“An Ugly Truth, Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination”.

I recently finished reading the book “An Ugly Truth, Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination”. My top line takeaways:

Zuck isn’t evil, he’s just an uber nerd who has zero interest or knowledge in “society”. He doesn’t want to be evil and has many of the same concerns as us regular people, but these concern are eclipsed by his singular focus on keeping Facebook stock flying high and innovating. So like many of us, he deludes himself into believing he’s a good person. Now isn’t that a good definition of evil.

Sheryl Sandberg, on the other hand knows exactly what she’s doing. However, similarly she’s deluding herself into believing she’s not evil — her job is to grow Facebook’s business. She doesn’t see her job as having to worry about Facebook’s impact to society, that’s for the rest of us to figure out. After all, if she doesn’t grow Facebook, another social network will eat their lunch and do the same thing. And she’ll get fired. A few years ago I was having dinner with a bunch of top CEO’s, Charles Schwab among them — I asked them the question basically “why can’t you do good” (I’m paraphrasing). They all basically said the same thing — because the shareholders will fire me. I asked that same question at several other dinners at that club to the power guys, and I always get the same answer.

Which brings us to the government. The book covered those hearings related to the Cambridge Scandal and other similar issues. It’s hard for the average person to remember if anything came out of that. Because it looks like nothing did. The book painted the government as totally incompetent, not understanding Facebook’s business model (it’s advertising stupid!), and relating this to other technologies and businesses such as TV / media power, and the rules around common carriers / telco. I used to be a lobbyist, I know from firsthand experience that the skills to get elected (shoveling Machiavellian BS) is totally different from the skills to actually govern, especially in a rapidly changing technology driven world.

Which brings us to the people that elect these politicians. Well therein lies the real problem. And who knows what is really driving people’s desire to consume junk (i.e. social networking addiction, obsession with TV shows and drama, falling for said Machiavellian BS). What is driving that? A competitive world with no meaning? Human weakness at evolving past our emotionally driven past? A huge conspiracy to dumb people down with crappy education in a complex world? The very math of the bell curve vs. the face that garbage sells? The Fermi Paradox makes a lot of sense…