Dear Zuck,
Like two million
others, I watched UK Channel 4’s video of the Cambridge Analytics (CA) sting, where
digital marketers brag about how well they manipulate people online to sell
elections to the highest bidder. This was, in part, how Trump got elected. CA worked
with Facebook partners, bought the profile data of 87 million users, and then aimed
fine-tuned “material” — fake news in its purest form — to change those users’ votes
and online behavior without anyone knowing. They bragged they could help buy
other democracies, too.
Then I wondered: Why
are people surprised CA’s subcontractors can legally purchase their data from Facebook?
Everyone sells user data, right? Search engines, news sites, shopping sites,
your phone and Internet provider, your favorite nonprofits, your appliances —
we users allow all of these to store, copy, share, and sell data about our
identity and everything we digitally do. But you know that better than anyone. You
know It’s always watching us.
I remember seeing you
onstage at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco in 2009, when you were in
your early twenties. It was the morning plenary, and up-close, on those new LED
stadium monitors, it was clear you were uncomfortable as you walked through
your deck. This was back before you got the gray t-shirt uniform; you were in a
sports jacket and sneakers, with earbuds like W. had worn in his campaign “debates.”
There were thousands of there, watching silently in the dark, and you seemed to
feel that, sweating a little and moving awkwardly. However, you were also super
focused on delivering the Facebook message, and you did it. You were genuine.
Earnest.
That’s why I still believe you feel the weight of It.
Even though you’re
now one of the wealthiest guys on earth (and the youngest and most technically
skilled of that cohort), and even though you control the most responsive, ubiquitous,
addictive, and unassuming propaganda machine in history — a system where
multimedia ads and entertainment look like reality, and vice versa — I still
believed you when, after the CA leak, you said “I promise you we’ll work
through this.” You can instantly command the eyes, ears, and attention of millions
— more amplification than anyone in history — and you know it. It must be a struggle
sometimes. You also must know how quickly It can turn on you.
So I’m not here to
add to all the finger-pointing. We can’t blame Facebook, Twitter, and all the
other data-sucks we opt-in to for the fact that tricksy, international
plutocrats now use them to manipulate democracies with greater success than
ever, secretly molding our distracted, collective will. Those are the bad guys. They’re the guys who want to take as much
as they can, leaving our kids behind in a parched, gray non-wilderness where
the most visible hope appears on a screen. I don’t think you’re one of them.
Not yet.
Because, when I hear
your voice in the official statements, I still hear sincerity. Sure, I did
laugh out loud at the posturing photos your people put out last spring, showing
you with American Folk, riding on their tractors, standing in beams of light in
their church pews, and eating weenies at their kitchen table. That was
obviously a campaign. But in the big picture? I think you’re still carrying the burden.
You’re not running away and hiding from what’s going on here. You have a real
address, a real wife and kids and privacy. Your public announcement that you’ll
give most of your money away in your lifetime suggests that you’re wise enough
(and at a younger age than your competitors) to know when enough is enough, and
also to understand the PR-value of keeping on the side of “the people” by
showing yourself to be someone who knows good from bad. And when you
respond — as you do, quickly — to the abject horrors that Facebook sometimes enables,
like live-streamed suicides and gang rapes and torture and infanticide, and you
say you’re sorry, it sounds like there’s real thinking there about how to make
things better — about how to fix “the system” and create better “social
infrastructure.” You don’t need to struggle like that, and you probably know it
wouldn’t matter to most people if you didn’t, because most people are
too busied to stop using Facebook and all the other things that watch them. In
fact, such horrors prove that lots of people actually want to be
watched. Your reacting so earnestly shows you’re still safe: the burden hasn’t
gotten to you. But you must know it will only get worse.
Last spring, once
these horrors got attention in the non-social media, you stepped up and
published “Building Global Community.” That manifesto frankly discussed
the awesome power Facebook wields, and the problems that result. It also acknowledged
how liable you and your company are, and will increasingly be, for what users
do inside the Facebook “system.”
After your message went
out, in seconds, to your one billion users, many reporters marveled at its
length (6,000 words), but I was particularly struck me by how well-crafted it
was. It takes a lot of skill to stay so on-message while acting with urgency,
and I felt you must have been really troubled by the stories out there,
troubled enough to buy the best communications expertise to work fast and say
the most appropriate things. When you said Facebook wanted to “help people” and
“give” them “the power” to build “long-term social infrastructure,” it again showed
signs of struggle — your honest attempt to make sense of something ugly. And seeing
someone like you, with so much instant power, trying so earnestly to make this right?
It made me feel something.
Not that I agreed
with the manifesto. For example, the hope that the current Facebook could give the
world a new “social infrastructure” is absurd. We already have a social
infrastructure: it’s called “civil society,” and it’s been through centuries of
user-testing. It takes time and work for governments, laws, courts, schools, utilities,
roads, and other no-profit-making essentials to evolve. We still have a free
press when we care to look at it, places where we can talk freely, and airports,
rails, and sidewalks to help us reach each other. None of these require any
sort of corporate-owned mediation like Facebook to come between us. Civil
society does not need data to be collected from our every interaction. Nor do
we need any part of our experience to be owned by others, and shared for
strangers’ profit. In the old days, you’d need to pay a private investigator to
learn about someone else’s every visit, call, conversation, trip, purchase,
book-borrow, movie watch, and so on. Would we allow wiretapping and then fight
over who has ownership of the resulting “material”? Why should that be legal
now? Who says we need it?
