Good job with the scan. I started reading the book and began to feel rage so I stopped after about 20 pages. Is it the most self-unaware book or just people trying their hand at PR?
This was 2012. There was still hope and optimism in the tech space. The Internet had helped overturn powerful regimes and given voice to the disenfranchised. There was the idea that person to person public discourse could resolve many societal problems. Smartphones had exploded just 6 years prior and they were already making inroads into traditionally underserved and neglected communities around the world, helping farmers improve yields and young women become self sufficient so they could escape forced marriages.
The idea that we could join together and share ideas and make the world a better place isn't a wrong idea, it is just one that got subverted once it was realized that inciting anger in users lead to more usage and thus more ad impressions.
Some additional context: morale at Facebook was relatively poor around this time period, partially due to the disappointing stock performance right after the IPO, as well as a one-time company-wide reduction in bonuses a bit after that. So parts of this book may have been intended to help inspire a workforce that was becoming slightly disgruntled over compensation.
fwiw they were still giving the red book to all new hires in ~mid 2013. Personally at the time I found parts of it to be interesting from a "company telling its own history" perspective, and other parts to be extremely cringe-inducing. That said, I'm sometimes a grumpy cynic, and I'm also familiar with some random rare aspects of FB history due to previously working for Harvard IT. (I started working there a year after Zuckerberg dropped out, so didn't have any overlap, but some of my colleagues there were directly involved in the disciplinary hearings regarding Facemash.)
There's a school of thought in change management that suggests that a time comes when current stories aren't working for the culture you're trying to move an organisation towards. A few here have said morale was low at FB right then.
At times like that, restating some important old stories and legends, salted with some useful new ones can help to galvanize people and create the culture change you want.
A good example is someone mentioned in this thread is Zuck's beat up old car. That's a great old story for the early days, but probably needed burying at the Red Book time. Clearly he's not going to drive that forever, so you need some more up to date motivational culture lore which embraces more excess while retaining how the Devs are still world-changing hackers who should work all nighters because 'we're all in this together for mankind, team'.
The car wasn't beat up (I don't see anyone claiming that here) or even all that old... it was just a very modestly-priced choice of vehicle for someone of Zuckerberg's wealth and position. I believe he was still driving it at the time of the red book.
Nor does the book really "embrace more excess" financially, at least as far as I can remember (and I don't see any of that flipping through my dusty copy briefly just now either). Instead it's the opposite: "Facebook was not originally created to be a company", "We don't build services to make money, we make money to build better services", etc.
Again, this was a period of disappointing post-IPO stock performance. The market wasn't convinced yet that FB could successfully transition to focusing on mobile. It took about 15 months after the IPO for the share price to start looking more positive.
So that was a factor, combined with an obvious desire to keep aspects of "chaotic small nimble startup" vibe/culture at a company that was definitely no longer a startup.
Fb did actually accomplish a huge feat. They connected in a defacto social network pretty much everyone in the world that wanted to be connected via a social network. They had just hit a billion users in 2012, took them 8 years, and the internet existed with a lot of hype and similar pretty much failed attempts of this before they succeeded. I think a lot of people probably forget or are too young now to know what even the early successful internet was like. It had a ton of hype, promise, etc. but just doing something simple like talking to other people was kind of clunky. It was cool because it had all the BBS and forums and niche community stuff. But, I'd venture to say for most people it was a solo experience. You got online, did some reading or research or gamed a bit, but didn't really start talking to other humans online until the late 2000s or later. You definitely didn't have a way be connected with people you actually knew, to your social network as we know it today. Sure, you had email, but we all know that has a very specific purpose and is not exactly social or hitting the same spot. This was actually a world changing product, there was a lot to be optimistic about.
All that said, I am not much of a social media user and never really used Fb much myself. I see the appeal and I see the bad sides of it. I think we'd be much better off without it. I don't necessarily like the way in which it changed the world, but there was a lot to be excited about at this point in time. Not liking the product/company/industry/etc doesn't negated what they achieved.
I can kind of understand having that kind of optimism back in the Internet of, say, 1998, before we saw how vampiric venture-backed winner-take-most tech companies would be. But by 2012, it would be incredibly naive of tech employees (of any company) to seriously believe they were some kind of force for good.
There _was_ backlash. It just didn't operationalize very effectively. For instance, news organizations mostly saw FB and Google as a way to undermine and ultimately replace vetted news with unvetted, unprofessional hot takes. Anyone above a certain age likely saw these viewpoints and agreed with them but not enough to start a movement.
When facebook became generally available I was maybe 14-15, and even back then I remember thinking "this feels very much like it's going to ruin some young womens' lives". But what the hell was I going to do? I mean - the platform _was_ used as a sort of early Tinder, where sexual attraction could play out in a semi-anonymized way.
The problem regarding news orgs is that they have previously sounded the alarm about bloggers, insisting that the sky was going to fall down now that any random person was allowed to just say anything they wanted and have other people read it!
