Facebook's Little Red Book(map.cv) |
Facebook's Little Red Book(map.cv) |
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/...
The world is feeling rather Cyberpunk 2077-ish so it's only a matter of time before I have no choice to trade in my values for the ability to support my family. I feel for people currently in that position.
But please, please dedicate more time to reading outside your sphere and beyond video games. They can be a part of the path to enlightenment, but there is much more going on.
None of the current status quo is a surprise to anyone who has been studying media or history or polemics or even poetry. In fact it’s just been agonizing to watch the cycles.
Equip yourselves, because if you don’t people will use those unknown ideas against you and the wider world.
The copy in the scan has a 2014 date, suggesting they were still giving the book to new hires in 2014 or maybe 2015. (I was hired in mid 2013 and my copy has a 2012 date.)
So based on company headcount those years and accounting for turnover, I would guess the total print run was at least 10,000... there are definitely copies of it around.
a solid engineering company that actually build good stuff, destroyed in collateral damage from the dot-com bust, sold off to oracle of all things. now further being humiliated by this narcissistic, exploitative, personality-disorder-masquerading-as-a-service company?
This is doing more to honor Sun than any other realistic choice they could have made.
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.
[1]: https://havenweb.org
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!
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.
It's taking a little bit longer than I thought, but isn't the destruction of Twitter a positive for humanity? :P
And that is before the inherent fundamentals of dual use. There is nothing we could do to keep fire from being fundamentally capable both of keeping someone alive by preventing freezing to death, and sterilization and is usable as a self-replicating weapon of destruction. Basically you can only control how well our surroundings handle being set on fire, not make arson an impossibility.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.)
All that said, I am not much of a social media user and never really used Fb much myself. I see the appeal and I see the bad sides of it. I think we'd be much better off without it. I don't necessarily like the way in which it changed the world, but there was a lot to be excited about at this point in time. Not liking the product/company/industry/etc doesn't negated what they achieved.
Nobody thought this.
(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.)
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.
I hope the cover is orange.
I don't think I saw any posters about carpooling, but if there were any, reprints of the classic [1] would have fit right in with the rest of the posters.
I'm pretty sure I saw this book, but I don't think I saved a copy I don't think they were still printing it when my employer was acquired.
Unfortunately, the propaganda doesn't work Page 110 talks about building trust, but what has FB done to earn your trust lately?
[1] https://fdr.artifacts.archives.gov/objects/17472/when-you-ri...
I read this at the time it showed up on everyone's desks (I wish I'd kept it, but I have no idea where it is). Employees naturally rolled their eyes at some of the excessive optimism in some places, but generally it got the ethos right. That some of the boldest statements have fallen by the wayside ("We don't build better services to make money; We make money to build better services", "Build Products around people, not data") is obviously disappointing, but I'd view what it was trying to do in the light of a piece of art that fell short of its goal rather than merely self-unaware.
It was never intended as PR. It delivered its message via anecdotes and the experiences of working there, not in any way that would have anywhere close to the same meaning to the broader world.
Smiling people drinking Pepsi, oil companies showing sun filtered through cornstalks....what's the difference?
I didn't know the NYT has always been right-leaning and letting folks with dubious intentions guest write. I thought that was recent! Nope.
When I attempted this once, I couldn't get the pages to be formatted nicely like a book, and the number of pages I ended up with was close to 1500 or something along those lines, which ends up costing you $100+ to print out with one of these services.
However I suspect that if someone were to typeset the essays nicely, it'd be an amazing coffee table book.
At times like that, restating some important old stories and legends, salted with some useful new ones can help to galvanize people and create the culture change you want.
A good example is someone mentioned in this thread is Zuck's beat up old car. That's a great old story for the early days, but probably needed burying at the Red Book time. Clearly he's not going to drive that forever, so you need some more up to date motivational culture lore which embraces more excess while retaining how the Devs are still world-changing hackers who should work all nighters because 'we're all in this together for mankind, team'.
