last ten US presidents are law school graduates, and “in any given year, at least half of the US Congress has law degrees, while at best a handful of members have studied science or engineering.”4
While America was previously a society of builders, Wang contends that it eventually became more concerned with the excesses of an engineering society. In essence, the US became worried about the by-products of growth, like “environmental destruction, excessive highway construction, corporate interests above public interests.”5 As a result, litigation and regulation became the norm, inducing a friction in which are more things were being slowed down or stopped than than being built. The process becomes the solution, inviting more complexity that entails “bureaucratic deliberation, greater public discussion, and more intensive judicial review.”6
Now it can be debated to what extent the US is really a ‘lawyerly society’ in the manner described by Wang. I imagine this dichotomy between lawyerly and engineering societies is really exists on a spectrum, and perhaps the US is closer to one end and China the other. And I dread to think where the EU would exist on this spectrum.
But this part of Wang’s book got me thinking about the negative perception that can exist around lawyers, and in particular data rights professionals. In the context of our modern digital world, I have attempted to explore the contrast between the techno-optimists and the techno-pessimists.
The techno-optimists believe in technology’s promise to bring about progress, growth and prosperity. They believe it so much that almost nothing else matters; we must build our way out of society’s predicaments.
Techno-pessimists, on the other hand, are luddites; data protection, online safety, influence operations, surveillance capitalism, algorithmic bias and the other various risks of modern technology are just evidence of a lack of belief in technology.
Lawyers and data rights professionals are often lumped into this second category. Their risk aversion manifests in party-poopers who say no to projects, obsess over procedure and ultimately stall progress.
But the truth is that you need both. You need optimism and pessimism. You need to build solutions but also focus on the right processes. Society cannot just be one or the other.
And this is what governance should fundamentally be about. Governance should not just be focused on process as the end-goal, requiring so many boxes to be checked that nothing actually gets done.
Governance should be about bridging the divide. It should be about fostering an environment where builders can build but do so responsibly and ethically.
This connects to the ideas presented in a different book which I think presents a nice antidote to the depressing dichotomy that Wang presents in Breakneck.
Loonshots, by Safi Bachall, gives a more promising vision for a path to progress that balances the benefits of engineering and lawyerly societies. Bachall’s basic argument is as follows:
The most important breakthroughs come from loonshots, widely dismissed ideas whose champions are often written off as crazy.
Large groups of people are needed to translate those break-throughs into technologies that win wars, products that save lives, or strategies that change industries.
Applying the science of phase transitions to the behaviour of teams, companies, or any group with a mission provides practical rules for nurturing loonshots faster and better.
Within this argumentation, Bachall addresses the difference between the artists and the soldiers within organisations. Artists are the creatives that generate the innovative ideas. The soldiers are the regulators that make sure that these ideas can become reality and conform to the appropriate requirements.
A core part of governance is about managing the transition of ideas from the artists to the soldiers.
It is about ensuring that there is a separation between the two while not completely siloing them from each other, and that the transition from ideas to solutions is managed properly. Neither side should be more prominent than the other, feedback should flow freely between the two, and the respective roles should be equally valued.
This is the dynamic equilibrium, a process that enables the perks of engineering and lawyerly societies to flourish complimentarily. Governance should not make the choice binary - either obsessed with building or obsessed with process. It should be about bridging the engineers and the lawyers.
Dan Wang, Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future (Allen Lane 2025), p.3.
Dan Wang, Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future (Allen Lane 2025), p.3.
Dan Wang, Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future (Allen Lane 2025), p.3.
Dan Wang, Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future (Allen Lane 2025), p.4.
Dan Wang, Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future (Allen Lane 2025), p.5.
Dan Wang, Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future (Allen Lane 2025), p.14.