Can Alphabet’s Jigsaw Solve Google’s Most Vexing Problems? Taking on ISIS, fake news, and toxic trolls
Can Alphabet’s Jigsaw Solve Google’s Most Vexing
Problems?
Jared Cohen, CEO of Google offshoot Jigsaw, is taking on
ISIS, fake news, and toxic trolls
BY AUSTIN CARR
10.22.17
Jared Cohen, the CEO of Jigsaw, surveyed the craggy
valley from the back of a gray SUV as it wound toward the Khyber Pass, the
mountainous roadway connecting Afghanistan and Pakistan that had become a
hotbed of Islamic extremism. The arid landscape was beautiful, but Cohen, who
is Jewish and was raised in an affluent Connecticut suburb, knew the excursion
was risky. This was his fourth visit to Pakistan. Colleagues had told Cohen he
was insane for going—his ransom insurance wouldn’t protect him against the
frequent roadside bombs in the area—but he’d still decided to take a 12-hour flight
to Dubai, where he caught a connection to Lahore and drove to Islamabad and
then on to Peshawar, in the north of Pakistan. At the direction of Pakistan’s
former foreign minister Hina Rabbani Khar, Cohen’s host, they rode in one car,
with a security detail following a short distance behind to avoid attracting
undo attention.
Around noon, they pulled into a village compound, where
Cohen, 35, donned a robe and turban, and for the next four hours immersed
himself in Pashtun issues. Through Rabbani Khar’s connections, he was able to
meet with tribal leaders, clerics, smugglers, survivors of drone strikes—anyone
who could help him better grasp the challenges crippling the region.
A Rhodes Scholar and former State Department policy wonk
who worked under Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton, Cohen is fluent in
Swahili and has journeyed to 103 countries, often amid turmoil. Once, according
to Cohen, he snuck into eastern Congo by hiding in a truck under a pile of
bananas during the Great War of Africa. He tells me he’s been kicked out of
Syria twice, and mentions he can’t go back to Cairo after conspiracy theories
arose suggesting that he had a hand in the 2011 Egyptian revolution.
A self-described “investigative anthropological
researcher,” Cohen was in Pakistan acting as an attaché for Jigsaw, the
Alphabet subsidiary that defines itself as an incubator building “tools to make
the world safer.” It evolved out of Google Ideas, an internal think tank Cohen
cofounded in 2010 with Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO and current Alphabet
executive chairman, to address geopolitical challenges with technology.
Facebook and Twitter helped spread free expression during the Arab Spring, and
yet social media is also being used to disseminate messages of hate, with terrorist
attacks coordinated on WhatsApp and beheadings aired on YouTube.
If there’s one core tenet of Cohen’s philosophy, it’s
that you can’t solve these problems from behind a MacBook. Google prides itself
on data and AI—and Jigsaw does as well—but Cohen’s company also leverages
anecdotes and human intelligence to inform its products. Cohen and team have
ventured to Iraq to interview ISIS defectors to learn about the group’s online
messaging tactics, and to Macedonia to meet with trolls who traffic in social media
disinformation.
With Alphabet’s engineering resources, Jigsaw translates
this research into internet tools that combat hate speech, detect fake news,
and defend against cyberattacks. Cohen’s eight-day visit to Pakistan in
December provided firsthand insights into what methods extremists are now using
to recruit new members online, which Jigsaw aims to circumvent using targeted
advertising to counter terrorist propaganda. The trip also gave him a valuable
network of new contacts, who were impressed an American business executive
trekked so far despite the safety risks. “You have to be willing to show up,”
Cohen tells me one day at a garden near his Manhattan apartment. “To them, I’m
no longer some random person in the tech sector—I’m the guy who ate a lamb
shank on their blanket five minutes from the AfPak border.”
