Something that strikes me about these "papers" is that we're still sort of using the Watergate playbook after all these years. The press reports outrageous things and the people with power, given new information and new outrage from the public, is spurred to action.
None of these reports has had as much of an effect on Facebook's stock price as the change Apple made to allow users to opt out of tracking. The Watergate playbook worked during an age that was fundamentally more democratic than our own. Government ability to act on large collective problems caused by large corporations has been effectively neutralized by the last 50 years of politics.
Personally I don't think anything meaningful will happen absent collective action by Facebook workers.
And taking it a step further: the more modern mode suggests people would have to “cancel” Facebook — deplatform the platform! — make its name divisive, the word a curse, and split people into “for” and “against,” so “against” can revile “for” as malicious idiots beneath contempt: this is the pattern Facebook helped groove deep into our social terrain, and they definitely see it’s coming, which would explain the (oh so meta!) name change
Fascinating piece, Charlie. When reading all of these reports over the past few years — and especially the reports of extremists organizing and communicating through FB — what keeps coming to mind is the genocide in Rwanda in the 1990s, and the role propaganda (spread by radio) played in inciting and inflaming all of the bloodshed there.
The difference, it feels like, is we can talk about that clearly now. It was obvious from the start how the extremists there used radio as an essential tool to encourage people to slaughter their enemies (around 800,000 people were killed, most hacked to death with machetes). There was no libertarian-techbro culture around radio; owners of radio stations and radio technicians didn’t circle the wagons around themselves and their technology to insist they’d played no role in what happened.
There is something deeply anti-social at its core about our tech culture today; there is a desire to change the world wedded to an absolute refusal to feel any responsibility toward that world that, even now after all we know, still shocks me.
Great article & summary. On the question of “what is to be done,” I think a good first start is to mandate reporting for more transparency. Force them to share more data so independent researchers can help us make sense of it all. Make it a blanket mandate for any platform of more than, say, 50 million users, that employs amplification algorithms.
We have to take our data back from these companies. When we take our data (and posts, videos, likes, etc.) away from them, we're taking their power away. We need to refactor the social tech so that the 'network effect' no longer results in social mastodonts who are not able to moderate content equitably. This will require regulation and legislation: https://stevenhessing.medium.com/5-steps-to-fix-social-media-3f794e9c141
Steven, it's too late to take back data. The tech companies have so much of it, and big data analysts and algorithms are so good at their jobs, that so much of it is statistically sampled and they can quickly work any such regulation.
That is defeatist thinking. It is never too late. If it is one thing that the Internet has shown, is that it can bring tremendous change and disruption to existing businesses. Just think MySpace. Even the 3.6 billion monthly users can be migrated to a better data privacy solution.
GDPR and CCPA are already having an impact. Legislation to ban companies to store our data can work and can be implemented in the 5 phases I describe in the earlier link. The first two phases are easy to implement for companies and set us on the right path.
Wrestling our data back will take time. I can see it taking 5-10 years. In the meantime, we need additional short/mid-term solutions.
Here is a piece written by Facebook Corporate that epitomizes everything wrong with the way corporate citizens approach their externalities. When I read bafflespeak like this, I long for la fin du monde (the beer, not the apocalypse, although both are inevitable).
They use the same corporate PR drone-speak their boss deploys. Clearly, they intend to lead us out of the wilderness by denying there is any such thing as a wilderness. When PR drone-speak is your weapon of choice, every wilderness looks like a Generalized Non-Urban Area of Concern.
Great overview here Charlie. Thanks for putting it all together. I'm definitely guilty of just tuning all this out a bit yesterday. (I was also on deadline, so I have something of an excuse!) Maybe my mistake was reading Ben Smith's "how the sausage got made" media column at NYT before any of the actual reportage. That made me tired from the jump.
No one knows what should be done. The problem is new technology amplifying problematic human tendencies, not just Facebook the organization. Altho the fact that top leadership seems to be amoral growth maximizers doesn't help, that type of mentality *is* what's incentivized by our economic system. If it weren't Zuckerberg, it'd be someone else.
Controversial view here. FB reminds me of the auto industry, with its balance of economic & societal benefits versus widespread harm. But the auto industry doesn't annoy one particular faction or class who wish for its users to be more compliant. I'm no fan of FB but the orchestration of this omnicrisis for the business is the story I want to read. If anyone has seen any good (ie not just opinion-led) reporting on this please recommend.
