Mike Trigg's Blog, page 7

Facebook Is Us

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Facebook has had a tough month. Really, they’ve had a tough last five years, which have been a nonstop parade of bad news—everything from spreading misinformation in the 2016 election, to compromising user data in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, to helping instigate the Capitol Riot. But since early September, the sixth largest company in the world by market cap has seen one of its steepest stock price declines ever—plunging by about 12%, around $120 billion in value.

The latest wave of setbacks started with the release of a trove of internal documents, dubbed the Facebook Files and largely broken over a series of articles in the Wall Street Journal, that show Facebook’s executives knew about and largely chose to ignore many ill-effects of their platform, from polarizing our politics to triggering teen suicide. That cheery revelation was followed by the whistleblower herself, Frances Haugen, going public in everything from a 60 Minutes interview to Congressional testimony, about what she saw inside the company. Then, of course, there was the massive service outage (not only of Facebook but Instagram and WhatsApp as well)—rare and suspicious enough in its timing as to cause speculation it was a deliberate distraction tactic, or even a chance for Facebook engineers to expunge compromising code.

Most mere mortal businesses wouldn’t have survived one of these scandals, let alone a seemingly endless series of them. The mainstream media has ruthlessly portrayed Facebook as an evil empire, a monopolist manipulating our society and exploiting our children. The company is one of the few topics that liberals and conservatives agree on—both sides hate them and relish eviscerating their executives every time they’re dragged to Capitol Hill. It doesn’t help that Mark Zuckerberg looks like an unhinged sociopath who hasn’t seen sunlight in years.

As cathartic as it is to blame a nefarious villain for our societal problems, my perspective is that Facebook is less a deliberate bad actor and more an example of extreme group think. As Haugen herself said, “No one at Facebook is malevolent.” Arguably, they’ve done exactly what companies are supposed to do: maximize growth, revenue, and profits for their shareholders. What makes the business so unusual though is that their “product” is us. We go there to share and consume information about ourselves and our friends. And Facebook is extremely adept at giving us exactly what we want—whatever dopamine hit will hook us so they can serve us up to advertisers. The real moral question of Facebook and its ancillary brands is whether a company should be able to exploit human behaviors for profit.

To really understand Facebook’s current state and the case for regulating it, it’s informative to look back at the origin of social networking. I happen to have been running marketing for one of the world’s largest social networks, hi5, when social networking businesses were first erupting. Though the company is largely forgotten now, along with contemporaries like Orkut, Six Degrees, Bebo, and dozens more, when I was there from 2008-2010, hi5 was a top-15 website in the world. It was not obvious at the time that Facebook would become the behemoth it is today. I recall telling a colleague who worked there that they were foolish to pass on Yahoo’s billion-dollar offer to buy the company. My bad. While modern social networking was invented by Friendster and scaled by MySpace, it was perfected by Facebook. Their reward was to become a trillion-dollar company.

But back in those Darwinian days, Facebook was in a fight for its life. With the benefit of hindsight, the company did several things right that were critical to its ultimate success. Likely due to their humble origins on college campuses, Facebook instilled a behavioral norm that users provided their real names and pictures on their profiles. Most other social networking sites had random anonymous profiles on them, making it much harder to find your real friends. Facebook also invented the News Feed. Most other social networking sites got boring after a while, but Facebook fed you an endless diet of the next thing to look at, click on, or react to. And Facebook launched Facebook Platform which enlisted thousands of software developers building addictive widgets, from hotness meters to Farmville, that gave Facebook’s users even more to do—more clicks, more ads, more revenue.

What all these innovations shared in common is that they increased user engagement. Turns out connecting with real friends is much more engaging than random strangers. Turns out if you stick an endless stream of information in the middle of the screen, users will scroll and click on it until they’re left drooling with their eyes crossed. Turns out if you release millions of rabid developers loose on your platform, some of them will invent apps that compel users to constantly check on the status of pretend crops. Who woulda thought. Really, what made Facebook a trillion-dollar company was one central success factor that they were better at than anyone else: discovering and amplifying what we human beings find engaging.

Imagine how deeply ingrained that gets into the DNA of an organization. What a foundational reward system it becomes. An entire generation of Facebook employees—from executives to engineers, designers to data scientists—became really, really, really good at giving us exactly what we want. On a daily basis for the last 17 years, they have continuously tuned their UI, their messaging, their interactions, their algorithms to keep us engaged, entertained, addicted. We are the product. And every day we blithely hand over, via the tell-all truth-sayer of our click stream, exactly what activates us.

What Facebook has harnessed is two million years of human evolution. Giving us what we are biologically hardwired to want. As any social scientist can tell you, human beings seek mates. Click. Human beings like being part of a group, forming tribes for our self-defense. Click. Human beings like to share information for the benefit of the tribe. Click. Human beings care what other human beings think about them. Click. Human beings like the validation of other human beings agreeing with us. Click. Human beings like to be entertained. Click. Whatever it is that gets us to click, tap, swipe, view, like, comment, share or otherwise engage is dopamine for us and ad dollars for Facebook. Symbiosis.