Although Cohen’s mission sounds philanthropic, Jigsaw
operates as a business, no different from any of Alphabet’s moonshots. Yet
Cohen says there’s no stress on the group to generate a profit. For now, its
value to the enterprise is the ancillary benefits of protecting Google’s myriad
other businesses—Android, Gmail, YouTube—from the world’s worst digital
threats. And if, in the process, Jigsaw can help address some of the most acute
unintended consequences of digital communication, all the better. “I don’t
think it’s fair to ask the government to solve all these problems—they don’t
have the resources,” says Schmidt. “The tech industry has a responsibility to
get this right.”
Jigsaw’s headquarters are located on the second floor of
Manhattan’s Chelsea Market, reached by a locked stairwell entrance near a
gelato stand. Not even Googlers have key-card access. Inside are the typical
trappings of an Alphabet-funded space—plush noise-canceling work pods and
fruit-flavored Hint water—but Cohen has subverted the usual playful themes:
Conference rooms here are named for oppressive states like North Korea and
Belarus.
When I meet Cohen in his office one morning in early
August, he’s wearing jeans and a black T-shirt, hunched over his desk with a
life-size wax figure of Theodore Roosevelt looking over his shoulder. Cohen,
who has black curly hair and the ever-unshaven look of a harried hedge-fund
analyst, is obsessed with American presidential history. He is working on a
book about transitions of White House power, and his two-room office is a shrine
of POTUS bric-a-brac, along with propaganda posters he’s collected during his
travels to Pyongyang and Iran and photos of him with world leaders, including
Pope Francis and King Abdullah of Jordan.
It’s increasingly rare to find Cohen at the office. With
two young daughters and a life spent juggling global summits and foreign
travel, Cohen’s schedule is hectic. Friends describe him as a cross between
Tintin and Dos Equis’s Most Interesting Man, who might be found at the gym in
Chelsea with his artist-buddy Jeff Koons, or falcon hunting with his wife in
the UAE. Dana Perino, the Fox News commentator and former White House press
secretary, jokes that he’s the personification of #goals, the millennial
hashtag that denotes life aspirations. “He’s climbing in the Grand Tetons one
day and by the weekend he’s taking his girls to get a pedicure,” Perino says.
Arianna Huffington, another close friend, says, “With Jared, there’s never a
moment you run out of things to talk about: He can cover everything from how to
put your baby to sleep to how to deal with cyberterrorists.”
Cohen’s jet-setting joie de vivre has helped him build an
eclectic Rolodex, but it’s also instrumental to how he learns. “Jared’s never
been some tea-sipping diplomat who learns from a leather chair,” says Alec
Ross, the Maryland gubernatorial candidate who overlapped with Cohen at the
State Department. “He’s happiest landing in conflict zones where half the
people around him want to take him for ransom and the other half want him
dead.”
Cohen grew up traveling. His artist mother and
psychologist father took him on trips to the Middle East and Africa. Once, on a
trip to Egypt when he was 10, his parents lost him in a crowded section of Giza
and found him moments later atop a stranger’s camel. He was a nerdy kid, with a
severe facial twitch that made him self-conscious enough to feel he had to
excel at sports in high school in order to avoid getting made fun of (he was an
all-state soccer goalie), but travel was his favorite extracurricular, and
during high school he spent summers living with host families in Thailand and
Tanzania.
By the time he got to Stanford, his twitch had gone away,
and his frat brothers mostly remember Cohen as an affable guy, though not
without quirks: His TV was set 24/7 to the news, and he painted large murals
depicting the Rwandan genocide that decorated the common area of Theta Delta
Chi. He always seemed to be planning his next adventure, like the one where he
spent part of his freshman-year summer with the Maasai people of Kenya, herding
sheep and at times living off a mixture of goat milk and iron-rich dirt. “You
have to be a 19-year-old to think that’s a good idea,” Cohen laughs.
In 2003, he won a coveted Rhodes Scholarship and
punctuated his two years at Oxford doing research trips to the Middle East. In
Iran, he encountered youths using mobile devices and Bluetooth to skirt the
society’s rigid rules, his first taste of disruptive technology in an
autocratic country. His research (which led to his second book, Children of
Jihad) impressed Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who hired him at 24 to
join her staff.
