this is a good article describing the tense scenes of corporate culture at FB. It outlines the desperate search for whistle blowers and muscular efforts to keep a lid firmly clamped down on inner communication and policy. There is a lot at stake here obviously for the employer but the expanding lucarative use of private user info only speeds his sinking deeper into a sort of paralysis of meaningful action and it is now looking like he has lost any hope of a simple way out…
Thanks, Fred. Deliriously lush story. So many notable quotes.
“This whole year has massively changed his personal techno-optimism,” says an executive at the company. “It has made him much more paranoid about the ways that people could abuse the thing that he built.”
Along with this, is the connection for me between the unhappy unpublished in Kay’s piece on the on-going Can Lit soap and their inversion, the publishers pissed at Facebook. The “platform” makes mince meat of both.
Chamath Palihapitiya, who had been Facebook’s vice president for user growth before leaving in 2011, had told an audience at Stanford that he thought social media platforms like Facebook had “created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric” and that he feels “tremendous guilt” for being part of that. He said he tries to use Facebook as little as possible and doesn’t permit his children to use such platforms at all.
The platform neglectfully exposes people to extreme con artists who realize that the gatekeepers have been disabled. They put out reams of flattery and fear; the worst of regular media, but personalized and on steroids.
The idea, explained Adam Mosseri, is that, online, “interacting with people is positively correlated with a lot of measures of well-being, whereas passively consuming content online is less so.”
You can’t put the genie back in the bottle. The problem IS interacting with people, sharing unbridled and unreflective desire compulsively, obsessively. In the film 20th Century Women on Netflix, you can catch a brilliant, prescient speech by Jimmy Carter that pretty much nailed the upcoming and our current social crisis.