[HN Gopher] Facebook's Little Red Book
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Facebook's Little Red Book
Author : heshiebee
Score : 245 points
Date : 2024-12-02 20:07 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.map.cv)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.map.cv)
| projektfu wrote:
| Good job with the scan. I started reading the book and began to
| feel rage so I stopped after about 20 pages. Is it the most self-
| unaware book or just people trying their hand at PR?
| qsort wrote:
| A little red book full of quotations from the chairman... Where
| else did I see this?
| woodruffw wrote:
| I think that's a very explicit, intentional reference.
| thanks_dang wrote:
| Is it too early to start a first print of paulgraham.com? I
| want mine signed.
|
| I hope the cover is orange.
| com2kid wrote:
| This was 2012. There was still hope and optimism in the tech
| space. The Internet had helped overturn powerful regimes and
| given voice to the disenfranchised. There was the idea that
| person to person public discourse could resolve many societal
| problems. Smartphones had exploded just 6 years prior and they
| were already making inroads into traditionally underserved and
| neglected communities around the world, helping farmers improve
| yields and young women become self sufficient so they could
| escape forced marriages.
|
| The idea that we could join together and share ideas and make
| the world a better place isn't a _wrong_ idea, it is just one
| that got subverted once it was realized that inciting anger in
| users lead to more usage and thus more ad impressions.
| dgfitz wrote:
| > There was the idea that person to person public discourse
| could resolve many societal problems.
|
| Nobody thought this.
| karmajunkie wrote:
| I hate to break the news to you, but literally millions
| believed it. There's still more than a (very
| overprivileged) few who still believe it.
| dgfitz wrote:
| Sorry, nobody "educated" believed this.
| notacoward wrote:
| That might be the most blatant "no true Scotsman" I've
| ever seen. Practically out of a textbook. I'm educated. I
| and hundreds of coworkers at multiple companies still
| believed it in 2012. You said something that is simply,
| provably untrue.
| dgfitz wrote:
| Sure, you're right. People thought this.
| rescripting wrote:
| Of course they did. It was 2012. The Arab Spring was
| happening when this was written.
|
| People might have been wrong, but that doesn't mean it
| wasn't a somewhat common belief.
| dgfitz wrote:
| It was common in some circles, sure. It was not a
| commonly held belief.
| dannyobrien wrote:
| You originally said "noone thought this".
| dgfitz wrote:
| Hyperbole, apologies. Your pedantic point was correct.
| com2kid wrote:
| Why not? It is mostly correct. One on one most people are
| reasonable. In large groups, or when posting online with
| the need to show in-group behavior, or when posting
| publicly where everyone in one's social group can later
| judge, people start doing the herd mentality thing, and
| they also become rude to anyone not in their same social
| circle.
|
| I have no proof, but I dare say the majority of angry
| people posting horrible stuff on social media are rather
| pleasant when around friends and family.
|
| But all of a sudden, when they get up on stage, they feel
| the need to copy the behaviors of those around them, which
| means anger and vitrol.
|
| When I first joined the Internet (1995!), there was more of
| an expectation of civility (IRC being a notable exception),
| and that is the behavior pattern I picked up upon.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Where were you during the "arab spring" ? I'm not of the
| opinion that twitter actually made any difference on-the-
| ground but that didn't stop the mediascape from preening at
| how hopeful the future was now that individuals could get
| information in and out of otherwise closed societies.
|
| I thought I'd try and find some evidence from that time
| period, 2008-2012, and found this article summarizing a
| metastudy [0] on perception and outcomes of social media on
| civic engagement. Among all of the factors
| examined, 82% showed a positive relationship between SNS
| use and some form of civic or political engagement or
| participation.
|
| [0] https://journalistsresource.org/politics-and-
| government/soci...
| KevinGlass wrote:
| Provide evidence. 2012 is pretty late to have been drinking
| the techno-utopian koolaid but millions of people, and IMO,
| maybe half of silicon valley tech workers, took this
| assumption as ground truth.
