At this point, Facebook’s mission statement sounds like the title and punchline of the famous Twilight Zone episode, To Serve Man.
The problem is that Facebook’s openness is one-way. Radical transparency is at the other end of the behavioral spectrum.
We — the observed and mined — have no insight into who gets our data, how they use it to tempt or manipulate us, how Facebook decides what to show to whom, what Facebook does in emergencies or under pressure from governments… the list is big, and I’ll leave the topic here, lest this become a book.
There are many things to like about Zuckerberg’s Hacker Way letter.
The latter half of the letter turns into a beginner’s course in the Internet Way or what these days is called Lean Startups. I’m glad Facebook’s management is running is enterprise that way. How the service stays up consistently, given its torrid growth, boggles and impresses me.
What’s interesting is in the first half, where Zuckerberg sets these goals:
- We hope to strengthen how people relate to each other
- We hope to improve how people connect to businesses and the economy
- We hope to change how people relate to their governments and social institutions
These are awesome goals. I broadly agree with the hopeful statements Zuckerberg makes about how more openness will lead to more democracy, etc.
But the Devil is in the details, so let’s take each sector in turn, and let’s do something unusual: let’s think about the best things that Facebook might possibly do in each case, if it’s mission statement — optimistically interpreted — were actually guiding its actions.
How might Facebook improve how we relate to one another?
We’re a decade into a massively empowering change in the world. Through all of recorded history, back into prehistory, it was never possible for one individual to leave materials (text, data, music, movies, designs, games, manifesti, code, more) in front of the majority of the world’s citizens — at very little cost. Of course there will be addictions, stupid behavior, unintended consequences and backlash. But on the whole, we’ll sort this out for the better.
The key for a beneficent Facebook is how to help us do that.
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