I’ve Fixed Facebook. You’re Welcome.

An open letter to Mark Zuckerberg 

Dear Mark,

I’m not a social media expert, but I play one on the internet. This is why I’m able to give you the following advice that will solve all the problems of your company—advice which is, I assure you, at least as good as any of the advice you’re getting on the inside.

And don’t give me that “Problems? What problems?” bunk.

You’re not only being held responsible for genocide, and for the bulbous orange baby now occupying the White House, you’re also being blamed for all kinds of discrimination. The New York Times, writing about one such example, points out:

Facebook has been criticized in recent years over revelations that its technology allowed landlords to discriminate on the basis of race, and employers to discriminate on the basis of age. Now a group of job seekers is accusing Facebook of helping employers to exclude female candidates from recruiting campaigns. 

Yeah, you got problems, dude. Here are three steps to solve them:

1. Go back to being the geeks you truly are 

Mark, your company is a tech company. And why is it a tech company? Because you’re a geek, Mark. What’s more, you have all the earmarks of a lovable geek. You’ve got the benign awkwardness, a wife you met in college who is her own form of geek, and the cool tech you brought into the world. In fact, the only times you stop being lovable is when you try to be something more than just a geek.

I’ve been in Silicon Valley since before it even was Silicon Valley, and I can tell you, Mark, we love guys like you. We’ve got 80-year-olds running around this valley who are just like you, except they’re wearing pocket protectors. And we love them, just like we love you.

So why does everyone else hate you? Because you’ve forgotten that, first and foremost, you’re just a geek. You’re not a publisher, you’re not a social engineer, you’re not a diplomat, or a lawyer, or a judge, or even a neighborhood watch volunteer. And you’re sure as hell not a politician. (And thank heaven for that, am I right?) No, you’re none of those things. You know why? Yeah, you know, repeat after me: because you’re a geek.

So, all these solutions you’ve come up with—the citizenship requirement for political ads, the 10,000 people you’re going to hire to manually deal with all this crap, or that crazy war room you’re building to safeguard elections—are never going to work. Because a tech company peopled with geeks needs to come up with solutions that are 100% tech solutions. Anything that relies on human intervention of any kind just will not scale. Dude, you’ve got 2 billion users! That’s a haystack the size of which humanity has never seen before, and the needles you’re looking for are the tiniest, shiniest, and sharpest of all.

And, in fact, you know this, because near the close of your misguided September 12 blog post, you admitted the following:

“The last point I’ll make is that we’re all in this together. The definition of success is that we stop cyberattacks and coordinated information operations before they can cause harm. While I’d always rather Facebook identified abuse first, that won’t always be possible.” 

To which I’ll say, nah, man, don’t drag me or my tax dollars into your shit. Instead…

2. Leave the other crap to the people who are paid to do it 

I’ll just say you made a huge mistake, Mark, both on the day you decided to refer to yourself in court as a publisher, and over the period of time you began acting like one by taking responsibility for the content on your platform. The only way an enterprise of the size and scale of Facebook is going to survive in the long run is to completely divorce itself from the content shared on the platform. Again, it’s a simple matter of scale. (Remember, 2 billion users!)

As much as I abhor Alex Jones, the law and society at large, not Facebook, should have been tasked with doing something about his violent incitements and other abhorrent behavior. And as much as I despise Donald Trump and the Russians who used your platform to help get him elected, it’s the job of government and, again, society at large, not Facebook, to address that very serious national security threat. Instead, you’ve got a bunch of idiot pundits and Congress-monkeys pointing the finger at you guys every time some butt-head posts something offensive, polarizing, discriminatory, or even mildly unpleasant.

And now you’ve even got viral Facebook stars and even your own employees jumping all over your shit. It’s like an amoeba, dude! Every solution you try just squeezes between your fingers! I’ll put it this way: I’m sure Samidh Chakrabarti is a great guy, but what the hell are you doing with a Head of Civic Engagement in the first place? You’re a geek! Your company is a tech company! Get out of the moderation business, man! I’ll say it again: 2 billion users!