Nor does the book really "embrace more excess" financially, at least as far as I can remember (and I don't see any of that flipping through my dusty copy briefly just now either). Instead it's the opposite: "Facebook was not originally created to be a company", "We don't build services to make money, we make money to build better services", etc.
Again, this was a period of disappointing post-IPO stock performance. The market wasn't convinced yet that FB could successfully transition to focusing on mobile. It took about 15 months after the IPO for the share price to start looking more positive.
So that was a factor, combined with an obvious desire to keep aspects of "chaotic small nimble startup" vibe/culture at a company that was definitely no longer a startup.
and that's not what succeeds. so FB will do just fine, if i'm right about that.
it's sad to see a genuinely good company gone and replaced by a slimy one. actually if you include oracle, two slimy ones. who are both inarguably far more successful.
it's sad because it's a statement about what our current economy values and what it does not. and to any of you who have the word "engineer" or "scientist" in your job title: it's definitely not those things.
They still rule the roost with that spyware WhatsApp
But at the point they were connecting people as a priority Facebook was an astoundingly good product.
Their greed ruined it (much like Google - it is a characteristic of public corporations in the capitalist system I guess).
If they could have been happy with simply being astoundingly rich they could have built on what they had, developing an ecosystem of software, and developers, to aid in connecting all the people of the world.
Instead they got deep into ad tech. Squeezed every dollar. Ruined it.
Mēh! Better off are we now!
For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_genocide
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.
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.
But many of those blogs (which now take the form of subscription newsletters) had incredibly valuable insight and perspectives that were otherwise not being reported on. The news media's alarmism about bloggers was (IMHO rightfully) ignored.
So when a couple of years later they started freaking out about Facebook/Twitter/etc, well, same old story, new platform.
The difference this time was that FB and Twitter algorithmically fed articles to people, instead of articles naturally spreading virally from person to person.
Not that the platforms were that bad at first! Remember that in the early 2010s Facebook was largely a platform for Farmville! It was drowning in spam for free to play social games, but the feed was still largely a timeline. Twitter only released their Apple client in 2010, and there were still a large number of third party clients in 2012.
A few years later Facebook would become inundated with political spam and vitriol, but 2012 was still an insane time of growth and optimism.
RTFC:
> It was evident where the trends were heading
I'm stating that tech in general still held the optimistic viewpoint, not that outside groups weren't tiring of techs optimism.
Yet even today, I see people regard the lack of moderation on certain sites as an unadulterated axiomatic good. Is that blindness really naïveté, or is it just a political stance like all others? If so, I would not call that naïveté 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.
I think it was also that people were beginning to see the consequences of “over sharing” with people you’d never normally share things with. The vision of connecting everybody sounds great but not everybody needs, wants or even should hear everything everybody else says. And once such a realization comes about, away goes the linear timeline and in comes a more algorithmic approach. Suddenly your own posts get algorithmiclly ranked, sorted and filtered by every person on your friends list. And to get your post to show up on their feed you have to please an algorithm first in order to get permission. Thus comes a whole host of negative social interaction and toxicity.
I dunno. Maybe the decline of things like Facebook are simply because society “figured out through lived experience” what the end game of a tool like facebook looks like.
But encouraging people to share to the widest audience was another aspect where short-term growth of metrics was prioritized over long-term health of the platform.
There was a possible future where FB leadership didn’t get worried about/envious of Twitter and push so hard on public sharing. But that type of call was solidly on Zuck and not Sandberg.
I also think so much potential for political influence had a weight on facebook but was not in the roadmap from Zuck’s POV. But it surely was for Sandberg because she had already been at Google witnessing the power of influence. Her husband’s own successes with SurveyMonkey emphasized some of that. This success+money+potential+(emerging ad tech) for facebook combined with a young startup spirit led to many scenarios that young Zuck was not prepared for. It definitely steered the company away from its founding vision. The company was suddenly infused with professionals that did not embody the spirit. And Zuck was quietly observing during this period.
