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I was Zuckerberg’s speechwriter

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Re: I was Zuckerberg’s speechwriter

#191

Post by cryoshon »

bertil wrote: post #129
craftyguy wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think it is a gift to mankind?

It allows me to keep in contact with many of my close friends and my family who live on three continent and more countries than I can count on a daily basis, has helped me find work a dozen times, has provided several companies who I worked for with credible identity, spectacular growth via targeted advertising. I can use Uber, AirBnB and so many more and not fear that the people with whom I share a car or a flat wit…

there are some problems with what you have posted.

let's begin.

>things I can’t talk about but that I’m incredibly proud of, and that have made the world a meaningfully better place.

ah, so we must simply trust you, then? FB has violated users trust from day one with the "dumb fucks" and the like. "making the world a better place" demands evidence. btw, i bet you can probably provide some evidence that will satisfy your criteria for this. just recognize that it's overtly incredulous unless you provide that evidence. and yes, i am incredulous here.

>Facebook is showing how to properly react to a scandal

lying, denying, fumbling, partial admission, larger admission, and then a cycle of non-apologies is NOT the right way to handle a scandal.

>Even now, the company is exposing itself to more criticism because that’s the right thing to do.

yeah, that explains the extralegal FB "raid" on CA's offices. or is there some internal explanation for that? because to everyone else, it looks like you guys were "just doing the right thing" by trying to destroy evidence of their wrongdoing. trying to dress that up somehow comes off as... shall we say, incredulous, again. there's a limit to how much people will believe that you believe.

and don't even bother watching zuck's testimony to congress. you will find that he is eminently doing his darndest to avoid criticism by avoiding inquiries. i encourage you to watch it in full and count the dodges. you will break fifty.

oh yeah, and trying to sue the newspaper that broke the story is egregiously scummy -- i'm talking like richard nixon level of brutal sliminess. these are the actions of a criminal organization trying to escape punishment for their wrongdoing -- or at least that's what it looks like from the outside.

>Overall, it’s fairly positive, I would say.

does your appraisal include:

involuntary surveillance of non-users

passing information to (malevolent or otherwise) governments regarding their citizens

non-consensual experimentation on users' emotions (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/29/facebook-...)?

what about being a willing accomplice in Chinese censorship, if they were allowed to operate in the country at all (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/22/technology/facebook-censo...)?

oh yeah, and what about causing negative emotions intrinsically via using the platform (http://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-may-cause-stress-study-... and http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23709009 & an extensive amount of similar evidence)? or is this somehow acceptable despite the galaxy of evidence that explicitly links FB to worse quality of life?

what about tax evasion (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/dec/23/facebook-...)? tax evasion is typically not prosocial behavior.

what about political censorship in kashmir (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/19/facebook-...)?

or maybe political censorship of the kurds (http://stream.aljazeera.com/story/201308240040-0023000)?

or religious and political censorship in pakistan (http://tribune.com.pk/story/855030/facebook-censored-54-post...)?

what about the censorship of the rohingya trying to tell the world about their persecution (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/20/facebook-...)?

---

i guess the bigger philosophical question is: at what point do you take responsibility for your actions in the context of facebook as a company? i understand that companies are often unethical in tiny steps until they're a monster, and it's hard to tell from the inside when things are happening. i can't imagine that i would have quit the company after any two of the things i listed. but there's more than two things. all the evidence is there, now.

what's your move?

PS: exhibiting restraint in this post was . . . difficult.

Re: I was Zuckerberg’s speechwriter

#193

Post by manjushri »

pitaj wrote: post #122
rememberlenny wrote: post #105

Web platforms are governments. "Facebook is a government. Facebook's users are citizens, and Facebook's applications developers are the private companies that drive much of the economy. Apple. Twitter, Myspace, Craigslist, Foursquare, Tumblr and every other large network of engaged users (including some services of Google) plays a similar role. We have always tacitly acknowledged this. We talk about these networks as…

Whether or not they are governments is a question of definition. Definitions are important, and social networks don't fit very well into it. They are fundamentally different from modern governments as they do not have a monopoly on coercion. If social media are governments, then every corporation - no, every association of people - on Earth is a government.

>Government: the governing body of a nation, state, or community.

Is Facebook a community? If so it would seem it fits the plain dictionary definition.

Re: I was Zuckerberg’s speechwriter

#194

Post by stale2002 »

GVIrish wrote: post #131
nickpp wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taking an average over the world, most governments are badly functioning and they've been that way for years if not centuries. Business on the other side, tend to be punished by the markets when misbehaving and then course-correct.

