When the looting starts
Rethinking work, life, and meaning in a digital age
On Monday, hundreds of Facebook employees staged a virtual walkout. They flipped on their out-of-office responders in a show of protest. Many tweeted about it, stirring the pot on the social media platform where they knew journalists would take notice. At least a couple threatened to resign, or did so. Like software engineer Timothy Aveni. In announcing his departure on LinkedIn, he chatted about his experience freely in the post’s conversation.
One of his comments, buried in a thread, stuck out to me: “Without going into the details of internal discussions, I can say one thing: Mark made it clear, over and over, that I should never expect him to listen.”
I want to talk about Mark the CEO; I don’t mean to address Mark the person. I truly hope that the person is torn up about these events, that most of Facebook’s senior leaders may be losing sleep. But until now, what happens next in any situation has always been determined by Mark, and only Mark. He cannot be overthrown, or voted out, or fired. That’s how he set his company up. That’s how the public market and governments have accepted it.
And Facebook, at 16, has established itself as more than a company. It’s the embodiment of what Mark described the very first time I interviewed him, in the fall of 2005. He was 21. Even then, he called Facebook a "social utility" and explained that one day everyone would be able to use it to look people up. Facebook has grown to become the face of a technological disruption as significant as the printing press: suddenly everyone has the same size microphone, and we are competing for audiences not according to the significance of our institutions, but the sensationalism of our messages.
As Facebook has grown, our trust in institutions has collapsed. The media has been crippled to the point of near ineffectiveness. Government at local and state levels is limping along, and our federal government is at best gridlocked -- at worst doing serious damage to millions of Americans.
Far too many of us failed to see this version of Facebook coming, to figure out how to regulate it, to plan for a future in which it was more than an upstart helmed by the well-intended. A generation of founders (like Napster’s Sean Parker), scarred by losing control over their own companies, encouraged Mark and his peers to demand an outsized amount of control over theirs. Investors hungry to get in on big deals at all costs agreed to fund these companies. And now, here we are, at the mercy one person to make decisions about how this utility operates.
In a very short period, we have all felt the implications of Mark’s decisions. This came to yet another head last Friday night when Mark decided Facebook would not remove Trump’s post in which he invoked a historically racist phrase to threaten violence against civilians. Mark suggested that it didn’t violate Facebook’s terms of service because Trump was a state actor and so his threat was more of a warning.
To be clear, no one is protesting *just* this one decision. Rather, a group of employees has begun to suspect the true impact of the platform for which they work could be far more destructive than they’d thought, and their leader does not possess the clarity and wisdom that is necessary to address it. As The Verge’s Casey Newton so eloquently put it, “Facebook is treating a moral issue as if it’s a legal one.”
Meanwhile, as misinformation and disinformation run unchecked across the platform, we are seeing the consequences in our streets. Our country’s polarization is amplified by our interactions on Facebook. And the Facebook employees voicing dissent are worried that bad actors are deliberately feeding the protests, cementing institutionalized racism, and inciting violence. Two years ago, the violence was on display in Myanmar, and we could look away. Today, it doesn’t just feel closer -- it actually is. Two blocks from my home in Brooklyn, cop cars rammed into a group of protestors over the weekend.
Mark the person is brilliant, and I’m not ready to say he’s the wrong person to be Facebook’s leader. While I don’t agree with Friday’s decision, what worries me most is that he made it in a vacuum -- a vacuum he chooses to inhabit. These are the most important decisions of our time. How we make them will continue to inform how information moves through our societies, and we need to draw from the collective wisdom of many stakeholders. No one person has the right information.
And that’s why Aveni’s decision to quit, publicly, is significant. It’s why the 400+ people who protested this week were doing more than binge-watching Schitt’s Creek from their living rooms, why their out of office messages have significance. The only way to impact Facebook’s direction is to cripple the company into capitulating. And the best way to do that is to drain it of its talent, and scare away its advertisers.
The protests have already led business partners to pull out of deals with Facebook. They’ve led former employees who now have the economic freedom, like Barry Schnitt, to speak out and even offer substantial and effective suggestions.
We all have a role. Any of us who have worked in tech now have an obligation to echo these voices, to track these moves, to try as best we can to impact and contribute to the decisions of Mark the CEO. It’s not just the future of Facebook that’s at stake. It’s American democracy hanging in the balance.
🎙Things I’ve made: I’m a guest this week on Charles Duhigg’s podcast, How To! With Charles Duhigg. It's sort of like if Dear Abby were an investigative reporter. Listeners call in with their Big Life Questions, and Charles tries to find them answers. This week, I was the expert, and we talked to a jobseeker who, at 38, wanted an entirely new career.
We’ve had a few strong Hello Monday episodes since I last wrote. I had a great conversation with Guy Raz about building things now. He had some choice words about Silicon Valley’s obsession with “Failure.” I also had therapist Lori Gottlieb on the show to talk about how we manage uncertainty. Because, personally, I had hit my limit. (And, that was before the country erupted in riots.) And this week, Reid Hoffman joined me to discuss networking in the age of a pandemic. You can find all three episodes here.
🎙Things you’ve made: Quite a few of you have shared your own podcasts with me recently. Former Daily Show executive producer Steve Bodow is eight episodes in to In Quarantine with Steve Bodow. They’re endearing and hilarious conversations with artists, creatives and thinkers that’ll leave you feeling like you’ve hung out at their table for awhile. Less funny, but just as endearing, is Amanda Clayman’s special series on the Death, Sex & Money feed, entitled Financial Therapy. She’s the Esther Perel of your financial life, and I hope the show gets picked up permanently. And, if you haven’t yet listened to Reid interview former Apple executive Angela Ahrendts on Masters of Scale, I recommend it.
📚Things I’m reading: Remember, no one is coming to save us, writes Roxane Gay. Rhode Island activist Kath Connelly offers pragmatic advice. White people, while you’re upset, I want to talk about your money. An interview with Bryan Stevenson on the frustrations behind the George Floyd protests. Kathryn Schulz on how we became infected by chain email. (Thanks Guy for pointing to it.)
🎊Kudos: New Jobs!
Consider this a placeholder. Send me what you’ve got for next time.
🎊Kudos: New Life!
So many new quarantine babies to celebrate! All Star Code founder Christina Lewis and husband Dan Halpern welcomed Macy Halpern in the final days of March. She arrived in New York City at the high point of the pandemic, after a very quick labor (7 minutes!). In San Francisco, Compass NorCarl President Libby Leffler Hoaglin and husband met their daughter, Hope Hilary, on April 7. And just this week, my LinkedIn colleague Page Williams had her second son in Reno, Nevada. Like Macy, he arrived quickly. And he has a wonderful name: Jude Joshua Williams.
📤Share the things you’re seeing with me. I’ll include them on the show, write about them for LinkedIn, and pass the news on here. We’re all going to need to help each other through this. If you’ve got an idea for something significant, let’s amplify it and help make it happen.
***So maybe you’re asking, what’s this about again? You're my brain trust. I don't write for thousands. I write to exchange ideas with the small group of people I've met and who matter to me, in hopes that together we can figure out something more about where humanity is going and how it gets there. This is a team sport.