Every company in the history of companies has tried to perfectly serve the needs of its customers. “Give the customer what they want.” “The customer is always right.” When that company-to-customer connection is mild, it’s called “Brand Loyalty.” When it’s strong, it’s called addiction. Which brings us back to the fundamental difference between Facebook and other companies that created addictive products, whether it was tobacco, oil, or OxyContin. Facebook’s product is us.

The credit that Facebook rarely gets is that they almost certainly do much more to tamp down our basest instincts rather than exploit them. I saw these behaviors first hand at hi5. Left unmoderated, social networks spawn hate groups, child pornography, and prostitution rings as efficiently as they do baby pictures, high school reunions, or the Arab Spring. Again, that is the inherent nature of the platform: it gives us what we want. For some of us, those wants are really bad things. And because those wants are public, Facebook creates its own moral obligation to regulate them. Of course, they can't permit illegal activity, or unethical, or exploitative, or . . . Merely unpleasant? Mildly objectionable? Possibly offensive? Where do we draw the line? What comments, actions, or behaviors do we tolerate? For the first time, humanity’s proclivities, from our darkest obsessions to our mildest prejudices, are up for discussion in a public forum.

And herein lies the undeniable imperative that Facebook needs to be regulated. We cannot permit a handful of unelected private sector executives, personally enriched by their company’s stock price, deciding what is acceptable and what is not, while hiding behind Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. As decision-makers they are fundamentally conflicted. Though they haven’t cynically exploited the most pernicious behaviors that would have transpired on their platform if left completely unmoderated, their ultimate loyalty is to their shareholders, not the greater societal good. We should not expect, nor want, them to be those arbiters.

That is why, as Haugen testified, every dilemma between Facebook’s interests and the well-being of its users is decided in favor of Facebook. Just as many Facebook users are addicted to the service, Facebook itself is addicted to growth, revenue, and profit. It cannot deny its sole purpose as a corporate entity, its fiduciary obligation to itself. Even bridled with the best intentions of well-meaning employees, it can’t self-regulate. Because we are the product, not even Zuckerberg himself fully controls it—there are just too many of us, two billion every day, generating content. Even if Facebook’s executives were saints, they can’t stop us from subjecting ourselves to our own worst instincts. The company, like many of its users, is like a drug-addled pusher, rationalizing its behavior, in denial, hooked on a bender, just one more bump. We need an intervention.

Domesticated

The start of the academic school year last month forced me to grapple with a reality I must admit I was in some degree of denial about: I’ve become a stay-at-home dad. With my younger son returning to in-person school and my older son leaving for college, I suddenly realized that at some point in the last year I transitioned from “work from home” to “stay at home.”

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Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

This was not the occupation I envisioned for myself at this juncture in my career. Not something that logically fit on my LinkedIn profile. Like many domestic partners, this also wasn’t really a conscious choice, but the logical culmination of a bunch of rational decisions that led to a place I didn’t entirely intend to go. Like David Byrne, I found myself asking, “how did I get here?”

The short answer is Covid. I don’t want to blame the pandemic entirely, but, like every family, ours was forced to radically alter the two-career lifestyle that had defined our entire adult lives. Unfortunately, due to traditional gender roles and workplace discrimination, women were more often pushed back into domestic roles than men—as housekeepers were unavailable, nannies were quarantined, and the load of domestic chores accumulated with everyone at home 24/7.

My own journey followed a similar pattern. Like most Americans, it started last March when my company implemented a mandatory work-from-home policy. I was running a six-person software startup with half our team offshore, so working remotely actually suited us. We mostly met on Zoom already anyway. But that change had far reaching consequences. First, it forced us to change our business model. We originally targeted businesses as our customers, but businesses abruptly stopped spending money on nascent software startups, so we pivoted to focus on consumers, forcing changes to our product and costing us time. Second, the pandemic made fundraising more difficult, at least in our sector. As venture funding redirected into businesses that benefited from the pandemic, we were on the outside looking in. Third, working from home robbed us of that important hunker down mindset. Distracted by household chores, it was too easy for us to lose focus and allow our energy and enthusiasm to dissipate.

The second big contributor to my new stay-at-home life was more personal. The combination of no household help with the fact all four of us were continuously at home generating substantially more dishes, laundry, and overall mess, meant a significant amount of housework needed to get done—before we were all buried under a pile of dirty dishes and clothes. Meanwhile, Covid was causing my wife’s job to become more demanding. Being in the healthcare field, her business actually accelerated during the pandemic, soon pulling her back to the office for longer and longer stretches. My children picked up some of the housekeeping load, becoming much more self-sufficient adults. They are both wonderfully self-motivated kids, so I didn’t need to become their tutor on top of everything else. Parents with young children or kids with more demanding needs don’t have that advantage.