I don’t think you do. Which
brings me back to what I wanted to tell you about this #DeleteFacebook moment,
and your more recent, appropriately fraught statements about why a Facebook
partner was allowed to download the profile data of 87 million users and sell
it to the digital marketers at CA who, in turn, manipulated our once-free elections
so that we now have the single most unpopular president in history in-office, where
he could easily divert us with war in order to throw a cloud over his
soon-to-be exposed sordid, venal little crimes, taking our beautiful democracy,
and the global climate and economy, down with him. I’m saying: You’re closer to
the fires now than ever before, but you don’t need to carry the burden forever.
And you shouldn’t feel you created this crisis by yourself. You can take quick
comfort in the fact that if you hadn’t invented Facebook, someone else would
have. People are always discovering new ways to spy on others. So take a quick
breath there; that’s not all your fault.
However, the same
smart, shrewd young man I saw speaking so stiffly before thousands of spectators
at a conference years ago is the same guy I see being called to the table today
by the world’s leaders. You can be sure they want to make a great public show
of forcing you to be accountable for all the nastiness that’s coming
out — nastiness engineered by the very plutocrats who’ve propped up many of
those at the judgment table themselves, and made possible by each of us who’ve
witlessly clicked past long user-agreements to allow our data to be duplicated ad
nauseum. You well know that when people get mad they want a scapegoat, someone
to put the hurt in, and how they might turn on you, because you’re richer,
younger, cleaner, and more powerful than most of them, controlling the attention
of one billion worldwide. You could undo any politician’s reputation with a few
clicks. They know it, you know it.
And that’s the one
ring that binds them all. And even if those next to you in the Facebook office
seem to want to help, you know you carry the weight alone.
You do have
the power to put an end to this ugliness, however. It’ll be epic, if you
succeed. Free yourself, and save the world; throw the ring back at the fires
where it was forged: the people. The people are the power; they made all the
content and interactions, they’ve produced all the data, and they’re the One
watching. So throw it back.
Here’s how:
- Disable data collection. Stop gathering users’ data on the more than 100 collection points now in Facebook. Be the first, and you will be the single most bad-ass disrupter in history. Digital marketers and your board and advisors may tell you this will render Facebook unprofitable, but paid advertising made TV and radio highly lucrative, for decades, without anyone spying on viewers and listeners. And Facebook usership will soar. Just ask the people: none of them say they’re in Facebook for the targeted ads and content. What they like is the easy real-time, multimedia connection with people they know, near and far. If Facebook were to regularly, publicly prove that no data is being collected from users, you’ll have recreated the free space for “balanced, nuanced opinions” that your manifesto calls for.
- Use your billions to create publicly-owned, free, secure broadband nation-wide. Everyone else has dropped that ball, and half the reason the 2016 digital voting manipulation occurred was because, while there is still no affordable wifi in much of rural America, there are hundreds of cheap cell plans from providers who filter news and other data (legally). And we’ve all witnessed what real-sounding tweets from a presidential hopeful can do; it could get worse. If you created free access to free information for all Americans, you’d be creating the social infrastructure you said you wanted. It would rival the Carnegie libraries.
- Consider making Facebook a publicly owned utility. But before you do, write the rules for how that would best work. You’ve carried this so long, you know better than anyone what governance is needed to ensure it can never again be used for evil. Maybe a governing committee with representation from every sector, class, race, and age. Put some kids on it — maybe one of your own. Membership could be revised automatically each year, by algorithm, to reflect actual usership. Maybe pull in some of your soon-to-be-former competitors.
- Build some strong law behind it. Standards for online behavior can and should be enforced just like any other behavior; inflicting pain and suffering on anyone online is pain and suffering in a real person, and once mediated, online life becomes public, and is no longer corporate-owned, such behavior will be easier to punish in real life. Let the governing committee figure out how to legislate around the public’s content — you no longer need to do that — and then let our other regulatory agencies, peace officers, and courts do the job they do best. This is also your chance to infuse more digital expertise into government. This governing committee might even liberate the corporate-owned FCC. You even demand that in exchange for all that you’re giving.
You can do all this
and still take the money you’d planned to hold. You’ll still have the clean global
persona you struggle to keep now. You’ll have cashed out at the right time after
ensuring the world’s a freer place than if someone else had beat you to it.
You’ll be a hero,
forever. You’ll have done something no one has done before, on a scale that
will take years for history to fathom: You’ll have liberated interpersonal
communication worldwide from corporate ownership and manipulation. Tricksy plutocrats
will reel, powerless to manipulate the public, because the public will have a
free, safe place to meet and share and grow, just as you envisaged.
Perhaps, best of
all: You will be a free man again. You will never again need to look twice into
the eyes nearest you to guess if they, too, are It. You can roam the globe with
unparalleled resources to address the problems that most threaten humanity, and
the world our kids will inherit. You’ll feel lighter, your courage proven once
and for all, with all the time you want to amplify the good you’ve done. You’ll
never need to do another marketing presentation again. You’ll be able to deliver
public statements without a gang-edit in advance. You’ll never again need to
strike a fake pose on a tractor. Let your critics and competitors withdraw to
their titanium-gate islands, or let them follow your example, as you and your
wife raise your beautiful kids in the real beautiful world you helped make.
No longer will you
be most known for being lucky and shrewd, but rather, for possessing the
wisdom, foresight, courage, generosity and nearly super-human discipline to
have made a change that saved the world from great evil.
Then
we’ll all be your true, grateful friends.