> Business on the other side, tend to be punished by the markets when misbehaving and then course-correct. That only happens when there are regulations to run afoul of and/or a company is not a monopoly. Without government companies would be free to pollute the environment, cheat customers, and abuse workers to breaking point. The market wouldn't punish those companies if all the companies in the market were doing th…

No, if a corporation behaves poorly then I can buy from a different corporation.

It has nothing to do with regulations.

Re: I was Zuckerberg’s speechwriter

#196

Post by stale2002 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #125
nickpp wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A well functioning government, does, ideally, what you describe. But most governments in the world (maybe except a few western ones) are, as I was saying, incredibly disfunctional. And when governments misbehave, they kill: wars, corruption, suppression, etc. Forgive me if I’ll prefer businesses over governments every day.

> And when governments misbehave, they kill: wars, corruption, suppression, etc. You're comparing a giant to a nest of angry ants. The giant sometimes tramples houses; the ants don't. One might conclude the ants are therefore gentler, and wonder much better life would be under giant ants instead of the giant, neglecting that if the ants had the giant's power, they would be far more deadly than it.

Absolutely.

Which is why we need to get rid of that power in the first place.

The problem is not the entity, it is the power, no matter who holds it.

Re: I was Zuckerberg’s speechwriter

#197

Post by mfringel »

bertil wrote: post #129
craftyguy wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think it is a gift to mankind?

It allows me to keep in contact with many of my close friends and my family who live on three continent and more countries than I can count on a daily basis, has helped me find work a dozen times, has provided several companies who I worked for with credible identity, spectacular growth via targeted advertising. I can use Uber, AirBnB and so many more and not fear that the people with whom I share a car or a flat wit…

Can you tell me more about your previous affiliation with Facebook?

Re: I was Zuckerberg’s speechwriter

#198

Post by manjushri »

pluto9 wrote: post #155
rememberlenny wrote: post #105

Web platforms are governments. "Facebook is a government. Facebook's users are citizens, and Facebook's applications developers are the private companies that drive much of the economy. Apple. Twitter, Myspace, Craigslist, Foursquare, Tumblr and every other large network of engaged users (including some services of Google) plays a similar role. We have always tacitly acknowledged this. We talk about these networks as…

By that definition, every conceivable grouping of human beings that has any sort of leadership has a government, but that definition is so broad as to be useless. An after-work football club is governed by its rules, organizers, customs, etc, but the idea that it has a government is laughable.

>By that definition, every conceivable grouping of human beings that has any sort of leadership has a government, but that definition is so broad as to be useless.

Well, that is in accordance with the dictionary definition.

The bigger and more powerful the grouping becomes, the more practical the definition becomes. Which is why it could be a useful designation for an entity with psychological control over 2,000,000,000+ people, but not so much for a football league with ~100 people (though technically it still can be called a governing body).

Re: I was Zuckerberg’s speechwriter

#199

Post by carapace »

parthdesai wrote: post #144
carapace wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pointing out that he's not some cyber-saint. What can we look at that would stand as evidence that he's not a huge douche-bag? Renaming the SF General Hospital after himself? His recent behavior in front of Congress? Show me the evidence that he's a good person, please.

Only thing i said is, to judge him based on something he said when he was somewhere between 19 and 21 years old in Uni is a stupid thing to do. A majority of us have said and done stupid things in uni.

Yes, and you're right about that.

It is stupid and unfair to judge somebody based on one thing they said when they were young.

Re: I was Zuckerberg’s speechwriter

#200

Post by deltron3030 »

PeterisP wrote: post #156
jrs95 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does respecting national sovereignty rather than letting your government be trampled over by international corporations run counter to a globally connected internet? This sort of attitude might seem like "nationalist populism" now, but it wasn't that long ago that "the left" was on the same page. I still am personally, but there seems to be a disturbing trend where anti-Trump sentiment is being leveraged to promo…

One issue is with diverging values and rules. If national sovereignty overrides everything, one country mandates X, and another mandates not-X - then that's not compatible with a globally connected internet; since each of them will require the "other" thing to be removed from "their" internet, and that leads to segmentation, blocking and separation. What do you do when country A requires all maps to show that some te…

You don't need to go that far. Problems already start on the local level, where you have cities and city people ruling over rural people and their interests, totally different lifestyles. There needs to be a way to shrink to homogenous units, and then use technology to organize everything.

The bureaucracy of centralized governments was practical, but it didn't kept up with the diversification of society. The self driving car stuff could effect housing too, think about self driving mobile homes, that cluster and arrange based on your preferences, basically going back to a nomadic way of living, but in a techy way.

This could be a solution to many problems of the static nature of cities, and problems that start perpetuating upwards from there.

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