During his four years at the State Department, Cohen
earned a reputation for being brash, leading envoys to increasingly hostile
areas to talk with unlikely characters—gangsters, prisoners, pirates—even when
it went against standard protocol. After discovering how tech-savvy activists
were using Facebook to organize protests against the longtime insurgent group
FARC, Cohen ventured to Colombia to meet with them—likely the first diplomatic
channel established on a social network in U.S. government history, he
jokes—and soon found himself opposite President George W. Bush in a two-hour
briefing on the global war on terror. When Cohen presented his findings, he
recalls, Bush “looked up, then at Condi, then at Cheney, and then back at me
and said, ‘That’s awesome.’ ”
Cohen appeared on The Colbert Report at 26 following a
New Yorker profile, and some career foreign service officers resented his
rising status, viewing his ideas about technology as naive. (Cohen would tell
colleagues he was determined to push the State Department to a point where he
could mention Twitter in meetings without getting laughed at.) But even his
eye-rolling detractors admit he was uncannily smart, and his supporters felt he
was empathetic and egoless. “Jared looks at things with new eyes,” says
Secretary Rice. “He would come into my office and say, ‘I have an idea, but it
might be stupid.’ I remember saying, ‘Jared, don’t start your presentation that
way.’ ”
Staying on through the transition to the Obama
administration, Cohen continued his work under Secretary Hillary Clinton—until
he almost lost his job. In June 2009, as street demonstrations were heating up
in reaction to the Iranian presidential election, Cohen caught wind that
Twitter would be pausing its service for maintenance. Concerned that the move
might quash the viral spread of protests in Tehran, Cohen reached out to
Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey and urged him to postpone the shutdown. Obama
administration officials were livid—Cohen’s action appeared to violate the
administration’s policy of non-interference—and, after the story landed in The
New York Times, recalls Ross, then a senior adviser to Clinton, President Obama
is said to have fumed aloud, “Who is Jared Cohen, and why haven’t we fired him
yet?”
Clinton protected Cohen, and the incident eventually
became a shining example of what her team was beginning to refer to as
“21st-century statecraft,” a paradigm shift in diplomacy that encouraged taking
advantage of growing digital influences to shape modern geopolitics. By that
point, Cohen and Ross had started organizing what they called tech delegations
to see what Silicon Valley and Washington could accomplish together overseas.
They corralled technology leaders like Dorsey, prominent VC Shervin Pishevar,
and Mitchell Baker of Mozilla to visit places ranging from Syria and Mexico to
Pakistan and Congo.
What Cohen reveled in most was the business world’s lack
of government constraints, as he witnessed on a 2010 trip to Russia with
then–eBay CEO John Donahoe. “We were there to discuss corruption and free
speech—you can imagine how far that gets diplomat to diplomat,” Cohen says,
recalling that Donahoe announced that Russia was too corrupt for eBay to
conduct business there. “Suddenly the Russian deputy prime minister wants to
follow [Donahoe] all the way to the airport to have another conversation.”
On the very first “techdel,” Cohen brought Eric Schmidt
to Iraq, where the two bonded while wearing flak jackets. Cohen was mesmerized
by Schmidt’s intellect and ability to suggest ideas unlikely to have occurred
to anyone from the State Department. “Eric was asking things like, ‘Why aren’t
you laying fiber-optic cables underneath roads when you’re paving them?’ ”
Cohen recalls. “ ’Why are you investing in low-orbit satellite when everyone is
going to be using mobile phones soon?’ ”
About a year later, during lunch at Dos Caminos in New
York, Schmidt convinced Cohen to join Google. Schmidt didn’t exactly know what
they would do together, but he knew he wanted to invest in Cohen. Schmidt
recalls thinking that Cohen had a “scalable mind,” one that would be of
consequence. “People like Jared make things happen,” he says. “You want to work
with him, for him—to be in his orbit.” The two soon launched Google Ideas,
labeling it a “think/do tank,” a corny name that led early employees to overemphasize
the dooooo part loudly, out of fear that it would become just another ivory
tower. “I thought this was going to be an arm’s-length academic exercise,” says
Yasmin Green, an early Ideas employee, whom Cohen recruited from Google’s
business focused on sub-Saharan Africa.