Today, he looks around FB and says that things need to change. “And if people are not happy about this, then I am ok with them finding something else.” (i am paraphrasing).
Zuck has doubled down on a different vision now: Oculus VR. It seems his desire for FB social networking has plateau’d.
The change happened because FB didn't internalize quickly or deeply enough that the mindset that got them to defeat MySpace wasn't the mindset they needed to become a trusted service for the long-term. Obviously yes it still exists but it's an absolute shell of what it could have been had this not been squandered -- which is the point that the parent comment was addressing.
Almost like a "I don't owe, but I should pay more, but I don't owe..." thought process that leads to moral vapor lock.
I think there used to be more release valves for this pressure. There aren't any tithing billionaires, for example.
I completely agreed with her, but after watching the talk came to the conclusion that if she couldn't change it, then I certainly wouldn't.
More generally, younger people tend to be OK with everyone knowing everything, while as you get older you want to share with smaller circles to avoid conflict. Sheryl was quite a bit older than Mark and Chris at the time, which may have been the difference.
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.
People might have been wrong, but that doesn't mean it wasn't a somewhat common belief.
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.
Also netiquette, learning to lurk before posting, meeting people outside your normal groups and getting along with them and other behaviors I'm sure I'm forgetting. Being a tech person on the early internet, despite the flame wars, was a positive experience for me. People wanted to make this work, and that early internet full of tech-minded people and engineers did work to some degree. The idea that this could become a place where people could be what they wanted to be but were still accepted was the idea going at that time, at least according to my experiences. Niches mostly kept to themselves, you could find the groups you wanted to be a part of, and you could avoid those you didn't. When everything we had started to go mainstream, it started to crack and fray. When everything went commercial, it all came crashing down.
I'm thinking mostly of pre-web, and early web. I remember thinking when I came across the first URL in a movie that it was likely the start of the end of the internet as I knew it. I think it was "The Net" which was probably mid-90s.
It is unfortunate that we have allowed algorithmic social media content to destroy so much, and to allow for targeted ad based services to cause such drastic harm to society. However society pretty much now knows what the root problems are and if there is a will, many of the worst offenders can be legislated away.
Remove gacha/lootbox mechanics from games and remove personalized algorithmic social media feeds.
It turns out, as a species, it isn't good for us to carry around machines 24/7 that can hit the dopamine center in our brains, or that can deliver targeted outrage on demand.
How about all the other stuff though? A connected world where I can play games with people around the globe? Forums that let fans share their love of their favorite media/artist/singer/author. The hundreds of amazing YouTube chefs that have introduced authentic, sometimes hyperlocal, world cuisines to a global audience. The sheer number of in-depth documentaries that are getting made about every possible niche topic now. The independent media organizations that have popped up (Curiosity Stream, Dropout, to name just two).
All that stuff is good.
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_Changed_...
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.
That means posting out of curiosity, not indignation. Internet indignation is addictive, repetitive, and boring (and there's already too much of it here).
This aesthetic represents to me the dead tech-optimist future we were promised but never got. It's a "ghost future." Mark Fisher had a lot of interesting writing about this phenomenon as applied to music, termed hauntology[2]. It's about how some genres/labels of music (like Ghost Box) were characterized as a misremembered past that was perceived as more rosy than in reality.
I suspect but cannot be certain that "vectorflourish" aesthetics like those and/or simple but not condescendingly dumbed-down ones like Bootstrap 1.0 will experience a resurgence in the coming decade, the same as the "Windows XP" aesthetic of ten years prior had a while ago, in the name of reclaiming such a lost future. With today's CSS I imagine it would be much easier to recreate such an aesthetic than in the past when mostly you had to use Photoshop to create all the raster assets.
There was plenty of cynicism in tech back then too, plenty of posters who always complained about 'micro$oft'. How Oracle had been corrupted, etc.