One more thing…

3. Quit being so goddamn greedy

All this madness probably started well before your IPO gave you an out-of-the-gate market cap of $104 billion (or, after the immediate drop because of the “fiasco,” about $50 billion), but it was certainly IPO day that put the whole thing on steroids. You were interviewed by Evan Osnos for his New Yorker piece fittingly titled, “Can Mark Zuckerberg Fix Facebook Before It Breaks Democracy,” but you were probably a little shocked when you read the final piece. Yes, Mark, Osnos did some incredibly thorough reporting and laid it all out for us. A “Growth Team,” Mark? Seriously? Fifty million users weren’t enough? I understand that your perfectly valid response to that could be, “Screw you, bub. We’re up to 2 billion.” To which I say, see above.

But seriously, all I’m saying is, maybe picture yourself with personal wealth in an amount slightly lower but every bit as obscene as $67 billion. Maybe $5 billion, or $7 billion. You can still live in your mansion, still own all the adjacent properties, still have a healthy philanthropic presence, still put your kids through the best schools. But you’ll be able to forget about your shithead shareholders. They’ll be turning on you soon enough anyway. Put that IPO squarely in the rearview mirror, let your user base dwindle down to a nicely sustainable 200 to 500 million, let some competition come in, and go out there and compete the way you and your fellow geeks like to compete: on cool tech, on features, on UX, on practical jokes, even—on anything, that is, but that cancerous, corrosive, congealing pathogen known as attention.

Because the thing is, Mark—and this is the last thing I’ll say, I promise—lovable geeks aren’t greedy, and they never have been. Those 80-year-olds with the pocket protectors, they’re sitting there stymied by the fact that their Cupertino ranch houses are now worth millions. They’re making digital movies of their grandkids’ kindergarten graduations and distributing them to their families—on DVDs.

One day, that could be you.

You’re welcome.

Douglas Engelbart, America, and Great Things

The loss of a computing icon gives us the opportunity to reconsider America.

On July 3^rd, Silicon Valley lost one of its greatest icons. If you are reading this at a computer, as the vast majority of you are (ubiquitous mobile devices notwithstanding), you are at this moment using many of the technologies conceived by Douglas Engelbart and his colleagues at the Augmented Human Intellect Research Center (AHIRC) at Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International). It probably doesn’t surprise you that some techno-geniuses long ago invented things we now take for granted like the hyperlink that brought you to this blog or the mouse you used to click that link. But what might surprise you is that all of these concepts—along with more basic ideas like organizing digital information into folders and files, viewing graphic representations of information on a screen, and even interacting with friends and colleagues through computers—were all created many years before companies like Apple, Microsoft, and IBM ever took advantage of them. And what might surprise you even more is that the objectives set out by Engelbart and his team back in the 1950s actually never mentioned a computer at all, and were in fact solely focused on humans and the effectiveness of their intellectual work.

I personally was a 9-year-old Catholic school boy (and those of you who know me know that must have been a very, very long time ago) when Engelbart and his team, and most notably his primary research partner Bill English, delivered what is now known as “the Mother of All Demos” at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco on December 8, 1968. If you’re geeky enough, as I was, to make it well into the YouTube posting of this video, you just might learn some valuable historical lessons about our country, what we once were, and what we’ve become.

The video shows what was projected on a large screen before a 2000-seat arena, and Engelbart introduces it by saying, “If in your office, you as an intellectual worker were supplied with a computer display that was backed up by a computer that was alive for you all day and was instantly responsive to every action you had, how much value could you derive from that?” Forty-five years ago, he literally describes the work environment of hundreds of millions of people on the planet today.

Engelbart sits below and to the right of the screen, which shows both his face and a number of other images superimposed on the view of his “computer-display work station.” Behind the scenes, Bill English commands a team of six people located both in San Francisco and at SRI’s headquarters in Menlo Park, who make the demonstration real and capture it on film by manning “cameras, switches, mixers, special-effects controllers, etc.” In noir black and white, Engelbart starts his presentation by showing capabilities and “user features” of one of the first timeshare computer systems. The computer feeds back, robotlike, with beeps and buzzing at various pitches. About 5 minutes into the demo, the video shows Engelbart’s hands and keyboard, and you realize he is using a mouse. Even the microphone headset Engelbart wears looks as if it belongs in 2013 and not 1968.

