Snippets: November 27, 2016
Welcome to the first issue of Snippets on Medium! Don’t worry, regular Snippets will still come to your inbox on Sunday nights. You can subscribe here. We’ll now also repost them on here on Monday, under our new Social Capital publication. As always, if you have feedback or suggestions for pieces to include, please send them to me on Twitter @alex_danco or to snippets@socialcapital.com. Enjoy!
It has sure been a fun past few weeks for Facebook, hasn’t it?
So, to recap: a few months ago Facebook was accused of being biased in their Trending Topics algorithm. But really the problem was the news feed, we decided, because of the built-in filter bubble. But they replaced the humans with algorithms anyway, which were terrible. Then they took a bunch of flak for “abuse of power” after censoring an iconic Pulitzer Prize winning photo. Then Trump TV launched on Facebook Live, and we grimaced but thought that’d be the worst of it. Then the election happened, and none of us saw it coming, and it was all Facebook’s fault. Then maybe… it actually was Facebook’s fault? But Facebook says absolutely not, and Mark Zuckerberg told us we were all being crazy and please knock it off. Naturally, we all took that suggestion well. Also, briefly, we were all dead. Then a fake news author spoke up and squirmed that, while he regrets his actions, he also got kinda rich doing it. And we got a quick about-face from Mark that assured us that “the percentage of misinformation is very small.” Which, naturally, was served to Ev Williams next to two sponsored stories that were very much fake news. But thankfully that was the end of the story because it really couldn’t get any more ridiculous, could i-Oh wait, China.
Let’s pause to take a deep breath.
Part of what’s making people so upset is that there really isn’t a modern precedent for this situation. Facebook exists somewhere along the continuum from “A kingdom under absolute control of the royalty’s velvet glove” to “a decentralized, cacophonous network with no one in charge”. And it’s not clear that anyone really knows where Facebook lies on that spectrum — or, indeed, where it should lie. Mark, Sheryl and the Facebook management team are in uncharted territory.
We can do a quick thought experiment though. At one theoretical extreme, we can imagine what the response to this fake news / censorship / filter bubble crisis would be if Facebook were a truly decentralized platform with no one in charge, and therefore there was nothing anyone could do to change it. On the other theoretical extreme, we can imagine what the response would be if Facebook were a monarchy that dictated absolute control, and therefore there was nothing anyone else could do to change it. So where does that leave us in the middle?
This is just one perspective, but it seems as though the real cause of frustration is that this continuum exists at all. Facebook has done a phenomenal job creating an institution that connects all the world’s people together, or at the very least to other members of their respective tribes. They’re a new kind of state that has never existed before — one that can simultaneously maintain the plausibility of being both a decentralized network whose strength is in its people but also a walled fortress whose strength is in its central algorithmic judgement. And we’ve become citizens of this strange place over the last twelve short years. No wonder it feels strange.
The duality of worlds like Facebook is difficult to grok. But we’ve managed to mostly ignore it without consequence until the past few months, when this duality had a very real and profound effect on our old fashioned, analog world. These past few months will likely blow over, but the conversation around this continuum between two extremes — and the implicit responsibility of its leaders — has started in earnest.
People with things to say:
Bobby Bose of Ezetap on India’s migration to digital | INK2016
Around the country:
Democrats don’t have an easy answer for the rust belt | Alana Semuels, The Atlantic
In a California valley, healthy food everywhere but on the table | Thomas Fuller, NYT
Can cities counter the power of president-elect Trump? | Benjamin Barber, The Nation
On security:
On phone numbers and identity | Philip Martin, Coinbase
The limits of Android N encryption | Matthew Green
Energy and its policies:
ComEd strips mandatory demand charges from Illinois energy bill | Julia Pyper, Green Tech Media
Siemens and US Startup LO3 Energy collaborate on blockchain microgrids | BusinessWire
Other reading from around the Internet:
How we structure our teams and work at basecamp | Jason Fried
Facebook, Google, Twitter et al need to be champions for media literacy | Dan Gillmor
Why the fuss about serverless? | Simon Wardley
Why great writers write | Shane Parrish, Farnam Street
Manufacturing jobs aren’t coming back | Mark Muro, MIT Technology Review
20 weird and wonderful datasets for machine learning | Oliver Cameron
The code I’m still ashamed of | Bill Sourour
ESPN lost two million subscribers in fiscal 2016 | Erich Schwartzel, WSJ
And some holiday posts just for fun:
As we wrap up our Thanksgiving weekends and head back to work, we want to share this reflection from Chamath on a recent interview about tech, our responsibility for our fellow people, and how to move forward into the next four years.
“The state department, in my mind, is the chief marketing officer of peace and prosperity. That’s their job — to make sure we are building bridges, we are building relationships. The thing that Silicon Valley has not understood, and frankly it should have been obvious and a huge punch in the face after November 8th, is that at the root of peace and prosperity, as we’ve defined it, is some form of capitalism. And capitalism, the way that it works today, is structurally broken. Because we take a few people here, and we use software, and we’re able to do with ten people what otherwise was done by a hundred fifty, or a thousand people. And that doesn’t have to be the value proposition. It was chosen to be that way. So now we have to ask some really difficult questions. What are the true and right long term profit margins in the businesses that we build? What are the businesses that we should build? How should we build them?
“Somewhere along the way, a capital allocation decision was made along the following lines. Path A: I’m going to go build some random site where a bunch of dopes can update photos and waste a bunch of time; or Path B: I’m going to build an amazing new robotic infrastructure that will actually keep some of these manufacturing jobs in the United States. There was, theoretically, the ability to have that threshold of conversation. We didn’t do it. And everyone here in Silicon Valley in some way is complicit because we chose Path A. And we chose Path A because the economic incentives said ‘Wait a minute, if this thing works, all these hundreds of millions of people all around the world will, for free, be effectively our employees!’ In what universe could we ever build a business on the backs of 1.7 billion people and never pay them? That’s a fantastic business! And when you see the artifact of that success, everybody else follows suit. The capital flows that way. The intellectual capital flows that way. The human capital flows that way. The social capital flows that way. But then the artifact is basically a lot of people who say, wait a minute. That is not the compact I thought we had. So I do think there’s a conversation we have to have: how do we allocate our time and money in more productive, constructive ways? And if it means that our EBITDA margins are not 65% and they’re 40%, so be it. That may be the grand bargain of the 21st century. And my point is, who helps frame that conversation? Today that conversation isn’t possible to have. And as a result, what you have are literally fifty five million people left out on the sidelines. That is not right!
I thought that I was doing my job, and doing my best, until November 8th. And as a person who grew up in an economically really difficult situation, I look at a lot of those people as my people. And I feel like I completely let those people down. And here I am and I live my comfortable little life in my halcyon days, and I think to myself, My God, I’ve betrayed these people. These are my people.”
There’s a lot of work ahead. Let’s get to it.
We hope you all had a good holiday and are ready for the last push of 2016. Have a safe journey to all that are traveling,
Alex & the team at Social Capital
