Zucked: How Users Got Used and What We Can Do About It. Roger McNamee

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СКАЧАТЬ other factor made the environment of 2004 different from earlier times in Silicon Valley: angel investors. Venture capitalists had served as the primary gatekeepers of the startup economy since the late seventies, but they spent a few years retrenching after the dot-com bubble burst. Into the void stepped angel investors—individuals, mostly former entrepreneurs and executives—who guided startups during their earliest stages. Angel investors were perfectly matched to the lean startup model, gaining leverage from relatively small investments. One angel, Ron Conway, built a huge brand, but the team that had started PayPal proved to have much greater impact. Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, Max Levchin, Jeremy Stoppleman, and their colleagues were collectively known as the PayPal Mafia, and their impact transformed Silicon Valley. Not only did they launch Tesla, Space-X, LinkedIn, and Yelp, they provided early funding to Facebook and many other successful players. More important than the money, though, were the vision, value system, and connections of the PayPal Mafia, which came to dominate the social media generation. Validation by the PayPal Mafia was decisive for many startups during the early days of social media. Their management techniques enabled startups to grow at rates never before experienced in Silicon Valley. The value system of the PayPal Mafia helped their investments create massive wealth, but may have contributed to the blindness of internet platforms to harms that resulted from their success. In short, we can trace both the good and the bad of social media to the influence of the PayPal Mafia.

      Thanks to lucky timing, Facebook benefitted not only from lower barriers for startups and changes in philosophy and economics but also from a new social environment. Silicon Valley had prospered in the suburbs south of San Francisco, mostly between Palo Alto and San Jose. Engineering nerds did not have a problem with life in the sleepy suburbs because many had families with children, and the ones who did not have kids did not expect to have the option of living in the city. Beginning with the dot-com bubble of the late nineties, however, the startup culture began to attract kids fresh out of school, who were not so happy with suburban life as their predecessors. In a world where experience had declining economic value, the new generation favored San Francisco as a place to live. The transition was bumpy, as most of the San Francisco–based dot-coms went up in flames in 2000, but after the start of the new millennium, the tech population in San Francisco grew steadily. While Facebook originally based itself in Palo Alto—the heart of Silicon Valley, not far from Google, Hewlett-Packard, and Apple—a meaningful percentage of its employees chose to live in the big city. Had Facebook come along during the era of scarcity, when experienced engineers ruled the Valley, it would have had a profoundly different culture. Faced with the engineering constraints of earlier eras, however, the Facebook platform would not have worked well enough to succeed. Facebook came along at the perfect time.

      San Francisco is hip, with diverse neighborhoods, decent public transportation, access to recreation, and lots of nightlife. It attracted a different kind of person than Sunnyvale or Mountain View, including two related types previously unseen in Silicon Valley: hipsters and bros. Hipsters had burst onto the public consciousness as if from a base in Brooklyn, New York, heavy on guys with beards, plaid shirts, and earrings. They seemed to be descendants of San Francisco’s bohemian past, a modern take on the Beats. The bros were different, though perhaps more in terms of style than substance. Ambitious, aggressive, and exceptionally self-confident, they embodied libertarian values. Symptoms included a lack of empathy or concern for consequences to others. The hipster and bro cultures were decidedly male. There were women in tech, too, more than in past generations of Silicon Valley, but the culture continued to be dominated by men who failed to appreciate the obvious benefits of treating women as peers. Too many in Silicon Valley missed the lesson that treating others as equals is what good people do. For them, I make a simple economic case: women are 51 percent of the US population; they account for 85 percent of consumer purchases; they control 60 percent of all personal wealth. They know what they want better than men do, yet in Silicon Valley, which invests billions in consumer-facing startups, men hold most of the leadership positions. Women who succeed often do so by beating the boys at their own game, something that Silicon Valley women do with ever greater frequency. Bloomberg journalist Emily Chang described this culture brilliantly in her book, Brotopia.

      With the biggest influx of young people since the Summer of Love, the tech migration after 2000 had a visible impact on the city, precipitating a backlash that began quietly but grew steadily. The new kids boosted the economy with tea shops and co-working spaces that sprung up like mushrooms after a summer rain in the forest. But they seemed not to appreciate that their lifestyle might disturb the quiet equilibrium that had preceded their arrival. With a range of new services catering to their needs, delivered by startups of their peers, the hipsters and bros eventually provoked a reaction. Tangible manifestations of their presence, like the luxury buses that took them to jobs at Google, Facebook, Apple, and other companies down in Silicon Valley, drew protests from peeved locals. An explosion of Uber and Lyft vehicles jammed the city’s streets, dramatically increasing commute times. Insensitive blog posts, inappropriate business behavior, and higher housing costs ensured that locals would neither forgive nor forget.

      Zuck enjoyed the kind of privileged childhood one would expect for a white male whose parents were medical professionals living in a beautiful suburb. As a student at Harvard, he had the idea for Facebook. Thanks to great focus and enthusiasm, Zuck would almost certainly have found success in Silicon Valley in any era, but he was particularly suited to his times. Plus, as previously noted, he had an advantage not available to earlier generations of entrepreneurs: he could build a team of people his age—many of whom had never before had a full-time job—and mold them. This allowed Facebook to accomplish things that had never been done before.

      For Zuck and the senior management of Facebook, the goal of connecting the world was self-evidently admirable. The philosophy of “move fast and break things” allowed for lots of mistakes, and Facebook embraced the process, made adjustments, and continued forward. The company maintained a laser focus on Zuck’s priorities, never considering the possibility that there might be flaws in this approach, even when the evidence of such flaws became overwhelming. From all appearances, Zuck and his executive team did not anticipate that people would use Facebook differently than Zuck had envisioned, that putting more than two billion people on the same network would lead to tribalism, that Facebook Groups would amplify that tribalism, that bad actors would take advantage to harm innocent people. They failed to imagine unintended consequences from an advertising business based on behavior modification. They ignored critics. They missed the opportunity to take responsibility when the reputational cost would have been low. When called to task, they protected their business model and prerogatives, making only small changes to their business practices. This trajectory is worth understanding in greater depth.

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       Move Fast and Break Things

      Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value. —ALBERT EINSTEIN

      During Mark Zuckerberg’s sophomore year at Harvard, he created a program called Facemash that allowed users to compare photos of two students and choose which was “hotter.” The photos were taken from the online directories of nine Harvard dormitories. According to an article in Fast Company magazine, the application had twenty-two thousand photo views in the first four hours and spread rapidly on campus before being shut down within a week by the authorities. Harvard threatened to expel Zuckerberg for security, copyright, and privacy violations. The charges were later dropped. The incident caught the attention of three Harvard seniors, Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra, who invited Zuck to consult on their social network project, HarvardConnection.com.

      In an interview with the campus newspaper, Zuck complained that the university would be slow to implement a universal student directory and that he could do it much faster. He started in January 2004 and launched TheFacebook.com on February 4. Six days later, the trio of seniors accused Zuck of pretending to help on their project and then stealing their ideas for TheFacebook. (The Winklevoss twins and Narendra ultimately filed suit and settled in 2008 for СКАЧАТЬ