Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

by Kara Swisher

For a long time, the bottom of the Facebook home page included the tag: “A Mark Zuckerberg Production.” Even more to the point: “His hero is Augustus Caesar, for fuck’s sake,”

Zuckerberg seemed to grok the downsides, noting the era “didn’t come for free.” He even admitted that Augustus had to “do certain things” to maintain order. Despite those peculiar caveats, Zuckerberg seemed to land on the side of Augustus Caesar and the belief that an emperor’s gotta do what an emperor’s gotta do. Osnos summed up Zuckerberg’s attitude perfectly, noting, “Between speech and truth, he chose speech. Between speed and perfection, he chose speed. Between scale and safety, he chose scale.” That idea of “mistakes were made” in service to the bigger idea would carry throughout Zuckerberg’s career and bleed into Facebook’s culture.

Very early in Facebook’s life, in fact, I was offered a job by one of Mark’s underlings who thought I should come and work on unspecific “editorial” issues. “Do they even care about editorial, about journalism, about anything except letting the algorithm rule?” I asked the executive, arrogantly astride my very high media horse. “No, but you could buy a Gulfstream someday,” he replied. Fair point, but it was lost on me.

And, oh yeah, we paid for it all by funding the creation of the Internet with taxpayer dollars and then with our own data. They owe us.

We had started out talking about Alex Jones, one of the worst people on the Internet (and in the world), who had pushed mendacious conspiracies about the mass murder of children in the Sandy Hook school shooting. He used Zuckerberg’s social network as his vehicle, even as he gamed it by breaking all the rules that the company had laid down. I wanted to know why Jones had not been tossed off the network, but Mark decided to double down on him in the interview. “Look, as abhorrent as some of this content can be, I do think that it gets down to this principle of giving people a voice,”

While Zuckerberg was not evil, not malevolent, not cruel, what he was, and continued to be, was extraordinarily naïve about the forces he had unleashed.

No, Zuckerberg wasn’t an asshole. He was worse. He was one of the most carelessly dangerous men in the history of technology who didn’t even know it. Unfortunately, he wasn’t the worst of them.

I didn’t say it out loud, but in my head I screamed a line that I wanted to say to an increasing number of players in the Internet space: “You’re so poor, all you have is your money!”

A truism began to form in my brain about the lack of women and people of color in the leadership ranks of tech: The innovators and executives ignored issues of safety not because they were necessarily awful, but because they had never felt unsafe a day in their lives. Their personal experience informed the development of unfettered platforms. And, in turn, this inability to understand the consequences of their inventions began to curdle the sunny optimism of tech that had illuminated the sector.

tech has always been a mirrortocracy, full of people who liked their own reflection so much that they only saw value in those that looked the same. They keep copying themselves, choosing slight variations on the same avatar template. Financial success was proof of their talents, which was like the old cliché of starting on third base and thinking you hit a home run.

“The people who love you are the only ones that count,” he said to me. Then, tearing up, he added, “Don’t waste your time on anyone else.” And then, wonder of wonders, he gave me a hug.

Like Jobs, I truly believe that you should push yourself in areas where you are passionate, and if you don’t feel passion toward something, get out of it.

consent decree that the company signed in 2011 that required users to be notified when their data was being shared by Facebook with third parties. After the scandal erupted in 2018 over whether political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica had been able to access data of 87 million Facebook users without their permission, the Federal Trade Commission got a $5 billion settlement from the company over violating the first agreement. Even though it was a landmark figure in the U.S., I called the fine a “parking ticket,” since it’s hard to imagine that Facebook’s executives saw the payment as anything other than a cost of doing business. They paid the ticket and continued with an ad-based business model that relies on getting and keeping the attention of users, and the ability to gather and mine data was critical.

In our interview in 2018, Zuckerberg remained painfully simplistic, as if all he really needed to know about free speech that he learned from CliffsNotes. “Freedom of speech and hate speech and offensive content. Where is the line, right?” he said. “And the reality is that different people are drawn to different places, we serve people in a lot of countries around the world, a lot of different opinions on that.” You can still make choices, I told a man who did not want to make choices, other than the choice of capitalism over community.

But things like, where is the line on hate speech? I mean, who chose me to be the person that [decided].” Well, Mark, you did. And what he was saying in 2018 was disingenuous since the hands-off attitude was already deeply entrenched at Facebook.

Facebook vice president Andrew Bosworth, one of Zuckerberg’s tight circle of advisers, the memo addressed the thorny issue explicitly: “Maybe it costs a life by exposing someone to bullies. Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools. And still, we connect people. The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is *de facto* good.”

As famed management guru Peter Drucker said: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”

they didn’t handle the propaganda. Not from the Russians. Not in Iran. And not in Sri Lanka, where a Buddhist mob attacked Muslims over false information spread on Facebook, prompting a government official to tell the New York Times in the most perfect of metaphors: “The germs are ours, but Facebook is the wind.”

The article noted, “A second senior U.S. defense official speaking on the condition of anonymity to be candid, said that there is no system comparable to Starlink and that the cost is likely to run into the hundreds of millions of dollars over the next year. This person had sharp words for Musk saying he ‘dangles hope over the heads of millions, then sticks the DoD with the bill for a system no one asked for but now so many depend on.’ ” The kicker concluded, “ ‘Elon’s gonna Elon,’ the official said.”