Sources familiar with the group’s evolution say that
Google Ideas was a hodgepodge of people brainstorming pie-in-the-sky concepts,
and many expected Cohen to start churning out white papers on net neutrality
and other hot-button policy issues at any moment to justify the group’s
existence. “It was rocky going at first, but he stayed the course,” says New
America CEO Anne-Marie Slaughter, Cohen’s boss at the State Department who
originally introduced him to Schmidt.
Cohen was still maturing as a leader and growing
accustomed to an even higher-flying life under the wing of Schmidt, and he
wasn’t afraid to tell employees in weekly meetings about his struggles as a
manager. “So many people [I know] just want to figure out how they can make a
billion dollars and run the world, but Jared is not about that at all—he has
real values,” says Ian Bremmer, founder of the Eurasia Group, who says Cohen
would reach out to ask if he was “screwing up” and would “agonize” when he felt
he got something wrong. “Five years ago, Jared was much more like, ‘What do I
do? Who do I meet?’ But he’s really grown comfortable in his own skin,” Bremmer
says.
Many attribute Cohen’s growing confidence to Schmidt’s
tutelage, especially as the two embarked on writing a book together. For
research, they traveled to more than 35 countries and developed a close
relationship. They’d sit opposite each other on laptops punching out bullet
points on Google Docs, detailing their trips to Libya and North Korea. Cohen
remembers a time in Pakistan when Schmidt sat down with the Pakistani army’s
chain-smoking chief of staff, and the two sized each other up in silence
through plumes of smoke before Schmidt deftly maneuvered the conversation
forward. “Eric has this diplomatic craft where he will say things like, ‘I
apologize for asking this question—please help me understand,’ ” an informal
deference that disarms people who might expect condescension, Cohen says. “If I
ever go back into government, that’s the kind of diplomat I want to be.” When I
ask what the two did for fun, Cohen responds, “Oh, well, when Eric travels, he
likes to go see data centers.”
Cohen and Schmidt’s book, The New Digital Age, appeared
in 2013, with glowing blurbs from Henry Kissinger and Madeleine Albright. It
predicts how technology will make the future more utopian in some ways and more
dystopian in others. It could easily double as an internal memo that details
how many of the search giant’s pervasive products—including YouTube and
Gmail—have inevitably become entwined in geopolitical issues, good and bad.
“What Lockheed Martin was to the twentieth century, technology and
cyber-security companies will be to the twenty-first,” the two wrote. But
Lockheed Martin creates products, and to have a true impact Ideas would need to
move in that direction—toward what would soon become Jigsaw. “That’s when it
became more than just a marketing campaign,” Schmidt says.
Cohen and Schmidt had witnessed the power of internet
activism during the Arab Spring, when Wael Ghonim, then Google’s head of
marketing for the Middle East and North Africa, used Facebook to help organize
rallies against the Mubarak regime in Egypt, and became an influential symbol
in the protests. “[Google cofounder] Sergey [Brin] was really interested in why
it was being referred to as the ‘Facebook Revolution,’ ” recalls Scott
Carpenter, Jigsaw’s managing director. If they had created the right products,
could it have been the “Google Revolution” instead?
When Cohen and Schmidt wrote in their book that the tech
world ought to be ready for the next 5 billion people coming online in
developing or oppressed countries, they clearly meant the next 5 billion
consumers. What happens if Alphabet (or other American tech companies) don’t
prepare? Just look at the strides Shenzhen-based tech giant Huawei has made in
the Middle East and Africa, spreading what Cohen and Schmidt call China’s
sphere of online influence. “For the countries not connected yet, they’re
either going to get built out with Chinese technology,” explains Cohen, “or
they’re going to get built out with more democratic technology.” That is, tech
from Google—or one of its Western competitors.