|
| This breathless article from 2009 [1] (found in 2 seconds
| by searching "tech will change the world year:2009") is a
| good example of what most people thought. You can find blog
| many posts and articles from the time saying basically the
| same thing. If you forget, back in 2012 people used to tune
| into Apple's yearly keynote with bated breath in
| anticipation of what marvelous innovation Apple would grace
| us with next. An app to replace your therapists? Uber for
| dogs? Solve poverty and racism? That was the attitude I
| remember among my peers (college kids and yes, professors
| too).
|
| [1] https://www.rferl.org/a/Science_And_Technology_That_Cha
| nged_...
| com2kid wrote:
| Technology has lifted a _lot_ of people out of poverty.
|
| Telemedicine reaching remote villages, drone deliveries
| of medical supplies, mobile phones giving farmers weather
| forecasts, and even allowing those farmers to find more
| competitive buyers for their crops.
|
| Even within the US, for the longest time technology was
| the only field that was not ruled by elites. Any kid who
| was smart enough could get their hands on a computer
| somehow, learn to program, and have a career ahead of
| them. No medical associating limiting applicants, no
| elitist law firms, no unions only giving membership cards
| to children of existing members.
|
| A lot of poor kids in the US, myself included, got lifted
| up by technology.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I can kind of understand having that kind of optimism back in
| the Internet of, say, 1998, before we saw how vampiric
| venture-backed winner-take-most tech companies would be. But
| by 2012, it would be incredibly naive of tech employees (of
| any company) to seriously believe they were some kind of
| force for good.
| Klonoar wrote:
| This take feels very out of touch with how tech was in
| 2012.
|
| It was evident where the trends were heading, but that
| optimism that was heavy throughout the tech boom in the
| late 2000s was _definitely_ still there.
| throwaway314155 wrote:
| There _was_ backlash. It just didn't operationalize very
| effectively. For instance, news organizations mostly saw
| FB and Google as a way to undermine and ultimately
| replace vetted news with unvetted, unprofessional hot
| takes. Anyone above a certain age likely saw these
| viewpoints and agreed with them but not enough to start a
| movement.
|
| When facebook became generally available I was maybe
| 14-15, and even back then I remember thinking "this feels
| very much like it's going to ruin some young womens'
| lives". But what the hell was I going to do? I mean - the
| platform _was_ used as a sort of early Tinder, where
| sexual attraction could play out in a semi-anonymized
| way.
|
| This comment is in no way exhaustive either.
| com2kid wrote:
| [delayed]
| gabaix wrote:
| People that I have known at Facebook at the time were not
| there for optimism. They were there for prestige and
| money.
|
| In 2012 Facebook was the fastest growing startup in the
| Bay Area. It was also the hardest to get into. As a
| result, it attracted top talent who were there for the
| challenge of getting admitted. The growth paid off,
| minting hundreds of millionaires for the IPO.
|
| Most Facebook employees I knew parroted the 'connect the
| world' motto without too much empathy. They were simply
| happy to be part of the exclusive club.
| ben_w wrote:
| I was that naive in 1998, owing to that being roughly when
| my pocket money first stretched to buying a modem. Almost
| the first thing I stumbled into was a flame-war.
|
| Yet even today, I see people regard the lack of moderation
| on certain sites as an unadulterated axiomatic good. Is
| that blindness really naivete, or is it just a political
| stance like all others? If so, I would not call that
| naivete even if the effect is the same, for it is a thing
| all suffer from, it's the blind spot in our thoughts, no
| matter how experienced and sophisticated and pragmatic we
| may otherwise be.
| evanelias wrote:
| Some additional context: morale at Facebook was rather poor
| around this time period, in part due to the disappointing
| stock performance after the IPO, as well as a one-time
| company-wide reduction in bonuses a bit after that. So parts
| of this book may have been intended to help inspire a
| workforce that was becoming slightly disgruntled over
| compensation.
|
| fwiw they were still giving the red book to all new hires in
| ~mid 2013. Personally at the time I found parts of it to be
| interesting from a "company telling its own history"
| perspective, and other parts to be extremely cringe-inducing.