What seems to be different now is that the optimism hype fades quicker. Back then Google kept it going for years. Recently things like Tesla and OpenAI the optimism gave way to the harsh reality of greed a lot quicker.
I think the anti-Microsoft sentiment (outside of some internet forums, and justified IE6 hate) had been dialled back by the early 2010s.
.NET was a thing, they were post-Gates, post-antitrust, making significant efforts at developer outreach. Windows 7 was a hit.
Despite working in the Microsoft ecosystem, I didn't feel trapped, and the walled garden was coming down, with awareness of non-Microsoft technologies being widespread.
There is an argument I saw made in a documentary that the Arab Spring also had nothing to do with social media.
Unless you received assurances otherwise, trying different things every week seems like the default expectation for a big company.
Even non-technology companies stole a bunch of marketing buzzwords from this era that are still in use today.
I imagine the future looked pretty bleak during world war I, and then again during II, and maybe something else during the civil rights movement, or there was also the cold war. Cynics and optimists have existed since there was something to have feelings about. what's different about today to say that the cynics outweigh the optimists, in a way they never could in the past before?
The whole 2+ years I was there (left because of 3-days RTO), I felt like it was a cult and some people seem to drink the kool-aid (or they are good at pretending to like the culture), but some like me, who are more skeptical, don't.
I remember that optimistic view we all had of technology in our youth.
For me the optimism was a little earlier than 2012 so maybe it goes hand in hand with being young and less experienced (jaded?).
I agree with some of the other commenters that a corporate structure makes altruistic goals like these impossible.
Only Wikipedia and The Internet Archive for me carry that feeling of goodwill still. I think OpenAI going from non-profit to profit will similarly erode the product as market incentives push it further away from what benefits the user most.
Perhaps we need a corporate structure between a non-profit and a for-profit.
Maybe a co-op (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative)? There are also "for-profit" like businesses that are oriented around a different goal than just profits, https://good.store/pages/good-store-about-us comes to mind.
....a...Government?
My favorite part was the “Facebook was not created to be a business” quote being juxtaposed against Kevin Systrom saying “instagram was created to be a business” right after the acquisition.
Products like this book are just an internal narrative. It doesn't discount other narratives, such as villain narratives, where FB could have the best or worst of intentions and the outcomes are what we know them to be today regardless.
Truth, on the other hand, is reserved for when the dust has settled, the facts are seldomly disputed, and are corroborated. Truth doesn't even need to be precise, it just needs to be accurate. Narratives are powerful in the moment and for momentum, truth is powerful across time. That said, even to truths there is a narrative.
Truth is a narrative too. There's one difference though: over time, truth will play out.
Simple example: blood moon occurs, people think they'll die. And then the next morning comes around.
With social systems, the truth takes a lot of time to truly unfold, but unfold it does.
The "some reality" phrase is not needed. This is exactly how all human faiths and religions developed.
"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.
> What happens when anyone can put their message in front of a lot of people?
I think we’ve answered this question by now, and it’s not good. I wonder what Zuckerberg thinks of it…
"But what happens when everyone can put their message in front of a lot of people? When the playing field is level? When everyone has a printing press, the ones with the best ideas are the ones people listen to, Influence can no longer be owned, It must be earned."
I wish people believe(d) in this still today, but we are in a jaded censorship world, and it seems that those who believe in it are labeled extremists.
Also corporations, political parties, propagandists, hucksters, and others.
Pathogens co-evolve with their hosts.
It's an interesting juxtaposition, because had she not had a profile, I wouldn't have found her. But by that same measure, she found it invasive enough to delete her account.
I think Facebook had a time and place for when connecting people was an innocent venture with largely altruistic goals. But like so many things, times have changed and the calculus for "maybe one day a special person will find me on Facebook" vs "creepily processing all personal information" has shifted. Most young people aren't on Facebook. The door has closed, and I'm not sure if it'll reopen any time soon.
