Facing the Book
When we say @Facebook is toxic, what do we mean? What level is the toxicity in depth of the organisation? We can’t possibly think everyone who works there is awful… is there a case of instead of destroying it, can it be converted to good?
People can change. Why can’t organisations? I suppose people say that they can’t as the automated system of autopilot and profit serving ensures that the rail is laid. However, companies have pivoted in the past, and great minds and great people can transform a service.
Think of Nokia, which originally was a fishing brand (Fishing Boots etc I believe?) they eventually went on to make telecom related infrastructure, eventually into mobile handsets and now back to telecom with IOT and 5G devices.
I like to think about problems or people at the max, at it’s best what is Facebook? It is a platform tool that provides a podium for people to have reach and ability to engage in a market (voicing opinion & selling products). It is the definition of what a system can do to add fluidity and reduce friction from going from 0 to flying. Ultimately a brand or business if of genuine merit will survive, it will find away… but if Shopify or FB get you going fast then its hard not to avail of it.
Advertising is dead in the old way. That is a longer piece and I would advise you read Eugene Wei’s excellent “Status as a Service”. (Link included).
Zuckerberg made a point many months ago that if the US Gov. wanted to break up FB, it would take him months and months to do so, as the underlying code is so intertwined in the systems of Instagram, FB, & WhatsApp etc. He bought himself time.
All things die or fracture. Cells do it everyday. Splitting and starting a new path isn’t a bad thing. Google discovered this a long time ago with Alphabet. Think about the laundry detergent you use? Which one is and isn’t also a P&G product. Wearing Converse? Are you wearing Nike really. Innocent Drinks… That’s a Coca Cola Company (Innocent still gives X amount to charity, is whimsical and produces some the best quality ‘natural’ raw ingredient drinks going). Can good prevail in the shadow of profits?
FB have had the long game planned out for a while. Libra now Diem has been in works for years. and they bought Oculus years ago and are pushing teams and projects hard for the last 2 years. FB released the FB phone and the Portal. Say what you will about monopolies and huge actors in our daily services life… very rarely does a ‘software’ company come along and make good ‘hardware’ on their first go. Google struggled for years and it took buying up part of Motorola and HTC to make decent industrial design but they got there. The point being — FB is well run company by the sounds of it, despite the toxicity which is a by product of a bigger issue that is coming to a head in society.
FB is the definition of Harvey Dent’s you die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become a villain. They have gotten the their ducks in a row. micro services and cheap payment rail systems are nearly there with blockchain and the VR/AR reality is close which will thrive in the Metaverse digital assets world we are entering with NFTs. But is it all too late? The crescendo moment is peaking for FB… but the brand has become poison. The purest form of ‘crypto’ revolution is fighting back against needing platforms like FB… but in reality we want plug and play systems. (that is another huge debate and a excellent thought piece (see also links added for platforms vs protocols).
Do not forget that FB started as a way for college students to connect online and share their IRL’s digitally. The avg. on cusp sub 23 year old would probably view it as a place where their parents hangout now, so it’s not cool, but in reality having a phonebook online is still pretty handy. I still nearly exclusively use FB for those 2 needs — Finding someone I haven’t contacted in a while + Birthday reminders… yet the platform does so much now, and we take for granted that while we might not need to sell goods on a local online market place, or need to send funds to a friend because I live in a area of world were having a smart money app / bank isn’t a option yet. Then this other service, which much like Google Search — is essentially the internet for many.
Google too have been living past their die a hero date… Peak Google Search was lost maybe… about 5 years ago ? (that is just a rough personal estimate). But I feel I could actually use it to find what I wanted. Same with Youtube. but the advertising model has killed that. We are in a horrible loop of funneling the user down not what they want but what we think they want (and unfortunately a little of that misguided intent does rub off even if we think we are better at filtering / curating that effect).
70% or so of Googles revenue was advertising. They know it’s over. This is why they actually own or have a hand in some of the biggest future technology companies in the world. If we go back to the starting point. Should companies let themselves fracture more? Google has been able to run many services as at a loss because they feed the whole grand view. (Google often strangled some services by trying to adorn the G badge over them while also starving some individually branded of the Google Network effect).
Amazon are very clear example of this, with Prime Video until recently being a afterthought. Something that was a nice to have add-on to you getting Prime. But wait until the micro-services and metaverse network effects kick in. Buying music or articles of clothing directly off of a paused screen will happen. (plenty of patents exist on this).