I am hoping Zuck's Meraverse becomes his Shangri-la and he departs this mortal coil for a fantasy world he can control completely. A god-like presence like Zeus.
Your fantasy Mark Zuckerberg accurately describes the real-life Peter Thiel, a member of Facebook's board and one of its early investors. There's that saying about the fine line between genius and madness, but in Thiel's case the line on the other side of genius is a megalomaniacal psychopathy. Think of a child whose parents are Ernst Blofeld and Elizabeth Bathory.
Acchhh! Mr. Dugnutt, you cut me to the quick, sir. I was blinded in my reverie to the reality of the embodiment of your spot-on imagined progeny. We are bound together at the mercy of these amoral 'geniuses'. With apologies to Mr. Plato, only the dead have seen the end of Zuck. And Thiel.
Outlandish things got hundreds of thousands of people killed in the U.S., too. Look at the pandemic deaths in the country with constitutionally enshrined freedoms of expression, widespread literacy, and high standards of living. We ended up being this widely circulated cartoon of a woman and a sentient coronavirus in dialogue.
Woman: "You can't fix stupid."
Virus: "I can fix stupid."
If we were to write future history, like how journalists write obituaries while the subject is still alive, we could pinpoint one key problem -- having people think through a problem they didn't have the right frame of mind to make sense of in the first place.
The nations that did have much lower infection, hospitalization and death rates than the U.S. all did the same thing -- and they were able to come about it despite barriers in culture, language and economy. They listened to their scientific and medical experts -- who despite the same barriers had a common value in science and were sharing and checking one another's work -- and they took collective action at the national level. The collective action they generally took was to constrict economic activity and social gatherings, anathema in the U.S. and a lot of western nations, but in exchange offer some form of compensation to people and businesses to tide them through. To be fair, the U.S. did a some of these: a universal basic income, rent and mortgage forbearance, debt forgiveness and the like. What the U.S. got wrong was 50 different approaches, and neither "red" states nor "blue" states got it right.
Something that strikes me about these "papers" is that we're still sort of using the Watergate playbook after all these years. The press reports outrageous things and the people with power, given new information and new outrage from the public, is spurred to action.
None of these reports has had as much of an effect on Facebook's stock price as the change Apple made to allow users to opt out of tracking. The Watergate playbook worked during an age that was fundamentally more democratic than our own. Government ability to act on large collective problems caused by large corporations has been effectively neutralized by the last 50 years of politics.
Personally I don't think anything meaningful will happen absent collective action by Facebook workers.
YES!!! Thank you for saying this!
And taking it a step further: the more modern mode suggests people would have to “cancel” Facebook — deplatform the platform! — make its name divisive, the word a curse, and split people into “for” and “against,” so “against” can revile “for” as malicious idiots beneath contempt: this is the pattern Facebook helped groove deep into our social terrain, and they definitely see it’s coming, which would explain the (oh so meta!) name change
Fascinating piece, Charlie. When reading all of these reports over the past few years — and especially the reports of extremists organizing and communicating through FB — what keeps coming to mind is the genocide in Rwanda in the 1990s, and the role propaganda (spread by radio) played in inciting and inflaming all of the bloodshed there.
The difference, it feels like, is we can talk about that clearly now. It was obvious from the start how the extremists there used radio as an essential tool to encourage people to slaughter their enemies (around 800,000 people were killed, most hacked to death with machetes). There was no libertarian-techbro culture around radio; owners of radio stations and radio technicians didn’t circle the wagons around themselves and their technology to insist they’d played no role in what happened.
There is something deeply anti-social at its core about our tech culture today; there is a desire to change the world wedded to an absolute refusal to feel any responsibility toward that world that, even now after all we know, still shocks me.
Great article & summary. On the question of “what is to be done,” I think a good first start is to mandate reporting for more transparency. Force them to share more data so independent researchers can help us make sense of it all. Make it a blanket mandate for any platform of more than, say, 50 million users, that employs amplification algorithms.
We have to take our data back from these companies. When we take our data (and posts, videos, likes, etc.) away from them, we're taking their power away. We need to refactor the social tech so that the 'network effect' no longer results in social mastodonts who are not able to moderate content equitably. This will require regulation and legislation: https://stevenhessing.medium.com/5-steps-to-fix-social-media-3f794e9c141
Steven, it's too late to take back data. The tech companies have so much of it, and big data analysts and algorithms are so good at their jobs, that so much of it is statistically sampled and they can quickly work any such regulation.