Case in point: Cuba. In June 2014, Cohen and Schmidt
traveled to meet with Cuba’s foreign minister, Bruno Rodríguez. With
coordination and encouragement from White House officials, they arrived in
Havana to promote internet freedom, but Cohen says he also brought a list of
Google products that weren’t available because of sanctions. “Within four
months, we got Earth, Picasa, Chrome, and Google Analytics available in Cuba,”
says Cohen, who insists he wasn’t aware of the Obama administration’s ambitions
to end the embargo, but the timing of their visit left Google in a good place
to reap the benefits. “When the announcement came, we had many more open doors
of people in Cuba who were interested in talking to us, because they remembered
that we showed up when it was unpopular.”
Some see Jigsaw’s efforts to effect geopolitical change
as a libertarian fantasy, a privatized version of the State Department with
unprecedented power. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange went so far as to suggest
that Cohen is Google’s “director of regime change” who builds power in “endless
soirees for the cross-fertilization of influence between elites and their
vassals, under the pious rubric of ‘civil society.’ ” Google has a long history
of government involvement—the National Science Foundation helped fund Brin and
cofounder Larry Page’s earliest research on organizing the world’s information
while they were still students at Stanford—and the company has reportedly
served as a contractor for government agencies since blossoming into a
multinational corporation.
But there’s been an evolution in the relationship between
Silicon Valley and Washington. “There was this rocky period where the
government was waking up to the Valley’s importance but still had this attitude
of bossing it around, like, ‘You have to do this! And take down this terrorist
content! And XYZ!’ ” says the World Economic Forum’s Zvika Krieger, who
established the State Department’s first office in Silicon Valley. “Then it
became, ‘No, [tech companies] don’t. We don’t work for you.’ And so it quickly
evolved from a head-butting, adversarial relationship to a recognition that
government doesn’t have a monopoly on impact.”
Edward Snowden also signaled a major turning point in
this power dynamic. Snowden’s leaks of sweeping U.S. spy activities revealed
the extent to which firms such as Google had been vulnerable to NSA hacking.
These revelations, Carpenter says, built “mistrust” between the tech community
and Washington, adding that Alphabet doesn’t want to be seen as an AT&T or
MCI, the telecom giants that had a longtime relationship with the NSA and
proved key to the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping initiatives.
“After Snowden,” Carpenter says, “[Alphabet] does not think of itself all the
time as an American company, but a global company.”
The company’s relationship with the White House has only
worsened under President Trump—Jigsaw doesn’t have many connections within Rex
Tillerson’s stripped-down State Department, which has curtailed its Silicon
Valley operations, according to two knowledgeable sources. Although Cohen says
Jigsaw is still willing to work with the White House on areas where their
values align, he stresses that Jigsaw “isn’t doing the bidding of governments.
We’re not doing these things because somebody in a dark suit and dark
sunglasses told us to.”
Establishing a clear Alphabet doctrine—the goals, the
limits, the moral groundwork for the global company—is now at the heart of
Cohen’s post. Cohen’s supporters argue that, with his unique pedigree, he’s the
best person to lead the charge, especially if other tech companies follow suit.
“[Silicon Valley] has immense power, in many ways unchecked,” says Admiral
James Stavridis, the former NATO supreme allied commander and current dean of Tufts’s
graduate school of international affairs, who is a mentor to Cohen. “But that’s
why you need responsible people like Jared, who understand how to stand on the
right side of the line and not take a private effort too far.”
Schmidt says that “there are limits to what we can
do—we’re not a country, though we certainly have influence. We’re trying to
promote what we consider to be the values of the internet.” Of course, Schmidt
is downplaying the ultimate effect of these kinds of efforts. In a 2014 public
discussion with Cohen at Stanford, Schmidt talked about the importance of
bringing the internet to repressed places like Pyongyang, which he thought
would lead the populace to question the autocracy. “All we have to do is get a
little doubt in, and that country will fall over,” he said of North Korea.