But many of those blogs (which now take the form of subscription newsletters) had incredibly valuable insight and perspectives that were otherwise not being reported on. The news media's alarmism about bloggers was (IMHO rightfully) ignored.
So when a couple of years later they started freaking out about Facebook/Twitter/etc, well, same old story, new platform.
The difference this time was that FB and Twitter algorithmically fed articles to people, instead of articles naturally spreading virally from person to person.
Not that the platforms were that bad at first! Remember that in the early 2010s Facebook was largely a platform for Farmville! It was drowning in spam for free to play social games, but the feed was still largely a timeline. Twitter only released their Apple client in 2010, and there were still a large number of third party clients in 2012.
A few years later Facebook would become inundated with political spam and vitriol, but 2012 was still an insane time of growth and optimism.
All I'm saying is that there were people who would have called it naive to be optimistic about such things- and that they were ultimately correct even though they didn't have the numbers or a proper movement.
That's a fair point, I would just contend that I imagine a cohort of techies shared my views on the subject although i can't prove that and I wasn't old enough to be employed by a tech company when these issues were around.
I was that naïve in 1998, owing to that being roughly when my pocket money first stretched to buying a modem. Almost the first thing I stumbled into was a flame-war.
Yet even today, I see people regard the lack of moderation on certain sites as an unadulterated axiomatic good. Is that blindness really naïveté, or is it just a political stance like all others? If so, I would not call that naïveté even if the effect is the same, for it is a thing all suffer from, it's the blind spot in our thoughts, no matter how experienced and sophisticated and pragmatic we may otherwise be.
Where were you during the "arab spring" ? I'm not of the opinion that twitter actually made any difference on-the-ground but that didn't stop the mediascape from preening at how hopeful the future was now that individuals could get information in and out of otherwise closed societies.
I thought I'd try and find some evidence from that time period, 2008-2012, and found this article summarizing a metastudy [0] on perception and outcomes of social media on civic engagement.
Among all of the factors examined, 82% showed a positive relationship between SNS use and some form of civic or political engagement or participation.
Why not? It is mostly correct. One on one most people are reasonable. In large groups, or when posting online with the need to show in-group behavior, or when posting publicly where everyone in one's social group can later judge, people start doing the herd mentality thing, and they also become rude to anyone not in their same social circle.
I have no proof, but I dare say the majority of angry people posting horrible stuff on social media are rather pleasant when around friends and family.
But all of a sudden, when they get up on stage, they feel the need to copy the behaviors of those around them, which means anger and vitrol.
When I first joined the Internet (1995!), there was more of an expectation of civility (IRC being a notable exception), and that is the behavior pattern I picked up upon.
> When I first joined the Internet (1995!), there was more of an expectation of civility (IRC being a notable exception), and that is the behavior pattern I picked up upon.
Also netiquette, learning to lurk before posting, meeting people outside your normal groups and getting along with them and other behaviors I'm sure I'm forgetting. Being a tech person on the early internet, despite the flame wars, was a positive experience for me. People wanted to make this work, and that early internet full of tech-minded people and engineers did work to some degree. The idea that this could become a place where people could be what they wanted to be but were still accepted was the idea going at that time, at least according to my experiences. Niches mostly kept to themselves, you could find the groups you wanted to be a part of, and you could avoid those you didn't. When everything we had started to go mainstream, it started to crack and fray. When everything went commercial, it all came crashing down.
I'm thinking mostly of pre-web, and early web. I remember thinking when I came across the first URL in a movie that it was likely the start of the end of the internet as I knew it. I think it was "The Net" which was probably mid-90s.
I still believe technology can be used for good. Diseases get cured every day, more people are able to make art of all kinds than ever before, families can keep in touch all around the world, people with disabilities can use technology to overcome what would have previously been hard limits.
It is unfortunate that we have allowed algorithmic social media content to destroy so much, and to allow for targeted ad based services to cause such drastic harm to society. However society pretty much now knows what the root problems are and if there is a will, many of the worst offenders can be legislated away.
Remove gacha/lootbox mechanics from games and remove personalized algorithmic social media feeds.
It turns out, as a species, it isn't good for us to carry around machines 24/7 that can hit the dopamine center in our brains, or that can deliver targeted outrage on demand.
How about all the other stuff though? A connected world where I can play games with people around the globe? Forums that let fans share their love of their favorite media/artist/singer/author. The hundreds of amazing YouTube chefs that have introduced authentic, sometimes hyperlocal, world cuisines to a global audience. The sheer number of in-depth documentaries that are getting made about every possible niche topic now. The independent media organizations that have popped up (Curiosity Stream, Dropout, to name just two).
That might be the most blatant "no true Scotsman" I've ever seen. Practically out of a textbook. I'm educated. I and hundreds of coworkers at multiple companies still believed it in 2012. You said something that is simply, provably untrue.