That is defeatist thinking. It is never too late. If it is one thing that the Internet has shown, is that it can bring tremendous change and disruption to existing businesses. Just think MySpace. Even the 3.6 billion monthly users can be migrated to a better data privacy solution.
GDPR and CCPA are already having an impact. Legislation to ban companies to store our data can work and can be implemented in the 5 phases I describe in the earlier link. The first two phases are easy to implement for companies and set us on the right path.
Wrestling our data back will take time. I can see it taking 5-10 years. In the meantime, we need additional short/mid-term solutions.
Here is a piece written by Facebook Corporate that epitomizes everything wrong with the way corporate citizens approach their externalities. When I read bafflespeak like this, I long for la fin du monde (the beer, not the apocalypse, although both are inevitable).
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-at-facebook-were-committed-to-accountability-and-transparency-lets/
They use the same corporate PR drone-speak their boss deploys. Clearly, they intend to lead us out of the wilderness by denying there is any such thing as a wilderness. When PR drone-speak is your weapon of choice, every wilderness looks like a Generalized Non-Urban Area of Concern.
Thanks for the reference to Max Read’s substack — the pitch alone is worth paying for, and his posts-so-far are great.
Great overview here Charlie. Thanks for putting it all together. I'm definitely guilty of just tuning all this out a bit yesterday. (I was also on deadline, so I have something of an excuse!) Maybe my mistake was reading Ben Smith's "how the sausage got made" media column at NYT before any of the actual reportage. That made me tired from the jump.
Cone on...grow a pair. tell us what should be done, you've been studying this for years!
No one knows what should be done. The problem is new technology amplifying problematic human tendencies, not just Facebook the organization. Altho the fact that top leadership seems to be amoral growth maximizers doesn't help, that type of mentality *is* what's incentivized by our economic system. If it weren't Zuckerberg, it'd be someone else.
There isn't one silver bullet to this, or even a few.
Controversial view here. FB reminds me of the auto industry, with its balance of economic & societal benefits versus widespread harm. But the auto industry doesn't annoy one particular faction or class who wish for its users to be more compliant. I'm no fan of FB but the orchestration of this omnicrisis for the business is the story I want to read. If anyone has seen any good (ie not just opinion-led) reporting on this please recommend.
I am hoping Zuck's Meraverse becomes his Shangri-la and he departs this mortal coil for a fantasy world he can control completely. A god-like presence like Zeus.
Does anyone remember Second Life?
Be careful what you wish for, Susan. :)
Your fantasy Mark Zuckerberg accurately describes the real-life Peter Thiel, a member of Facebook's board and one of its early investors. There's that saying about the fine line between genius and madness, but in Thiel's case the line on the other side of genius is a megalomaniacal psychopathy. Think of a child whose parents are Ernst Blofeld and Elizabeth Bathory.
Acchhh! Mr. Dugnutt, you cut me to the quick, sir. I was blinded in my reverie to the reality of the embodiment of your spot-on imagined progeny. We are bound together at the mercy of these amoral 'geniuses'. With apologies to Mr. Plato, only the dead have seen the end of Zuck. And Thiel.
Good read. Saying outlandish things on FB in America is allowable, but in other countries it got people killed.
Outlandish things got hundreds of thousands of people killed in the U.S., too. Look at the pandemic deaths in the country with constitutionally enshrined freedoms of expression, widespread literacy, and high standards of living. We ended up being this widely circulated cartoon of a woman and a sentient coronavirus in dialogue.
Woman: "You can't fix stupid."
Virus: "I can fix stupid."
If we were to write future history, like how journalists write obituaries while the subject is still alive, we could pinpoint one key problem -- having people think through a problem they didn't have the right frame of mind to make sense of in the first place.
The nations that did have much lower infection, hospitalization and death rates than the U.S. all did the same thing -- and they were able to come about it despite barriers in culture, language and economy. They listened to their scientific and medical experts -- who despite the same barriers had a common value in science and were sharing and checking one another's work -- and they took collective action at the national level. The collective action they generally took was to constrict economic activity and social gatherings, anathema in the U.S. and a lot of western nations, but in exchange offer some form of compensation to people and businesses to tide them through. To be fair, the U.S. did a some of these: a universal basic income, rent and mortgage forbearance, debt forgiveness and the like. What the U.S. got wrong was 50 different approaches, and neither "red" states nor "blue" states got it right.
Know one “knows” what should be some so experts should speculate what should be done that’s how we make progress!!