| That said, I'm sometimes a grumpy cynic, and I'm also
| familiar with some random rare aspects of FB history due to
| previously working for Harvard IT. (I started working there a
| year after Zuckerberg dropped out, so didn't have any
| overlap, but some of my colleagues there were directly
| involved in the disciplinary hearings regarding Facemash.)
| woodruffw wrote:
| I think in 2012, SV startups (and _especially_ social media
| startups) were still getting high on their own supply: there
| was a seemingly genuine groundswell belief that unilaterally
| connecting the world would be a force for good, rather than a
| mere reconfiguration of powers.
|
| (I don't think Zuckerberg himself is a true believer, but I
| _do_ think that the people who wrote and read this book in 2012
| probably believed it. This was the same year as the Arab
| Spring, after all.)
| junon wrote:
| Yes, this. I was at Uber in SF around 2016 or so when they
| did their "pixels and bits" rebrand which felt very similar.
| It felt very... "we are messiahs"? Most people felt it, only
| the people with the highest paychecks (or managers) played
| into it.
|
| After hearing the core values of the company thrown around in
| regular speech so often most people got kind of numb to
| anything corporate (e.g. "I really like that you're always
| hustling so hard but I would love to see you do a bit more
| toe stepping").
|
| I left SF a year or so after that so I wonder if that whole
| approach has changed in the bigger offices or not. Being in
| Europe now most people here (most ..) wouldn't play into it I
| don't think. Retrospectively feels very American.
|
| ---
|
| EDIT: Actually it's kind of hard to find info on the rebrand
| now. There's the announcement[0] but that only seems to
| allude to the weird philosophical aspect of it in the
| description, which leads me to believe they never published
| it publicly.
|
| > The new Uber brand system is made up of primary and
| secondary components that tell the story of technology moving
| the physical world. Today, we're rolling out a new look and
| feel that celebrates the cities we're in and the technology
| that brings people what they want, when they want it.
|
| It was more than just "primary and secondary components",
| they had somehow likened people and pixels together and were
| trying to create some weird (but similar) narrative of
| "connecting everything through transport" or whatever. I
| think the idea was that they wanted to start breaking into
| more verticals, _a la_ UberEATS and whatnot, but I distinctly
| remember hearing a lot of "what ifs" about freight, air,
| etc. that I think were mostly fluff chatter to hype up the
| rebrand.
|
| Most people, even internally, hated it it, and shortly after
| that started monthly, then weekly, then at times daily new
| public scandals about the company or TK, so many people left
| shortly thereafter.
|
| [0] https://youtu.be/axjXNEordH8?feature=shared
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| For better or worse, social media (I'd even go as far as saying
| Facebook) has changed the world. As cringey as that book
| sounds, people loved hopium of early 2010s. Maybe I was young
| and naive as well, but I also believed that such connections
| will unite the world somehow.
| Underpass9041 wrote:
| The amount of retcon in even the first few pages is comical, it
| comes across as the most tone deaf thing ever.
| tejohnso wrote:
| What's so enraging? A company puts out some propaganda about
| how wonderfully world changing it is. Not all that unusual or
| unexpected.
| paulddraper wrote:
| Huh?
|
| Smiling people drinking Pepsi, oil companies showing sun
| filtered through cornstalks....what's the difference?
| whalesalad wrote:
| page 17. android operating system on an iphone 4. i'm crying
| right now, particularly the way this is juxtaposed with so many
| critical moments in history.
| Mogzol wrote:
| I think it is meant to be a generic phone, the edges and front
| camera are wrong for an iphone, but then the home button is
| very distinctly an iphone. It is weird.
| whalesalad wrote:
| it's either an iphone 4 or iphone 5 in a case. the home
| button is an iconic giveaway.
| croisillon wrote:
| i don't think it's an iphone
| firecall wrote:
| Correct - it's not an iPhone.
|
| It's the Facebook Phone!
| duck wrote:
| Could it be an iPod Touch?
| pests wrote:
| I think that's a BlackBerry. The later Motion from 2017 had a
| singular button down there too. Could be an older version but
| can't find anything.
| firecall wrote:
| It is in fact the Facebook Phone!
