An Anti-Facebook Manifesto, by an Early Facebook Investor

I understand this is a manifesto, but really the dialogue around Facebook and social media has truly become unhinged. Facebook is just a symptom, it seems<p>What is there to be _done_? Pandora&#x27;s box is open, so to speak. If Facebook disappeared overnight, are we really going to assume the problems they&#x27;re in are going to go away?<p>Everyone is potentially connected to everyone, everywhere, on the entire planet. There has never been a technology so powerful as the centralized internet.<p>Furthermore, outside of media companies and the HN bubble, people _do not care_. Your average person doesn&#x27;t care about decentralization, preventing social media addiction, gamification, or polarization of online communities.<p>To the contrary the market shows that companies like FB are massively successful.<p>So what are we to do? The world has been changed, drastically. Were we ready for it? And if we somehow were rid of Favebook, are we ready for what follows?

These large dominating companies are monopolies in every sense of the word and need to be broken up. The Bell System was broken up and didn&#x27;t have a tenth of the tracking and control of people&#x27;s lives that Google and Facebook do. Ma Bell didn&#x27;t actively harm its users and cause depression. Ma Bell didn&#x27;t collude with Russia to influence a presidential election and install a puppet president.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Monopoly" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Monopoly</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;academic.oup.com&#x2F;aje&#x2F;article&#x2F;185&#x2F;3&#x2F;203&#x2F;2915143" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;academic.oup.com&#x2F;aje&#x2F;article&#x2F;185&#x2F;3&#x2F;203&#x2F;2915143</a> &quot;Association of Facebook Use With Compromised Well-Being: A Longitudinal Study&quot;

What I struggle to understand is how could esteemed AI researchers like LeCun and many others work for such a company to give it even more powers and edge? How can they justify this as scientists?<p>The huge influx of money into research (here AI, but could be anything in the future) combined with the disfunctions of academia is very troubling.

This debate is needlessly muddled by this fuzzy notion that because it is &quot;the Internet&quot; therefore something different needs to be done, that this is somehow a new situation. But it is not. If it was the 1970s and people were told to sign a contract to allow a company to physically track every single event in their lives, they would not consent to it. If it was the 1970s and some company tried to get exclusive access to people&#x27;s TV and radio to bombard them with bespoke advertisement and propaganda, they would not consent to it. So then what is so different? Nothing much. What Facebook and Google and others are currently doing is way beyond what a sane society would allow. It is just that people are confused because it is done through a new medium, but nothing much is different.

If he gave away all the profits he made from Facebook and put out the book for free, then maybe I&#x27;d consider his feedback.

Off topic comment here. I remember two years ago when people on HN were arguing people that cared about privacy had something to hide. I am glad the tide is starting to change. Privacy is a fundamental human right.

It would be a dramatic change of decades of ideological, political and popular sentiment to start breaking up companies or tightly regulating them. I doubt it would happen.

&gt; Let’s examine the evidence. At its peak the planet’s fourth most valuable company, and arguably its most influential, is controlled almost entirely by a young man with the charisma of a geometry T.A.<p>Does the writer really think a more charismatic founder would have changed the outcome for the better, or that more charisma would have led Zuckerberg to make different choices?<p>Let&#x27;s not forget that history is scarred from the manipulations of <i>charismatic</i> leaders.<p>This sounds rather like the old nerd&#x2F;geek&#x2F;greasy-grime bashing trope trotted out again.

Its curious that the media is going to such great lengths to paint Facebook as villians.<p>My own Facebook stream is travel photos, people saying gushy things about their spouse, plus a few people still obsessed with Trump. Harmless stuff.<p>Our lives must be pretty cushy when this is one of the biggest dangers that we face.