So funny!
But what happens when everyone can put their message in front of a lot of people? When the playing field is level? When everyone has a printing press, the ones with the best ideas are the ones people listen to. Influence can no longer be owned. It must be earned
Man, Zuckerberg would be rolling over in his grave if he saw what happened in the following years and our current engagement/algorithmically-driven media ecosystem.
I find this book to be a bit sad. I do believe they were trying to do all of this stuff but it definitely went off the rails.
Even if you yourself try to resist, you'll be beat down by market forces until eventually you either give it all up and let someone else do the evil, or discard the idealism and say "That's just the way it is!" and look back on your idealism with shame and grief.
Makes me sad too
Yes, that was the joke that apparently wasn't obvious enough. :-)
> 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.
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.
Is the Chinese instagram’s name, Little Red Book (小红书), related to Facebook’s Little Red Book, or just a coincidence?
I'd bet they're both related to Mao's Little Red Book.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotations_from_Chairman_Mao_T...
You know, "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun," and stuff like that.
facebook was just trying to use an adbuster's style approach, but actually during that time there were tons of subversive messages, e.g. mckenzie wark's "hacker manifesto" was commonly read and discussed. that whole hacker-chic is what facebook and PG modeled their entire personality off of. even though they might not have cared about edgy communism back then, the GNU manifesto written 20 years even earlier (and lots of FOSS warriors) certainly did.
even back when facebook had their little print poster shop on their campus, a lot of hackers outside felt really grody seeing this anti-capitalist spirit co-opted by this financial behemoth. it was like every 2 weeks someone would know someone else's small startup get snapped up for $10s of millions here and there. it was like watching the air slowly get sucked out of a party.
Retrospectively, it's a bit creepy and ominous.
"Best" in a Darwinian memetic sense of "optimized for reproduction and dissemination", not "accurate" or "helpful".
"When education is not liberating, the dream of the oppressed is to become the oppressor."
Seeing them claiming they had their focus on privacy is especially hilarious.
Thanks for sharing it, but I'll delete it right away.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotations_from_Chairman_Mao_T...
And then they did...
it was no accident
Ah, the importance of being specific.
If you want to change your neighbourhood, you could start every morning by sweeping the pavement. Or you could leave a random dog turd. Both will accomplish your stated goal.
Sad for me. As an S.E. (later called TPM) at Sun, I always busted my ass to meet customer needs technically, cost-wise (our group was Higher Educational Sales) and with dedication. I went to Sun after serving many years in computer support for Cal Berkeley, so I wore the customer's moccasins, so to speak.
Our customers were indeed customers, not products. I loved it. Most of us, I think, were crazy for providing the best for customers, and I don't recall a book. We WERE the book.
https://spaccapeli.com/i-remastered-facebooks-little-red-boo...
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?
It's the Facebook Phone!
(probably)
I’d like to know how big this “book” is actually?
One of the things I’ve learned over the years is almost every company becomes the symbol of it’s anti-mission
Root cause almost always seems to be trying to design PM performance around metrics
Metrics are a poor framework for values
What we're seeing in tech today feels like it started in the 80's, and before that point computers, etc. were viewed by some as the downfall of humankind and by others the saviour.
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.
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
Google's culture is hire 15 geniuses from the Ivy League with 130+ IQ and make them fight with a 40 minute C++ build and a balky Kubernetes culture because "we only hire the best"; YouTube and the advertising system are a money printing machine, the team works for 3.5 years at something that get canceled at the last minute.
Facebook is much more oriented towards greasing the skids with the goal that a fresher developer would be able to push a change to a shared development system the first day on the job.
Look at React vs Flutter.
Like Microsoft, Google is thrashing around looking for "the next big thing", sometimes like a mindless beast. I've met person after person who told me that they went there because they believed they could make an impact and came to the conclusion within a year that they couldn't make any impact at all.