By late last year, the writing was on the wall for my startup. I’d given myself until the end of December to raise more funding. Spiking Covid cases at that time made that difficult. And we simply hadn’t made enough progress as a business. The end of 2020 was a pretty dark time as we commenced with shutting down the company and laying off employees, while the entire country seemed to convulse with the election, ongoing quarantine mandates, and social unrest.

But the new year started with a resolution to lean into this new, unfamiliar role and take advantage of its silver lining. Although it’s not a path I might have chosen without the forcing function of a global pandemic, I enjoyed the additional precious time with my kids, taking our dog on long walks, and generally slowing down the frenetic tempo of my prior professional life. Plus, most importantly, this change has afforded me the opportunity to really focus on my writing—finally finishing my first novel (coming out next summer!) and writing a second.

So while the pandemic may have turned me into a stay-at-home dad, it also gave me the chance to pursue lifelong goals that might never have happened otherwise. Every path has unexpected benefits.

Half Nesters

Photo by Mateusz Stępień on Unsplash

A few weeks ago, August 26 to be exact, we dropped my oldest son off at college—a milestone perhaps as momentous for parents as it is for the ascending freshman, an indelible mark in the passage of time, a step closer to retirement, hair loss, grandchildren, senior living communities.

Eight hours of travel time and three time zones now separate us, leaving us as what I call “half nesters.” The baby we held in our arms has become a full-blown man whom I needed to stand on my tip toes to hug when we left for the airport. In three short years, we will be proper empty nesters, with our youngest hurtling toward his own graduation and college adventure at a rate that seems continuously to accelerate.

Of course, in this day and age, we can stay connected digitally with our children in myriad ways that didn’t even exist when I left for college. Text messages, FaceTimes, live streams of concerts and athletic events all afford us the chance to stay connected. Yet, these are also a constant temptation. We have to force ourselves not to lurk through our cameras. To resist the comfort of the digital connection that is always within reach of our phones. Let him have his independence, I keep telling myself—arguably the entire point of the four-year college experience.

In 1988, my freshman year, I might as well have been on a desert island. The connection to my parents was limited to weekly voicemails left “after the beep” on a tiny cassette tape within a dusty answering machine. Once a month, out of guilt, I would call back, in an immediate haste to hang up. I was barely heard from until Thanksgiving. My parents’ generation was even more detached, limited mostly to written letters on actual paper, delivered by a tired mule or carrier pigeon, I imagine.

Today, transitioning our children to the responsibility and independence of adulthood requires deliberate intent, cutting of the digital cord. My son has peers who video conference with their parents a half dozen times a day. FaceTime, Zoom, and Facebook Portal enable an always-on connection, as if the child is still in the next room. Amazon Prime delivers any want or need to their dorm room overnight. WhatsApp, SnapChat, and Instagram all stand ready to convey the latest thought or image, question or concern. All of it enabling parent-child co-dependence indefinitely—as we knock down obstacles for them, solve their problems, stunt their maturation.

But I get it. Now as a half nester, when I sit in my son’s empty room, I definitely get it. I see the tassel dangling from a lamp, the sports awards pegged to the wall. Stuffed animals piled on a bed, too childish to offer comfort yet too sentimental to be thrown away. Books stacked on shelves, about subjects never to be studied again. Posters for sporting events, concerts, and vacation destinations that bring back a flood of memories. Drawers still full of shirts I’ve seen him wear hundreds of times—too small or worn to make the packing list. Articles of clothing just waiting for the nostalgia to fade enough for us to take them to Goodwill. What to do with pictures of friends and teammates, toys, trinkets, and trophies, mementos and memorabilia—all of it left untouched, as if he were about to bound through the door from school, from practice, from a party. Preserved like an exhibit at a museum for that eventual Thanksgiving visit, for Christmas, for next summer.

As our children dive head first into the academic and social adventure that is college, we parents grapple with these ubiquitous reminders of their absence. Like a phantom limb your brain insists is still connected. Triggers for a tangled basket of mixed emotions—so proud of them, yet part of us still wanting to keep them as a child forever. Fret over course loads, homework, and fraternity parties. Intervene in roommate disputes, class selection, and messy breakups. Encourage them to have fun, but not too much fun. Wanting them to know you’re there for them, but not hovering. A compulsion to call, to text, that is hard to resist. The inverse of home sickness. Away fever.

As digital natives, our kids are, in many ways, better equipped and more disciplined at setting communication boundaries than we are. Like the unplayed messages on my freshman year answering machine, the text messages will wait longer for a response, the photos will remain unliked, the video calls will be sent to voicemail—not because they don’t love us, but because they have their own lives to live. Inching further and further away as they find their sea legs, gain confidence, become independent. Ultimately, that, as parents, is what we want—happy, healthy, well-adjusted young adults.

Hard as it is, our job is to let them go.