
An Anti-Facebook Manifesto, by an Early Facebook Investor - smharris65
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/29/books/review/roger-mcnamee-zucked.html
======
androidgirl
I understand this is a manifesto, but really the dialogue around Facebook and
social media has truly become unhinged. Facebook is just a symptom, it seems

What is there to be _done_? Pandora's box is open, so to speak. If Facebook
disappeared overnight, are we really going to assume the problems they're in
are going to go away?

Everyone is potentially connected to everyone, everywhere, on the entire
planet. There has never been a technology so powerful as the centralized
internet.

Furthermore, outside of media companies and the HN bubble, people _do not
care_. Your average person doesn't care about decentralization, preventing
social media addiction, gamification, or polarization of online communities.

To the contrary the market shows that companies like FB are massively
successful.

So what are we to do? The world has been changed, drastically. Were we ready
for it? And if we somehow were rid of Favebook, are we ready for what follows?

~~~
jerf
"What is there to be _done_?"

A $0.01 tax per ad impression.

Such a thing would not destroy the advertising industry, but it would do
wonders for making it much less worthwhile to deploy massive surveillance
technology to make .03 cents more per user per day, and leave only very high-
value advertising behind. It would probably anti-decimate it or more, though
(leave only 10% behind instead of destroying 10%).

$0.10 per impression if you're feeling feisty.

~~~
jkingsbery
According to [https://blog.adstage.io/google-display-ads-cpm-cpc-ctr-
bench...](https://blog.adstage.io/google-display-ads-cpm-cpc-ctr-benchmarks-
in-q1-2018), advertisers spend around $2.80 for a thousand impressions in
display advertising. You're proposing a tax that is 3.5 times as much as the
thing itself costs. That would have pretty steep ramifications on the
industry.

Also, when one thinks about high-value advertising, it doesn't always
correlate with high-value to society, but rather things that are expensive.
That of course would incentivize advertisers to make sure their ad spends are
effective which would in turn _create more incentive for more ad tracking_.

~~~
jerf
"You're proposing a tax that is 3.5 times as much as the thing itself costs."

Yes. Yes I am. I did say it would probably cut 90% of the industry.

"That of course would incentivize advertisers to make sure their ad spends are
effective which would in turn create more incentive for more ad tracking."

They may sit there and _wish_ for more tracking, sure. They're pretty addicted
to that as the only model in the world for making money.

But if you may something much more expensive, and therefore much less
profitable, you are saying that you'll get even more of it. That's not how
raising prices works.

They're not tracking every last cough we make because they have to to make any
money. They track everything because it enables them to make .03% more off of
us, _and that .03% is profitable_. (Number made up, but the evidence strongly
suggests we're long past the point of diminishing returns on more tracking,
yet they do it anyhow.) Take away the profitability, and they'll stop doing
it.

They'll _have_ to. Most of them will be bankrupt and won't be tracking anybody
anymore.

Besides, exactly what "more" tracking are we concerned they're going to deploy
in a world where they have 90% less money and probably even less profit? They
already read all our email, track everywhere we go, track everything we see on
the internet, listen to a good chunk of what we say, and use our social
connections in every conceivable way to monetize us. What's left?

------
JohnJamesRambo
These large dominating companies are monopolies in every sense of the word and
need to be broken up. The Bell System was broken up and didn't have a tenth of
the tracking and control of people's lives that Google and Facebook do. Ma
Bell didn't actively harm its users and cause depression. Ma Bell didn't
collude with Russia to influence a presidential election and install a puppet
president.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly)

[https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/185/3/203/2915143](https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/185/3/203/2915143)
"Association of Facebook Use With Compromised Well-Being: A Longitudinal
Study"

~~~
AlexB138
> [Facebook colluded] with Russia to influence a presidential election and
> install a puppet president.

This is a conspiracy theory, and really diminishes the level of the
conversation here.

~~~
drugme
_[Facebook colluded]_

I'm not sure what source you're quoting, or what the original text was that
you're attempting to simplify.

EDIT: missed the quote when reading the message above somehow - sorry.

~~~
daveFNbuck
> Ma Bell didn't collude with Russia to influence a presidential election and
> install a puppet president.

In the context of an argument about why Facebook is a more dangerous monopoly
than Ma Bell, this implies that Facebook did collude with Russia.

~~~
drugme
OK, agreed - that was definitely unjustified hyperbole. By all accounts, they
did not intentionally "collude" with the Russians.

But what looms larger in my mind is the fact that FB was _egregiously
negligent_ in allowing the manipulation of their platform to take place to the
extent that it did --- both in the context of that fiasco, and in much worse
situations, e.g. in regard to the genocide against the Rohingya in Myanmar.

------
x3tm
What I struggle to understand is how could esteemed AI researchers like LeCun
and many others work for such a company to give it even more powers and edge?
How can they justify this as scientists?

The huge influx of money into research (here AI, but could be anything in the
future) combined with the disfunctions of academia is very troubling.

~~~
pesenti
I joined a year ago to lead the AI team (Yann is part of it but I am not
answering for him here). It's a choice as I don't have to work any longer. Why
am I there?