Back to the FB pivot and a piece of industry Amazon has their eyes on with a recent huge online RPG game. Video game culture and AR/VR digital worlds and assets are becoming a reality. What if owning a Echo comes with a geospatial speaker in the virtual world? Maybe our digital assistants will soon become the Navi’s of Link from Legend of Zelda series. (Will we have out of box versions of from big tech and then more private bespoke but technical knowledge needed versions that we train?)
Something that we saw with Apple, is that in the modern digital age, privacy has become a digital luxury. The advertising model has broken down (we critique better in general, the algorithms are warping themselves, we want more privacy, we see through fake influence and seek genuine advocacy). This idea of digital assets that have financial value are becoming essential as the freemium model of giving up data will no longer exist.
Facebook are doubling down on this outcome (and this outcome may very well be essential if the world’s IRL energy and commodity shortage keeps on course — NB. energy consumed by digital living is still high and while their are more efficient ways being developed all the time, they are a few years away. So the question is, are digital artefacts of monetary gain just a way to keep selling us products? because they are a little cheaper to make then harvesting raw material, making them into forms, and shipping them half way around the world?
AR/VR is hard. Look at Magic Leap. But Snapchat are doing great things also and in the bushes silently buying up some the best startups in the tech space for it — Apple will wait until significant market buy-in is established (they need to be careful not to wait too long, as while letting Tesla break open the electric + self driving cars industry, they waited too long to acquire them. Apple generally let others start a trend, then they set it. But they missed the boat with Tesla when they turned down option to buy it. (The question is was it meant? so that Tesla could establish a new industry for them to gallop into… or/and — Apple then discovered that making cars is actually quite hard?).
Facebook have done the same now with digital currencies and the past year has seen a boom in 3D type worlds related to blockchain + NFT related living.
Their new name and branding, and restructuring of company, might be the most important moment yet. When you decide to bury a villain it’s often because you are about to plant new trees on the plot instead.
I would be long FB or whatever the new company is called. If they could acquire Shopify and Discord and add to high end gaming studios. Then they would be up there with Amazon and Google (both of whom are about to have some of their traditional pies eaten).
Lets see if the Square and Twitter and Blockchain/Payments effect work for Jack Dorsey’s vision, which is far closer to open protocols vs platforms (which by their censorship of late does not seem as sure set as the promise hopes us to believe). But the accumulation phase of Twitter has taken root and seems to be breaking out. (FB had to cannibalise the intrinsic values of FB & Instagram to finally start generating revenue as running services and products focused on the users need rather then also make money became impossible — While Twitter ran a simple core fragile but powerful platform who they did very little to tweak until very recently with the rise in value of digital self)
Regardless, the future looks likely to have a digital passport of sorts. Much like we use our FB , Google, LinkedIn, Github, Apple etc to sign and verify. We will likely have a 3 fold version of you online in a blockchain ID wallet, that will store all permissions etc in;
- True Full self (Think tax reasons)
- Pseudonym self (Think Reddit Avatar you) (Scanner Darkly)
- Throwaway Anon. self (100% private, like Burner Money Cards)
Bonus: Keep eyes on the nifty stuff Brave Browser are doing along with Urbit for a new way of doing computer OS’s and network links.
The question is what masks will we choose to wear into the future, and which version of itself will Facebook adorn going forward, as they put their current book back on the shelve and begin to write the next story. (I personally think if it was available for right price that that would be a suitable renaming — Story.
Get Rich / Design Trying
Status as a Service (StaaS) — Remains of the Day — www.eugenewei.com
Editor’s Note 1 : I have no editor. Editor’s Note 2 : I would like to assure new subscribers to this blog that most my posts are not as long as this one. Or as long as my previous one . My long break from posting here means that this piece is a collection of what would’ve normally been a series
Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech | Knight First Amendment Institute — knightcolumbia.org
After a decade or so of the general sentiment being in favor of the internet and social media as a way to enable more speech and improve the marketplace of ideas, in the last few years the view has shifted dramatically — now it seems that almost no one is happy. Some feel that these platforms have become cesspools of trolling, bigotry, and hatred.1 1. Zachary Laub, Hate Speech on Social Media: Global Comparisons, Council on Foreign Rel. (Jun. 7, 2019), https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/hate-speech-social-media-global-comparisons. Meanwhile, others feel that these platforms have become too aggressive in policing language and are systematically silencing or censoring certain viewpoints.2 2. Tony Romm, Republicans Accused Facebook, Google and Twitter of Bias. Democrats Called the Hearing ‘Dumb.’, Wash. Post (Jul. 17, 2018), https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/07/17/republicans-accused-facebook-google-twitter-bias-democrats-called-hearing-dumb/?utm_term=.895b34499816. And that’s not even touching on the question of privacy and what these platforms are doing (or not doing) with all of the data they collect.
