Vardon Hamdiu is the Swiss-Albanian Co-Founder of the revolutionary social platform Sparkable. With Albanian roots in war and conflict, Vardon has taken his passion for bridging divides from working for a Swiss president, to caring for refugees, to today where he has built Sparkable, a nonprofit organization pioneering ethical social media design and practices. In this interview, Vardon shares the inspiration he gained from his Albanian father’s experience in conflict to carry him into his career today that is shaping the future of inclusive, ethical, and peaceful social media.
Where were you born and raised?
I was born and raised in Bern, Switzerland and I’ve been living in Zurich, Switzerland, for the past five years. I grew up bi-culturally because my dad is Albanian and I think that has shaped my personality. My dad was born and raised in North Macedonia and then came to Switzerland at a later stage in life.
How did your dad impact your upbringing and then later in your career?
Being in between cultures for me is something that shaped me into being a bridge builder because oftentimes I had to explain to others what I am feeling or what I am seeing, which felt like different worlds. It made me sensitive to differences, but also things people have in common within different cultures. It’s something that is the core of my work with Sparkable and at the core of my personal life.
Can you share about your career journey and experience with refugee caregiving?
Talking about childhood, there was the aspect of different cultures, but also the experience of war, which I secondarily experienced since my father’s hometown was affected by it. It’s something that shaped my childhood as well, this experience of what can happen when communication breaks down between communities. When I grew up, I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do with work so I started a business administration apprenticeship because it was a way to keep my doors open. I then got into a job in communications which was really interesting since it was for one of the Swiss presidents- we always have seven of them. It was really special to work there and insightful, not at least because a part of my work was to create a press review every day. I was basically looking at around 500 news articles each morning and assessing each to determine if it was relevant or not for the president, the team, or the department that he was overseeing.
I was consuming a lot of news and I did that for five years where I think I looked through more than 200,000 news articles. It changed me in many ways and made me realize the effects of the things that are going on in our information environment at warp speed because I was just consuming more than the usual person. During the same time, I had to do civil service, which I did with refugees. I worked as a refugee caregiver for half a year and it was a complete contrast to the news where you always read about a community such as refugees. I started seeing the news and thinking, when was the last time you actually spoke to someone who is going through the process of having to flee their country and having to find a new place and so on.
It raised a lot of questions around our information environment, our online environment, and why everything is so divisive and negative. These questions are what led to Sparkable, because I started to question the business model behind the news, but also social media platforms, which are mostly advertisement driven and have this incentive to keep people on platforms as long as possible to serve them more ads. What keeps us on the platform for a long time is that content is emotionally engaging, but that can be very dangerous when it is not high-quality content, but rather low-hanging fruits that activate our emotions. This leaves us empty at best and hateful at worst. I started to see the dynamics more clearly and I couldn’t let it go or sleep at night while thinking about where we are heading in that sense. I think that was the main motivation behind what is now Sparkable, to contribute to a healthier information environment where ideally we could facilitate understanding.
What has been the biggest challenge in building a nonprofit platform like Sparkable?
It’s a huge challenge because we live in an economic system where nonprofit work is mostly unpaid –which is a human choice, that you have to emphasize. I think it’s a fundamental flaw we have in our economic system, but since that is something we haven’t solved yet, it means that it’s just a challenge. For me, it meant that from the beginning, I had to work next to my unpaid work at Sparkable. We did have a brief period where we had financial support from a nonprofit fund, but apart from that, I’ve always had to work a part-time job to be able to pay the bills for Sparkable. It also means that you cannot scale as quickly without fundraising of some sort. But I think each restriction can also be a creative restriction which can be turned into a strength. Sparkable has to be slower by the nature of it as a non-profit, but that also allows us to really build more intentionally and build it the way we think is right, together with the community. We are not under any pressure from investors because as a non-profit we can’t have investors. I think that’s great to not have that financial pressure from shareholders. Of course, I do feel a lot of internal pressure within me because I feel like the time is absolutely right for Sparkable. I think we need to create a healthier information environment and it’s past time to implement that. I feel this internal pressure because I see the opportunity to take this moment where people are ready for new platforms and to hopefully create something healthier with the momentum that is there.
Is there any particular event or story that reinforced the impact of Sparkable?
I think Sparkable is not at the point yet where we are having the impact that I would want it to have because it’s still at such an early stage, but there has been positive feedback. I think for me, the experience of speaking to people who are affected by today’s social media platforms in harmful, negative ways has been the most powerful. One event that comes to mind is meeting a content moderator for one of the big platforms who took on an incredible personal toll because of that work.I started following what that means for the folks who do that type of work and the struggles they have to go through. This made the impact that platforms are having tangible. I knew for a while theoretically which negative effects platforms can have but speaking with directly affected people changed me in the way that I emotionally understood the harmful effects that today’s social media is having.
What is the ideal impact that you aim to see with Sparkable?
Increased understanding. I would love for us to be able to do qualitative surveys and people telling us that Sparkable helps them to better understand other people or a certain topic, or just the world in general. I think that is really at the core of Sparkable, building bridges between communities. In the same way that today’s social media is unintentionally causing divisions, I think with intentional design, we should be able to create the opposite- to create understanding and social cohesion. Even though that might be difficult to measure, it would be a success to hear people saying that they have more understanding or a better understanding of others thanks to a platform. I think that would be my definition of a healthy social media platform.