Ultimately, however, like all good presenters, Engelbart starts to give us stories. The first is the story of his wife calling and asking him to do some shopping, giving him the chance to show us how he constructed not just one but a series of shopping lists for various stores he would visit on his way home, and not just the lists, but also a map of his trip home showing the various stops, each with a hyperlink to the shopping list associated with that particular stop.

Then, 18 minutes into the demo, Engelbart declares that he will be “shifting from the illustrative material to the real working stuff, in case you wouldn’t recognize it.” And this is where he gets to the more interesting story: that of his team at SRI, its history, its objectives, and its funding sources.

His team had had the system he was demonstrating up and running for about 6 months, going from one timeshare terminal to 6, with plans to add another 6 in the coming months after that, and here he explains that “... the next step when you’re faced with having this in your office all day, as I now do (it’s been very exciting since), how do you put that to work for yourself?”

At the time, the AHIRC was staffed by 17 people working in a specialized computer lab. Staffing over the years from 1950 onwards had grown in fits and starts, and had in fact been only 1 from 1950 to about 1962, rising to 17 by 1968. Through that time, it functioned as what Engelbart calls a “goal-oriented pursuit” of the following primary objective:

Improve the effectiveness with which individuals and organizations work at intellectual tasks.

Notable to me in that objective was its broad sweep. Engelbart wasn’t trying to win a war, he wasn’t trying to defeat terrorists, and he certainly wasn’t trying to make any money for anyone. Nonetheless, in all that time, he tells us, AHIRC was “sponsored by government agencies. Currently, ARPA, NASA, and RADC. Also, in the past, AFOSR and ESD. These are the people that first grubstaked us many years ago.”

Now many of you will recognize those acronyms but many won’t, so I’ll help: Engelbart and his team were supported in their sweeping research objectives by the U.S. Government’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Agency, and the U.S. Air Force’s Rome Air Development Center. In addition, they had gotten initial funding from the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research. And of course that’s a good thing, because it’s highly unlikely that the iconic computing enterprises of the day, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Fairchild, or any of the rest, would have spent a dime on a small research team whose objectives had no direct line to their bottom line.

Even more remarkable, Engelbart goes on to explain his team’s research approach, which he describes as an empirical approach of build and try, or “bootstrapping in a new sense.”

We needed a research subject group to give them these tools, put them to work with them, study them, and improve them. We’ll do that by making ourselves be the subject group and studying ourselves and making the tools so that they improve our ability to develop and study these kinds of systems and produce in the end this kind of system discipline.

Now as I heard Engelbart saying this on the video, I was listening from my 2013 frame of reference, and from that frame of reference I found myself channeling the likes of a Paul Ryan or an Eric Cantor, and hearing what they would hear, and what I came up with was something like, “These guys want our government to give them money so they can build a bunch of high-tech toys that they themselves will go play with, all in the guise of a serious research project!?” Well, that’s exactly what they wanted, in a sense, and that’s exactly what they got, and that’s exactly what they did, and in the end, hundreds of millions of citizens of the world got new, more effective, more efficient ways of executing their daily work. And of course there were “toys” at AHIRC and there was “play,” but what there was, mostly, was intense, groundbreaking, intellectual work, the cost of which had been justified and explained in exacting detail in research proposals submitted to government agencies dating back to 1950. And we can all be thankful that there were intelligent people at those agencies applying both critical and creative thinking to the reviews of those proposals, because otherwise we never would have gotten the very tangible results that we are now, by the thousands, looking back on in the Mother of All Demos.

In Engelbart’s day, the roles of Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor were played by people like Joseph McCarthy, Barry Goldwater, and Richard Nixon, and I struggle, frankly, to imagine any of those elected leaders applying the kind of critical and creative thinking the Defense Department, the Air Force, and NASA did when they approved Douglas Engelbart’s research proposals. I will, however, continue with that struggle, because that’s my only way of remaining connected and hopeful in our hyper-partisan 2013 America.