Facebook on the other hand is still run by the founder and it is pushing hard to develop a technology that he believes in even if the rest of us don't. It's a riskier strategy than Microsoft or Google who are likely to stumble on another multibillion dollar business despite themselves.
FWIW I’ve noticed with some confusion that over the past years HN has become more cynical and pessimistic towards tech.
I do think that HN has gone from indie entrepreneur/ real startups to Big Tech and then back again over the time I've been hanging out here.
Anyone who can't grok the doc in 30 mins is unlikely to ever open it, and if they do and spend a few hours on it, chances are they don't have much to add and it only served to educate themselves.
Instead, you give it your best shot, surrounded by others which helps to focus/eliminate distraction and then get to listen to someone with far more depth critique it - and you get to learn their framing and about a ton of nuance you would never have taken away otherwise.
I'm sure they knew this was propaganda. The little red book is a very clear reference (just do a search for "little red book" if anyone doesn't recognize the reference).
A large percentage of programmers of a certain generation got their start in the graphic design world.
But I was referring to the fictional version from the Foundation series, not the apparently real (pseudo-)science that I didn’t know existed.
They say you shouldn't bring a knife to a gunfight. But this is the only time a flag might be useful in a gunfight.
See Catholics and Protestant See Muslim and Jews
No form of communication would have stopped the racism, inabilities to see other cultures and work together
People suck. Connecting them doesn’t result in utopia
There are some points in the book that after reading became extremely obvious, like the belief that technology can (and will) overcome human limitations, restoring us to a perfect/divine state; that technological progress is the path to transcend physical and moral limits (all of which we see in the techno-optimism of the tech industry).
It's been around forever, we are just seeing a new dress up of it with the information age, the way tech "leaders" speak has been mocked to no end in Silicon Valley because of how insufferably close to religion all of this is...
But every once in a while you came across a person who seemed to genuinely believe the corporate kool-aid they were saying, usually working at Facebook or Microsoft. These people are horrifying: completely manipulated, willing to not only say but believe whatever it took to, basically keep earning their money. I have no doubt that if the winds in America turned towards some kind of communisty cult-of-personality thing they would be first in line: a true believer of anything that it's convenient to believe in.
(and I'm thinking of the USSR-type of cult here, the type described in Milan Kundera novels here. Trumpism is rather different.)
What a time to be alive!
Weibo would be a prime example of that last dynamic, in China.
But for me, the world started with my youth. I was a young kid back then...
Seriously, it was probably Usenet that kept me engaged. The web was exciting to browse but the conversation was on Usenet.
The idea was you make the change, take a screenshot of the result on your dev instance, get it stamped by your “mentor” and then abandon it. AFAIK this had been going on for a while before I got there.
Fast forward a few months and I see a sev pop up. “Default text on www.facebook.com search bar says ‘I am a search bar!’”
I have mixed feelings about marketing to the enterprise market. On one hand you can build some large and interesting things that deliver a lot of value, particularly in the semi-custom area. For many reasons I can understand the viewpoint of a salesman on commission. On the other hand I was really depressed after I'd talked with about 20 vendors in the "enterprise search" space and found that none of them particularly cared about search relevance and didn't regularly do evaluation work unless they were participating in TREC to gain industry visibility. Sometimes enterprise products have a lack of refinement or even basic quality compared to consumer products.
If I was going to get back into business development I'd do it with a keen understanding that getting the politics right and the software wrong is better than the reverse when it comes to making a living. I think I'd find myself hard to motivate in that situation.
I think Microsoft's end user area where they are the most pathological now is XBOX, Game Pass and all thought. Looking from the outside it looks like Dr. Evil has decided to buy the whole game industry to put it out of business and force people to pick up another hobby.
One of the big selling points of Bluesky right now is that it does not do this and that is why it feels so much like 2010-era Twitter.
Without that, to pay for social media, the options would have been paid apps, which would never have had the escape velocity to be what current social media is today
For people profiting from that economy, of course. For everyone else? Not at all.