|
| Or at least a mockup of one.
|
| It has the front-facing camera in the top right corner, which
| is a hint!
|
| Googling suggests the Facebook phone was an HTC device?
| grahamj wrote:
| [flagged]
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Ha ha, so it's more of a cautionary tale. I love those!
| yapyap wrote:
| haha, for real though. they poisoned the culture. of course not
| only them blah blah blah but they definitely played a BIG part.
| t-3 wrote:
| No, they didn't. Facebook was just a less trashy, more
| exclusive version of myspace when it came out. Geocities,
| livejournal, blogger etc. were earlier iterations on the same
| concept - personal websites for non-techies. The only thing
| new about Facebook was their relative success in signing up a
| broader userbase, which was probably just a right-place,
| right-time thing of being around when computers and high-
| speed internet were becoming cheap and ubiquitous rather than
| anything different about what they were doing.
| woodruffw wrote:
| Facebook is definitely a "great company" by Person of the Year
| rules[1]. There are some real whoppers on that list.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Person_of_the_Year
| bee_rider wrote:
| It is great in the sense that it is very large.
| paxys wrote:
| And has completely changed the world.
| righthand wrote:
| I think Google aped Facebook on world-changing by
| harvesting data and running algorithms to get you to
| scroll through a list. Changed the US might be more
| accurate.
| Zambyte wrote:
| Limiting the influence of Facebook to the US doesn't seem
| necessary.
|
| For example:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_genocide
| kibwen wrote:
| Great like the Great War, or the Great Depression, or the
| Great Irish Famine?
| Towaway69 wrote:
| page 27
|
| > Zuckerbergs's Law: The amount each person shares doubles each
| year.
|
| I initially thought wealth, ideas and love was meant but no ...
| it's just data.
| dullcrisp wrote:
| [flagged]
| pc86 wrote:
| I looked up "psychohistory" and while the definition makes
| sense, I don't really understand what you mean by this
| comment.
| dullcrisp wrote:
| It just sounds vaguely prophetic like he thinks he knows
| how every person will behave for the foreseeable future.
|
| But I was referring to the fictional version from the
| Foundation series, not the apparently real (pseudo-)science
| that I didn't know existed.
| ninth_ant wrote:
| I'm quite confident this would have been based on metadata
| collected by Facebook from its user activity. The company has
| been extremely analytical about its own growth, and id be
| surprised if this wasn't a conclusion from an in-house data
| scientist that just got Zuckerberg's name stamped on it.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| While I'm sure Facebook had data to roughly justify this,
| just like Moores Law, I'm sure this is equal parts back-
| projection as prophetic declaration of intent.
|
| For Facebook, they needed the cultural expectation to be
| ever-increasing data sharing. They (along with other
| companies) facilitated the creation of tools to share ever-
| increasing amounts of data.
| mparnisari wrote:
| Why would you think it was anything BUT data?
| almog wrote:
| For a moment I read that "the amount of each person's shares
| doubles each year"
| paxys wrote:
| I think people here are too young to remember the tech industry
| in 2012. None of the images and ideas conveyed in this book
| (printing press, cave art, fall of the Berlin wall, Arab Spring,
| particle accelerators) were outlandish for the time and space it
| was printed in. Tech was all about optimism and idealism.
| Everyone in silicon valley _knew_ they were changing the world
| for the better, and tech was the missing piece all along. Silly
| people would finally all stop fighting and get along now that
| they had Facebook and Twitter and iPhones.
| bbqfog wrote:
| Facebook was created to spy on college girls. There was nothing
| altruistic or techno-optimistic about it. It was literally
| designed and executed to be spyware from day 1.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| OP didn't make a statement about the facts on the ground, but
| the culture and myths of the time. (If you think the villainy
| myths we tell ourselves today are more grounded in truth,
| they're not. We're always in a narrative. And there is
| nothing wrong with collective narratives.)
| cdchn wrote:
| Narrative is the correct word for what this is. This is
| what Facebook leadership wanted to persuade the Facebook
| rank-and-file that _this_ is what they're about. This is
| purposeful internal propaganda.