I was surprised to find in his writings that Engelbart was aware, at some level, of what he was asking of the world as he embarked on his quest for a better world. Seeing ever-increasing complexity in daily life, and increasingly complex problems facing humanity, Engelbart realized that his effort to tame that complexity would amount to something like a “crusade.” And as he wrote in his 1986 paper Workstation History and the Augmented KnowledgeWorkshop:

Crusades have many strikes against them at the outset. E.g.: they don't connect to a normal source of government or business revenue; they don't have nice organizational frameworks—you can't go out on the streets and expect to find financial, production, or marketing vice presidents; even if you accomplished the sweeping change that was the ultimate objective, chances are that in this very complex world, the side effects might be bad enough to make you wish you hadn't.

We can only be glad and appreciative that despite those misgivings Engelbart resolved to press on, and despite the forces arrayed against him, our government decided to support him in the end.

Barney Frank has said, “Government is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together.” We should all be pleased and encouraged that so often those things turn out to be the truly great things that change the world.

Silicon Valley, a Wake-Up Call

There are times in life when you are humbled in a way that goes to your core. Of course, we are all humbled each and every day...by the perseverance of the disabled vet, by the smarts of the colleague 20 years your junior, by the grace of the special-needs adult smiling through his day. But sometimes you encounter humility that ends up actually making you sad.

This is what happened to me the day I read George Packer's piece, "Change the World: Silicon Valley transfers its slogans—and it's money—to the realm of politics," in last week's New Yorker. Like Packer, I was raised in the Santa Clara Valley that everyone in the world now calls "Silicon Valley." Packer was a senior at Gunn High School in Palo Alto in 1978, the year my wife Carol was a freshman there. I graduated the previous year, 1977, from Branham High School in San Jose. Very much unlike Packer, however, I did not follow the Woodward/Bernstein inspiration that led me to complete my journalism degree in 1983. Instead I was swept up by tech, and have now had a long and lucrative Silicon Valley career. I'm certainly no Marc Andreessen or Sergei Brin, but I am comfortably settled into an obscenely overvalued rancher in Los Altos, holding out reasonable hopes for an earlier than usual retirement.

And this is why Packer's Silicon Valley piece was so humbling. From the vantage point of my tech career and my day-to-day life in the valley, I have observed the trends with some uneasiness: the rise of social networking companies that "make" nothing beyond user interfaces on which to display advertising, the insulation of workers in citadels with free gourmet food, dry-cleaning pick-up, and medical/dental centers, the increasing divide between the super rich and the unrich best embodied by urban gentrifications that have literally pushed the disenfranchised further and further out to the edges. I have observed these changes, scratched my head over them and even seethed with envy at times, but I had never seen them as a contiguous whole, as a real social transformation taking place at an alarming rate in the place where I was born and raised, until I read Packer's piece.

And that was just the setup.

Packer goes on to expose twenty- and thirtysomething millionaires and billionaires who have artfully convinced themselves that they are “changing the world” when in fact they have no clue what “the world” is. As Packer observes:

It suddenly occurred to me that the hottest tech start-ups are solving all the problems of being twenty years old, with cash on hand, because that’s who thinks them up.

More alarming (or perhaps more amusing), Packer tells us how this "change the world" self image has led these captains of tech to look for political applications for their millions. And what happens when the cash-rich and clueless get involved in politics? Well, I’ll direct you first to Packer’s piece—it’s a must-read in my opinion—but I’ll also embellish with my own observations: 

The only “world-changing” I expect from this latest crop of IPO millionaires might be:

1. A few new laws and regulations favored by the tech industry, such as an increased allotment of the H1B visas they use to displace uppity American engineers in favor of the half-the-cost variety available from various parts of Asia, or reductions in corporate tax rates because, hey, how can they possibly be expected to keep their intellectual property, profits, and jobs in the US with these exorbitant tax rates. (This despite the fact that they themselves live in the US, walk the safe streets of the US, eat the safe, thoroughly inspected foods of the US, educate their kids in the US, etc., etc.)
2. Perhaps a few more “world-changing” developments like the candy shop, arcade, and soon-to-open hobby shop that now grace the streets of Downtown Los Altos, all brought to us by local Google executives whose children are apparently bored by the currently available attractions in the historically geriatric village. (Yes, the young techistocracy are procreating, and apparently their kids need something to do with themselves beyond the walls, vineyards, swimming pools, and tennis courts of the Tuscan villas of Los Altos Hills.)

Other than that, I don’t expect much. But hey, surprise me.