\- I believe Facebook's products are good for the world. They have had an
extremely positive impact on my family in particular.

\- It is the one place where AI can have a really positive impact on the
world.

\- It's is the most talented set of people I have ever worked with. Not just
the AI team but every single person I meet there.

\- I believe in Zuck. Despite all the bashing, he is one of the most
thoughtful and visionary leader I have worked for.

This said I don't agree with everything that the company has done. But
Facebook is a place were you are free to disagree openly and so far my team
and I have always been able to do what we considered the right thing to do.

[Edit: agreeing with the comments that I should have written "is one place"
instead of "is the one place"]

~~~
x3tm
Thanks for your clear reply. There's only one thing though from what you
mentioned that is not vague or subjective:

> It is the one place where AI can have a really positive impact on the world.

Can you develop on this please?

Why do you think a social network (however efficient it may be with e.g.
targeted ads) will have a bigger impact on its members versus e.g. AI in
healthcare? or finance? or education? which will have a truly global impact.

~~~
aylmao
Not OP, and I don't agree with "the one place", but I think I might see his
point from a content moderation perspective.

The possible effect of AI in other fields I think is overstated, or worries me
because it might take jobs. I'm skeptical about AI in education and don't
really see how it could fit. I think the negatives in education come from a
broken system and not necessarily a lack of "an efficient way to extract
information from data".

Dropping more automation in finance will just help extract value more
efficiently, not necessarily create it, which if anything I think is a
negative impact on the world.

Content moderation sounds like a big positive though. It is necessary, but not
really a job many people have or many people "should" have-- there's a lot of
violent, gory, traumatic things those people have to sift through.

I do think healthcare can be augmented by AI and doctors working together in a
way that doesn't cut jobs and increases the effectivity of treatment. Wether
that will happen or this will be an excuse to cut staff is a worry, though the
implications if effectivity of diagnosis and/or treatment increases are not to
be understated-- quite literally life-changing.

------
lumberjack
This debate is needlessly muddled by this fuzzy notion that because it is "the
Internet" therefore something different needs to be done, that this is somehow
a new situation. But it is not. If it was the 1970s and people were told to
sign a contract to allow a company to physically track every single event in
their lives, they would not consent to it. If it was the 1970s and some
company tried to get exclusive access to people's TV and radio to bombard them
with bespoke advertisement and propaganda, they would not consent to it. So
then what is so different? Nothing much. What Facebook and Google and others
are currently doing is way beyond what a sane society would allow. It is just
that people are confused because it is done through a new medium, but nothing
much is different.

------
tgb29
If he gave away all the profits he made from Facebook and put out the book for
free, then maybe I'd consider his feedback.

------
dkkdjdjsjd
Off topic comment here. I remember two years ago when people on HN were
arguing people that cared about privacy had something to hide. I am glad the
tide is starting to change. Privacy is a fundamental human right.

------
l5870uoo9y
It would be a dramatic change of decades of ideological, political and popular
sentiment to start breaking up companies or tightly regulating them. I doubt
it would happen.

~~~
ardy42
> It would be a dramatic change of decades of ideological, political and
> popular sentiment to start breaking up companies or tightly regulating them.
> I doubt it would happen.

I think it will. It took a couple decades of dramatic change to get us here
(in the 70s and 80s), and the pendulum is now swinging back (and probably has
been for the last decade).

------
danans
> Let’s examine the evidence. At its peak the planet’s fourth most valuable
> company, and arguably its most influential, is controlled almost entirely by
> a young man with the charisma of a geometry T.A.

Does the writer really think a more charismatic founder would have changed the
outcome for the better, or that more charisma would have led Zuckerberg to
make different choices?

Let's not forget that history is scarred from the manipulations of
_charismatic_ leaders.

This sounds rather like the old nerd/geek/greasy-grime bashing trope trotted
out again.

~~~
SilasX
Yeah, that seemed like an unnecessary, irrelevant personal attack.

Raise the alarm about what he's doing to privacy, not his social shortcomings.

------
paulsutter
Its curious that the media is going to such great lengths to paint Facebook as
villians.

My own Facebook stream is travel photos, people saying gushy things about
their spouse, plus a few people still obsessed with Trump. Harmless stuff.

Our lives must be pretty cushy when this is one of the biggest dangers that we
face.

~~~
opmac
Unfortunately I believe your myopic viewpoint is exactly what Facebook has
driven to create.

~~~
paulsutter
What are the sinister threats in your Facebook feed? Or are you just
speculating about what the unwashed masses must be seeing?

~~~
opmac
Not sure about threats, but I've seen plenty of fake news, conspiracies, etc;
many of which have been tied to Russian disinformation groups (or other
malignant foreign interests). See the Nation in Distress group;
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/10/11/faceboo...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/10/11/facebook-
purged-over-accounts-pages-pushing-political-messages-
profit/?utm_term=.9cdd16851e5f).

~~~
paulsutter
You saw these in your own feed? Do share

~~~
pixl97
Sounds like you're caught up in your own FB reality tunnel.