> what current social media is today
...the social media of today is undesirable. People would absolutely pay for social media if the product was good enough. In fact, I believe we're heading towards that future[1].
"Free" search exists. However, so does paid[2].
The idea that companies need hyper growth, "escape velocity," or whatever to succeed is outdated.
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[2]: https://kagi.com
1) The Stream (timeline, whatever you want to call it). Instead of static single "pages" that linked to each other as separate entities with their own internal logic, everything became one flow, and more importantly "impermanent" (e.g. the way we think of "content" is no longer about an archive or repository of things, but rather, moment to moment). A reverse chronological sorting isn't bad in itself. Even the old long form setups like blogging and livejournal etc all supported this method of viewing content - but add in the following issues for a perfect storm.
2) Limited text length (blame Twitter and Facebook, and item 3). By limiting the length of text we create another "short attention span" mindset. Twitter, by it's origin, did have a specific need for short text due to its SMS origin. W/FB - the old 420 char entries was limit to what one can say and encourages short, quick, non-discursive entries. This may have been prudent both to reduce data retention costs and keep people "engaged" (though I don't think the side-effects of this were intentional at first)... This helps to feed the short dopamine burst/feedback. Neither of these were intended for deep discourse.
3) iPhone (and Android; But, frankly it was the iPhone that really got the phone and modern style of apps/ecosystem to where we are now). Having a smaller screen that was "always on" helped to push short text & images instead of longform content, plus the instant feedback loop, wherever you were.
4) "Always On" internet via small devices vs "Log In" standalone bulky systems. Instead of coming home to a computer as a separate space that you had to intentionally log into (in dial up days; or at least turn on in cable/fiber days), we no longer had to set aside a sort of "sacred place". The space no longer being localized, it was everywhere. While this is part of item 3, the form factor of 4 meant that longer form content is still easy to produce whereas with the form factor of 3 means interaction is limited and more difficult to use due to the limitations of onscreen text/keyboards (though advances made it easier, it's still not the same as sitting down and writing a big ass blog post).
4) The death of "blogging"/Google Reader. While blogs exist and come and go in fashion, Google killing reader really was a sort of deathknell. This was more due to the rise of "social media" though, not a precursor. But it helped to cement that long-form content was "dead". Blogs still exist, but aren't near as popular.
5) Images and Embedding/Walled Gardens: The removal of easy interactivity between platforms locking people in to the systems. While in some ways this is a nice convenience (take a URL and past into FB and BAM there's the image all formatted nicely (usually)) - unlike say Livejournal where you still had to type in the img src tags (or use the visual editor that would pop up a window for you to paste the url, that would, after saving/posting the page, would render the image). Sharing memes and other content with a "share" button meant you no longer had to create the content, you could just share what someone else said if you thought it was funny, were angry about it, etc. Meme replication become much less intellectual and lazy. "Engagement" didn't come to mean actual long thoughtful replies, but just an emotive "click" on an emoji to signal ones preferences towards said content. No need to discuss. Sure the option to do so was there, but who has the time when the internet is always on and there's always more content.
6) "The Algorithm" - that which keeps the "engagement" happening and as fast and deep as possible. Just one more click. One more hit of interaction. Keep the people "engaged" as long as possible on a platform.
Of course, long form still exists, and forums like HN allows for a better more thoughtful input on these things. But HN isn't really "social media".
I'd consider blogs and similar forms a proto-social-media (or, with livejournal, honestly I'd consider it the original social media, but without all the algorithmic bullshit that let you organically find people with similar interests).
Finally - I think the drive of FB to have everyone put everyone they know IRL and the ease of "add all your friends from your contacts" makes that also much easier. By adding IRL people, it changes the dynamic. When a lot of us came online, we were looking for an escape FROM the people IRL. We wanted a new space, away from "out there". Eternal September, the normies invaded. They were everywhere, and at all times. And people add them because it's rude not to. And the escape that the online world provided with similar minded people you were hoping to find was reduced back to the friction of "the real world" and the same fights. Note that alone isn't bad in itself. A bubble is also a bad thing.