Provide evidence. 2012 is pretty late to have been drinking the techno-utopian koolaid but millions of people, and IMO, maybe half of silicon valley tech workers, took this assumption as ground truth.
This breathless article from 2009 [1] (found in 2 seconds by searching "tech will change the world year:2009") is a good example of what most people thought. You can find blog many posts and articles from the time saying basically the same thing. If you forget, back in 2012 people used to tune into Apple's yearly keynote with bated breath in anticipation of what marvelous innovation Apple would grace us with next. An app to replace your therapists? Uber for dogs? Solve poverty and racism? That was the attitude I remember among my peers (college kids and yes, professors too).
Technology has lifted a lot of people out of poverty.
Telemedicine reaching remote villages, drone deliveries of medical supplies, mobile phones giving farmers weather forecasts, and even allowing those farmers to find more competitive buyers for their crops.
Even within the US, for the longest time technology was the only field that was not ruled by elites. Any kid who was smart enough could get their hands on a computer somehow, learn to program, and have a career ahead of them. No medical associating limiting applicants, no elitist law firms, no unions only giving membership cards to children of existing members.
A lot of poor kids in the US, myself included, got lifted up by technology.
I think in 2012, SV startups (and especially social media startups) were still getting high on their own supply: there was a seemingly genuine groundswell belief that unilaterally connecting the world would be a force for good, rather than a mere reconfiguration of powers.
(I don't think Zuckerberg himself is a true believer, but I do think that the people who wrote and read this book in 2012 probably believed it. This was the same year as the Arab Spring, after all.)
Yes, this. I was at Uber in SF around 2016 or so when they did their "pixels and bits" rebrand which felt very similar. It felt very... "we are messiahs"? Most people felt it, only the people with the highest paychecks (or managers) played into it.
After hearing the core values of the company thrown around in regular speech so often most people got kind of numb to anything corporate (e.g. "I really like that you're always hustling so hard but I would love to see you do a bit more toe stepping").
I left SF a year or so after that so I wonder if that whole approach has changed in the bigger offices or not. Being in Europe now most people here (most ..) wouldn't play into it I don't think. Retrospectively feels very American.
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EDIT: Actually it's kind of hard to find info on the rebrand now. There's the announcement[0] but that only seems to allude to the weird philosophical aspect of it in the description, which leads me to believe they never published it publicly.
> The new Uber brand system is made up of primary and secondary components that tell the story of technology moving the physical world. Today, we're rolling out a new look and feel that celebrates the cities we're in and the technology that brings people what they want, when they want it.
It was more than just "primary and secondary components", they had somehow likened people and pixels together and were trying to create some weird (but similar) narrative of "connecting everything through transport" or whatever. I think the idea was that they wanted to start breaking into more verticals, a la UberEATS and whatnot, but I distinctly remember hearing a lot of "what ifs" about freight, air, etc. that I think were mostly fluff chatter to hype up the rebrand.
Most people, even internally, hated it it, and shortly after that started monthly, then weekly, then at times daily new public scandals about the company or TK, so many people left shortly thereafter.
For better or worse, social media (I’d even go as far as saying Facebook) has changed the world. As cringey as that book sounds, people loved hopium of early 2010s. Maybe I was young and naive as well, but I also believed that such connections will unite the world somehow.
Actually you can download the whole thing by using https://github.com/ofou/graham-essays , and then I imagine you can pipe it into pandoc or something of the sort to create a PDF. And then you can send that over to https://www.blurb.com/pdf-to-book or similar providers to get it printed.
When I attempted this once, I couldn't get the pages to be formatted nicely like a book, and the number of pages I ended up with was close to 1500 or something along those lines, which ends up costing you $100+ to print out with one of these services.
However I suspect that if someone were to typeset the essays nicely, it'd be an amazing coffee table book.
I could never figure out how much of the employee directed propaganda was from people who were doing it ironically and how much was from people who were drinking the Flavor Aid.
I don't think I saw any posters about carpooling, but if there were any, reprints of the classic [1] would have fit right in with the rest of the posters.
I'm pretty sure I saw this book, but I don't think I saved a copy I don't think they were still printing it when my employer was acquired.
Unfortunately, the propaganda doesn't work Page 110 talks about building trust, but what has FB done to earn your trust lately?
I think the way to read it is as a few things:
- An artifact intended to try to help solidify a sense of unity of mission and values
- Internal cheerleading
- A stake in the sand about things which did not fit in with the values.
I read this at the time it showed up on everyone's desks (I wish I'd kept it, but I have no idea where it is). Employees naturally rolled their eyes at some of the excessive optimism in some places, but generally it got the ethos right. That some of the boldest statements have fallen by the wayside ("We don't build better services to make money; We make money to build better services", "Build Products around people, not data") is obviously disappointing, but I'd view what it was trying to do in the light of a piece of art that fell short of its goal rather than merely self-unaware.
It was never intended as PR. It delivered its message via anecdotes and the experiences of working there, not in any way that would have anywhere close to the same meaning to the broader world.