| therein wrote:
| Yes but people talked about it even less than they do today.
| Back then you could say connecting people is always a good
| thing and people didn't challenge that openly like we do
| today.
| tsunamifury wrote:
| The average 1st world citizen didn't comprehend how
| expanding networks meant centralizing power in even fewer
| hands.
|
| We still dont see it yet today. Not fully
| mawise wrote:
| It's funny; as I've been working on Haven[1], one of my guiding
| lights is what Facebook _could have been_[2]. To that end the
| opening section is really inspiring. This is describing a world
| where digital tools enhance your friendships. I think that's
| still possible and still a worthwhile goal--I just don't think it
| can be done by an entity with a corporate incentive structure.
| Those incentives will always tend towards enshittification[3].
|
| [1]: https://havenweb.org
|
| [2]: https://havenweb.org/2022/11/02/facebook-lie.html
|
| [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification#
| nashashmi wrote:
| > what Facebook _could have been_
|
| In 2010, facebook changed. Twitter was cooler. Myspace was more
| money. So facebook took a page out of their platforms.
|
| In 2012, facebook went to Washington DC.
|
| In 2016, Washington DC went to facebook.
|
| When did facebook change? When zuck lost control of it after
| sandberg came on board. When did zuck get control? When zuck
| changed to be in alliance with the master plan... which was
| take control of the world... politically. Remember zuck running
| for election?
| ninth_ant wrote:
| Oh my god, no.
|
| Zuck had -- and I believe still has -- complete control of
| the company. Demonizing Sandberg and lionizing Zuckerberg is
| a complete disservice to reality. It was the focus on growth
| and not money that ruined everything.
|
| Many changes occurred in this period. I was there.
|
| A big change is that ads became profitable. I think it's fair
| to say this change was sudden. Facebook went from being
| scrappy and underfunded to being wealthy and powerful.
|
| At the same time, the growth had eclipsed competitors and
| Google Plus came and went. The media tone and coverage
| changed from "oh this startup is doing neat stuff" to a point
| concern for data privacy and the implosion of journalism
| revenue. So they became a lot more influential culturally.
|
| Being suddenly wealthy and influential but with a cultural
| mentality of being a scrappy and upstart-- something this
| book accurately reflects -- lead to hubris.
|
| The focus on hypergrowth which had served them well from a
| small startup -- under the umbrella of this hubris -- led to
| events like the Cambridge Analytica disaster. Insufficient
| care was being placed on how data could be collected and
| misused by others, growth took priority.
|
| This focus on Hypergrowth meant that changes that responded
| well in metrics got pushed. The longer-term damage of people
| not enjoying their experiences wasn't a high enough ranked
| metric compared to engagement and user metrics.
|
| None of this was Sandberg's fault. She was an extremely
| competent manager and is brilliant. Absolutely she was
| instrumental in leading Facebook to profitability but this
| push wasn't a big factor in their decline.
|
| Instead, Facebook got too big way too fast and the employees
| and Zuck didn't have the mindset shift needed to consider
| everything as it was happening. Yes, money ruined everything
| eventually -- but that came later.
|
| The most crucial damage had already happened -- people gave
| up on trust that Facebook could handle their data
| responsibly, and trust that they'd have a good experience on
| the site.
|
| I could go on but that's enough.
| mgiampapa wrote:
| I think FB turned the corner when Mark stopped driving his
| Acura. I'm not sure when I last saw it at building 16, but
| that was the date for me.
| nashashmi wrote:
| Is there a version I can read without the pictures? Just the
| manifesto?
|
| I'd like to know how big this "book" is actually?
| dangoodmanUT wrote:
| You can probably parse this out really fast with OCR
| latexr wrote:
| Did just that with some random online tool and it said it
| found just under 7000 words. Probably also counting words in
| the images, though.
| mgiampapa wrote:
| Physically it's 4 1/4 x 7 x 5/16. Word count isn't much.
| lbrito wrote:
| Web 2.0-era peak hubris. A decade later, its hard to decide if
| this looks delusional or prophetic - they did change societies,
| but probably not in the ways they ostensibly wanted to be
| recognized for changing.