But further: 7) Ideological Techno-utopianism that doesn't take into account all the corporate power behind the algorithms, the data sharing, and the means of keeping engagement (by rage-baiting, bad-faith-actors, etc...) I used to be one of them, I used to crow about JPB's "Declaration of Cyberspace Independence" in the 90s. Even until maybe 2015 I had hopes. But slowly I began to realize these architectures amplify the worst tendencies of social interaction, purposefully or not. My point with the 90s utopianism is that this Red Book reads like it's 20 years out of date, even by the time it was written, but maybe not. Maybe it just took time for the iPhonization/SocialMedia effects to take root and alter society on the level it has.
"Convenience is the enemy". I don't know the answer, frankly. I know there are a lot of people who try to bring back "the old days" with things like indieweb movement and small shell accounts for kids to try out what the old dial up world was like, and people get interested, but the mass pull of the large places is too great. The power of having an audience (which is the magic of social media - that stream makes it EASY for everyone to just dip their foot in and out whenever they want another nibble from the Dopefish^TM on their feet). There's the tipping point where everyone's friends finally jump ship, this happened with Livejournal and Myspace over to Facebook. Or now Twitter/X to Bluesky. Early adopters watch as the masses come to their little place, sometimes they are happy about it, but other times they see what they thought of as "their" space now invaded by an outside culture. Bluesky probably not so much since it's still quite like Twitter, and most of the people coming in are from Twitter, but for other places there are cultural shifts. Another big change I can think of is how Reddit went from a pretty technical place early on to one full of lazy bro joking when Digg users migrated en masse, and the vibe shifted radically even though Reddit was more bountiful with content.
Some of this will always be a tradeoff (it's called Eternal September for a reason after all), but some of this are design choices. I wish I could say that those designing these things honestly have the best interest of society at heart, but after watching enshittification play out the past decade+ it really feels like good intentions don't mean shit and a lot of hard work needs to go into making a productive place.
It helps when engaged community members are helping run things (whether good reddit mods, or mods on metafilter, or people like dang here on hackernews). Free for all media isn't bad, and I'm not saying every site needs to have mods, etc... But... It does seem like people who have an intentional community and a vibe they are trying to retain can help inculcate a better social atmosphere than shoving everyone into a clowncar walled garden and expecting civil society (especially when algorithms feed on making those dopamine hits for engagement).
In the old days, you were small groups exploring the uncharted. You were in the minority because you were part of a group of pioneers, and I think there was a sense of optimism and excitement around that. I think a lot of the magic is gone precisely because tech is now ubiquitous and mainstream.
I can't help but wonder if it's my nostalgia as well, but I feel like 1995 - 2005 was the golden decade. It was at the point that technology was actually good enough to enable a lot of stuff (broadband, large storage media, etc), but it was still enough in its embryonic state that the novelty was still there.
P.S. Your JPB quote from 1992 reminded me of Stuart Brand in 1985:
> "Computers suppress our animal presence. When you communicate through a computer, you communicate like an angel."
How else can such a site exist, grow to such scale, and not fall over if it doesn't make money?
> People would absolutely pay for social media if the product was good enough. In fact, I believe we're heading towards that future[1].
People won't do this. A very very small percentage of people will do this. Time and time again that's been proven to be true. Which is fine, but the globally connected social media could never have existed by charging every person on Earth.
Mark my words, paid search will not overtake free search. The people who value paid social media over free social media enough to actually pay are always going to be a very small minority (albeit well represented in this forum)
taps the sign
The idea that companies need hyper growth, "escape velocity," or whatever to succeed is outdated.
> paid search will not overtake free search
There is space for paid and free to coexist. It's not a zero-sum game.