Days after visiting Cohen in his office, I squeeze into a
product meeting down the hall, in a tiny nook with two rows of shelf seating. A
team leader clicks through slides on the screen at the front of the room
detailing a Jigsaw group’s recent Nairobi trip, which coincided with the Kenyan
presidential election and involved excursions into Kibera, one of Africa’s
largest slums, to investigate how residents were utilizing technology and
dealing with online censorship and fake news. The group references how they
bumped into a Facebook team in Nairobi—a sign that Jigsaw isn’t alone in its
interest in these spaces—and attendees hurl out questions throughout the
discussion, asking about the impact of products like YouTube, Google Maps,
WhatsApp, and Twitter, and posing questions such as “What’s the UX of going to
vote in Kenya?”
Jigsaw’s employees are a mix of engineers and
researchers, who have built out a portfolio of more than a dozen products.
Since Alphabet spun out Ideas and rebranded it Jigsaw, in February 2016, Cohen
has narrowed the company’s focus to geopolitical issues that present both a
complex engineering challenge as well as a direct security threat. Montage, for
example, is a tool that crowdsources analysis of YouTube footage from conflict
zones to identify evidence of war crimes. Another, Perspective, which launched
earlier this year, employs machine learning to filter out toxic language online
and is now utilized by The New York Times.
The company is under no pressure to charge for these
products yet—the team says they’d like to get to breakeven—but they’re already
delivering value for other Google properties, whether by cleaning up content on
YouTube or making popular Android apps (like that of The New York Times) more
usable. Another product that Jigsaw developed, to help activists and
journalists in autocratic countries thwart phishing attacks, led to improved
security measures on Gmail and Chrome. “I can’t think of a single thing we’re
working on where there is not some part of Google that we’re either learning
from or sharing our knowledge with,” Cohen says.
And therein lies Jigsaw’s true ROI. If virulent toxicity
and cybersecurity problems continue to infect tech’s biggest platforms, they
could represent an existential threat to Silicon Valley’s bottom line. “A lot
of these issues are driving at [tech’s] core business interests,” says the WEF’s
Krieger. “If Facebook and Google become havens for extremist speech, bullying,
terrorist content, fake news, videos of beheadings—then they become platforms
nobody wants to spend time on.”
In many ways, this new reality has already arrived. The
Jigsaw team didn’t have to travel to Kenya to find chaos. Around the time I
joined their meeting, Trump threatened nuclear war with Kim Jong-un via
Twitter, and the U.S. was still reeling from the deadly clashes in Charlottesville,
Virginia, fueled by white supremacists who used Facebook and YouTube to foment
anger. And a Google employee named James Damore tested the company’s appetite
for free expression, writing a memo that parroted gender stereotypes, which
went viral and got him fired. Soon, right-wing organizations were promoting
protests against the so-called Goolag.
Cohen is careful not to talk about Trump or explain how
the U.S. presidential election has changed Jigsaw’s approach. Yasmin Green, who
was born in Iran and is one of many living in the U.S. who stand to be affected
by proposed travel bans, explains that it doesn’t do Jigsaw any favors to talk
about politics. Strategically, it makes more sense for the company to focus on
the problem behind the problem—that is, state-sponsored networked propaganda—rather
than, say, Trump. “If you become consumed with the politics or the actor,
you’re really missing the opportunity,” she says.
But sources close to Cohen say Trump has obviously
changed the Jigsaw calculus. Even Schmidt acknowledges that the two made a
significant error in not grasping sooner “the extent to which
governments—essentially what the Russians did—would use hacking to control the
information space,” adding that Jigsaw is now “looking at the technology behind
information warfare. I worry that the Russians in 2020 will have a lot more
powerful tools.”
Jigsaw’s current political position is somewhat
precarious since the Breitbart crowd may regard Jigsaw’s core mission as a
direct affront to Trump, whose ascent benefited from the kind of misinformation
and distortion campaigns Jigsaw stands to challenge. Eurasia Group’s Bremmer
says that Trump’s election “makes Alphabet more vulnerable” to criticism and
scrutiny from the White House. “Alphabet and Jigsaw want to make it impossible
to allow people to manipulate search, to manipulate news, to manipulate facts,”
Bremmer explains. “And that is deeply problematic to Trump.”