| scrubs wrote:
| Bingo ... let's not confuse a techie for a messaging app
| selling ad data as a tech savant (almost) brilliantly
| predicting the future because it tries to bootstrap itself into
| the stratosphere with a flourish of art copy & paste by
| association with pictures of CERN, Egyptian hieroglyphics and
| so on.
|
| The latter are cool ... and stand well in time. CERN requires
| something a tad more complicated that pushing around "lol :)"
| over tcp-ip done before them + "big data" analysis to sell it
| to morons on madison street.
|
| Claude Shannon, von Neumann, creators of the transistor,
| capacitors, languages, algos etc are the cool+smart kids ...
| not Zuckerberg. Not Facebook.
|
| "Move fast and break" things has some tactical truth in
| larthargic companies, but averaged over time is
| asymptomatically a zero. It's just SV frat boy talk. Enough.
| zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
| This looks like an Instagram feed. Is it a coincidence that they
| purchased Instagram in April 2012?
| worik wrote:
| I find this terribly sad.
| deadbabe wrote:
| Anywhere to find an original copy of one of these?
| chucknthem wrote:
| I remember this. Wish I'd kept my little piece of history.
| Written at a time when people were still optimistic and hopeful
| about tech.
| jonas21 wrote:
| Lots of people are still optimistic about tech. They're just
| generally too busy to get into silly arguments about it on HN.
| cflewis wrote:
| Yeah, the dreams of what computers could do around Windows 95,
| and what the Internet could do around Windows 98/Windows
| 2000... it felt amazing as a teenager who wanted to go into
| computer science. IMHO social media heralded the beginning of
| the end, although no-one knew that at the time.
|
| A lot of the 90s nostalgia is just the same rose-tinted glasses
| as all generations experience, but I think in this one
| dimension it truly felt a lot better back then.
| alex1138 wrote:
| I have a serious problem with calling everything social media
| and (more importantly) how it spells doom for this that and
| the other
|
| If you want to criticize specific companies - yeah. But I
| literally do not understand what people are talking about
| when employing the usual "Social media was a mistake" type
| stuff
| gosub100 wrote:
| FB has done a lot of great things. There just aren't any
| articles written about them.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Ben Barry's page on the book from his website archive:
| https://v1.benbarry.com/project/facebooks-book
| Animats wrote:
| Just read the whole thing. Not one word about ads.
|
| From the 2014 book:
|
| _Remember, people don 't use Facebook because they like us._
|
| _They use it because they like their friends._
|
| Where that went:
|
| _We have the power to cut them off from their friends._
|
| _So we can control everything they see._
|
| _Muahahaha!_
| mparnisari wrote:
| Okay, so Facebook started as a way to interconnect people. But
| it's a business, so it has to make money to survive. So they
| added ads. And now my feed is 99% ads, 1% updates from my
| friends. Sooooo mission accomplished, right? Right?
| exe34 wrote:
| you get updates from your friends? the only reason I have
| Facebook is to see pictures of cats, but it insists on showing
| me hamas propaganda ai-slop.
| mparnisari wrote:
| Yes. I get updates from my local community
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Facebook was started as a way for college boys to gleam full
| names, pictures, and other personal information of college
| girls. When it was just this, it was actually wonderful and
| mostly innocent kids having fun. But Zuck was greedy, and
| eventually it evolved into yet another of the online behemoths
| that can only thrive by selling as much of your private data as
| it can get away with. As such, it is no longer special, and
| therefore it is ripe for disruption.
| ribadeo wrote:
| There are STILL people drinking the techno-utopian kool-aid.
|
| Plenty of folks think Musk will do something smart someday, for
| humanity's benefit, despite all evidence to the contrary.
|
| I was here when the web showed up, and I can honestly state that
| we featured blatant techno-utopian rhetoric in nearly every
| aspect of the industry, as well as our underground nocturnal
| allegedly musical entertainment.
|
| I now feel rather dumb, aka a product of my time, but the notion
| that inventing tools would lead to them automatically being used
| for good was prevalent, if specious.
| vundercind wrote:
| Similar journey here.
|
| I think I've become some variety of techno-determinist
| pessimist. We are what technology lets us be, including when it
| comes to ethics and government. And major inventions aren't
| guaranteed to push the space of the possible in the _right_
| direction--but neither can we avoid these changes, as
| effectively sounding the alarm early enough to matter, while
| also correctly calling which are bad and how they're bad, is
| too hard to practically happen.
|
| Freedom's a fleeting gift of circumstance, and the world is a
| machine none of us control and that's often bad and sometimes
| destroys important things, I guess is where I'm at now. I'd
| definite press a button to permanent un-invent the Internet, if
| someone put it in front of me.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| There's a lot of altruistic sounding stuff about connection in
| there, but it's hard to believe it's sincere when their product
| is a space where paid accounts don't have to bother with consent.
| jmyeet wrote:
| How far we've come in a little over a decade.
|
| If you're working for Big Tech now, you're basically working for
| a defense contractor. Amazon, Microsoft, Google or Meta are
| really no different to Boeing, Lockheed Martin or Northrop
| Grumman.
|
| Meta was culpable in the Rohingya genocide [1], builds AI for the
| military [2], silences content about Palestine (with deep ties to
| the Netanyahu government) [3] and Zuckerberg is cozying up to the
| incoming Trump administration [4].
|
| We're so far away from Sergey Brin's principled stance against
| China [5]. You can find similar lists to the above for Google,
| Microsoft or Amazon.
|
| [1]: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-
| faceb...
|
| [2]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/nov/05/meta-
| allo...
|
| [3]: https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-
| promises/...
|
| [4]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c87x98q8y08o
|
| [5]: https://archive.is/tOWfY
| KerrAvon wrote:
| re: 4 -- Facebook and reactionary politics have been hand in
| hand from the beginning of general public access to Facebook --
| the world would be in a much better place without it.
| Frummy wrote:
| "complacency breeds complacency breeds complacency breeds
| complacency breeds complacency breeds complacency breeds
| complacency breeds complacency breeds complacency breeds
| complacency breeds complacency breeds complacency breeds
| complacency breeds complacency breeds complacency breeds
| complacency"
|
| So funny!
| smnrg wrote:
| Design and content references must have felt like a cute
| satirical reference at the time.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotations_from_Chairman_Mao_T...
| tsunamifury wrote:
| "We were going to change the world."
|
| And then they did...
|
| it was no accident
| drivingmenuts wrote:
| I thought it was created so Zuckerberg could get back at people
| he felt were excluding him ...
| jbullock35 wrote:
| That was Aaron Sorkin's story in The Social Network, but it
| seems to have been a fiction. Steven Levy's history of the
| company is much more detailed (and Levy is trying to be
| faithful to the historical record, unlike Sorkin) - and it
| argues that there's no evidence for this Sorkin story about
| Zuckerberg's motive.
| swyx wrote:
| are there any pdf printing shops that cna take this pdf and ship
| it to us as a book?
| forth_throwaway wrote:
| Facebook has usurped the legacy media that they mention in the
| Red Book. But their relationship to capital and government is the
| exact same as the legacy media they replaced, so instead of being
| disruptive they fill the same role --except this time with even
| more ruthless efficiency and profitability.
|
| "When education is not liberating, the dream of the oppressed is
| to become the oppressor."
| tills13 wrote:
| When it was produces, this was probably inspiring and effective.
|
| Retrospectively, it's a bit creepy and ominous.
| dang wrote:
| All: if you're going to comment, please make sure you're
| following the site guidelines
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
|
| That means posting out of curiosity, not indignation. Internet
| indignation is addictive, repetitive, and boring (and there's
| already too much of it here).
| tsunamifury wrote:
| I think this all can be boiled down to to a true axiom of modern
| power:
|
| "Expand the network at all cost, and increase its engagement."
|
| This went from a little flippant red book to a credo that has now
| changed elections and democracy as well as culture and view of
| the human self.
|
| At the time it was radical idealism and today its something
| different, but its worth seeing and truly understanding.
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