As if the political landscape weren’t tricky enough,
Jigsaw also faces challenges navigating the minefield of Alphabet’s own shareholder
interests. This past summer, New America CEO Slaughter fired a scholar at the
think tank not long after he praised the EU for leveling a $2.7 billion
antitrust fine against Google. Schmidt, who has provided significant funding to
New America and served as its chair until 2016, had expressed displeasure about
the scholar to Slaughter, the type of corporate strong-arming that appears to
conflict with Jigsaw’s ideals about the free flow of information and its
moonshot goal of ending online censorship. Schmidt and Cohen avoid directly
responding to the controversy. When I ask about the connotations of a powerful
corporation influencing these types of issues, Schmidt interrupts, “I don’t
agree with you, with your choice of words. I want to be clear: We’re not trying
to influence outcomes with Jigsaw.”
The common concern about Alphabet is that it has grown
too powerful, and that Jigsaw, by extension, represents a potential new digital
form of imperialism. Yet throughout my reporting, the chief criticism I heard
is that Jigsaw’s accomplishments are thin and that the jury is still out on the
efficacy of its products. It’s hard to reconcile that Jigsaw is supposedly
tackling the world’s nastiest problems yet has just around 60 employees. If
Alphabet truly believes in Cohen’s mission, shouldn’t it be investing more
resources into Jigsaw than it has in its efforts in virtual reality or TV
streaming? Unless it does, Jigsaw could prove nothing more than a form of
digital tourism, with Cohen as the chief tour guide.
Cohen is used to this criticism. He’s faced cynicism
throughout his career that his work melding diplomacy and technology is
superficial. “Jared has always had a knack for being in the right place at the
time, riding one zeitgeist to the next,” says one of his harsher critics. But
the problems Jigsaw is going after are real, and so too are the consequences if
it doesn’t. “[In the coming years,] there will be a lot more pressure—a moral
sense of obligation—on Silicon Valley to [solve] these problems,” Secretary
Rice says. “I hope they’re willing to fix them, because the worst thing that
can happen is that the government just starts regulating things it doesn’t
understand.”
It’s true Cohen sometimes seems as if he’s a character in
a Salman Rushdie novel, appearing at pivotal points in a country’s history—in
Tunisia right after the revolution, in Libya after Muammar el-Qaddafi’s death,
in Tanzania right before the embassies were bombed. But his face lights up with
a genuine elation when he talks about the people he’s met in his travels—about
what he’s learned and the positive influence he hopes to have on them, from the
women he’s interviewed who have escaped the clutches of the Taliban to
endangered activists in Syria who have become his close friends. “In the rawest
sense, I feel like I was put on earth to do these things,” he says. “It’s how I
understand the world’s problems.”
On a recent trip to Papua New Guinea, Cohen visited with
the people of Chimbu, a remote and mountainous province where the indigenous
tribesmen coat themselves from head to toe in skeleton war paint. The macabre
makeup was originally meant to scare off rival tribes—now it’s more for
show—and Cohen couldn’t resist asking to join in their ritual skeleton dance.
Stripping down to a grass belt, the natives used their fingers to smear
charcoal on his body and face, shrouding his eyes in orbs of black, and rubbed
white dye made from clay on him in the shape of bones and teeth. Cohen, of
course, looked ridiculous, but it didn’t matter. It helped him see through
their eyes. Cohen’s guide told him he was likely the first American to
participate in their tradition, which the locals apparently appreciated. Even
after the ceremony was over, Cohen kept the mask on. As he drove back to the
nearest town, local boys and girls would run alongside his car, pointing and
laughing hysterically at the scary-looking foreigner. Cohen just smiled back
and kept on moving.
A version of this article appeared in the November 2017
issue of Fast Company magazine.
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