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Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg

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Re: Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg

#41

Post by linotype »

whatever1 wrote: post #31
jocaal wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of the people you mentioned's companies sell products your life depends on. If you don't like them, don't use or buy their products. I'm of the opinion that AWS, facebook and tesla cars are genuine trash. I don't know why people use that stuff.

You cannot avoid FB. They literally stalk you everywhere and sell your info to advertisers. You are their product whether you like it or not.

It’s easy to delete your account though. They may still track you, but you’re not feeding the attention machine.

Re: Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg

#42

Post by HenryBemis »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #29
jocaal wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of the people you mentioned's companies sell products your life depends on. If you don't like them, don't use or buy their products. I'm of the opinion that AWS, facebook and tesla cars are genuine trash. I don't know why people use that stuff.

Because your opinion is wrong. Problems with social media notwithstanding, just because you don't like the person who's running/ruining/most associated with the brand, doesn't make the product itself bad. Most people don't give two fraks about who Bezos or Musk or Zuckerberg are, and they definitely don't think of them when using products and services from the companies you mentioned.

> Because your opinion is wrong.

I was having a strong argument/discussion yesterday with a friend who is a communist. A real "I want hammer and sickle" kinda guy. He owns two homes, works for big-pharma, his wife works for big-logistic, scuba-diving vacations across the planet, very 'communist' way of life.

His opinions (just as the parent-commenter) are not 'wrong'. His/her/our/their (not pronouns, just groups of people) are different to ours. They got a different vision of this world (which of course it costs them nothing - until Communism settles and they are beheaded for having two homes, SP500 investments, and going scuba-diving across the planet!!)

> Most people don't give two fraks

"What are you talking about dude?? I got all these Gmail, and OneDrive, and Webex stuff for free!! It's like modern day communism!!" /s

Re: Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg

#43

Post by js8 »

max_ wrote: post #12
isoprophlex wrote: post #7

Good to have more people expose the greedy, dictatorial, detrimental shitshow that is single individuals having an outsized control over important technology. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Noone should be as big as Zuck, Musk, Altman, Bezos... I had one moment of eyebrow-raising while reading the article. On the risk of blaming someone who was mind controlled into caring too much about ultimately unimportant, s…

>Noone should be as big as Zuck, Musk, Altman, Bezos... What should be the maximum of how big someone should be? Humans are not perfect, whether "big" or "small".

> What should be the maximum of how big someone should be?

In democracy, the maximum should be 1. One vote per person. That's it.

In practice, we can delegate stuff, but I don't see reason why should people (as adults) accept any sort of authoritarianism in their lives.

Re: Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg

#44

Post by vnorilo »

max_ wrote: post #24
kelnos wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly the "maximum big level" is something that reasonable people could disagree about, but I don't think a society is healthy when people can get as big as Zuckerberg, Musk, Altman, and Bezos have gotten. Individuals should not have that much power. It's not healthy.

It is definitely not healthy. But I don't think you can limit people's wealth and not call it communism. I think the real problem is abuse of power, not accumulation of it. Power cannot be eliminated. It will either end up in the hand of politicians (who are genuinely more evil than tech bros) or remain in hands of wealth creators. What we should do is focus of punishingpeople who abuse thier power.

> But I don't think you can limit people's wealth and not call it communism.

In communism, an individual can not own any means of production - effectively 0% of the society's total capital. I don't think it follows that any non-communist system must permit any single individual to gain up to 100% of the society's wealth.

I don't know what the limit could look like or how to make it work, but societies commonly called capitalist already implement various brakes on free trade, from regulation to capital and immigration controls, subsidies, tariffs...

Re: Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg

#45

Post by wisty »

> A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism

Has anyone ever seen Facebbok as idealistic? As far as I can tell, they've always been basically Amazon (the borg that will win at all costs) but a little more trivial, cool and Web2.0, they were never the "don't be evil" Google, the idealistic Twitter, I can't think of many less ideal driven companies.

Facebook beat MySpace IMO because it tricked people into using real names. It had the best network effect because of its real name policy (you could easily find people you knew), but it didn't tell you about it, it just posted your name from the sign-up page, which was kind of a dark pattern at the time.

Facebook also had a tool that would let you give them your username and password for other sites, and would scrape contacts for you. But don't try scraping your own contacts out of Facebook, that's wrong.

Remember the apps, like zombie games? Facebook was not kind to 3rd party devs.

Facebook has always been ruthless and other than a bit of open source (PyTorch and React are nice, I guess) as far as I can tell it's never really had any mission other than getting big.

Re: Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg

#46

Post by blitzar »

kelnos wrote: post #13
isoprophlex wrote: post #7

Good to have more people expose the greedy, dictatorial, detrimental shitshow that is single individuals having an outsized control over important technology. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Noone should be as big as Zuck, Musk, Altman, Bezos... I had one moment of eyebrow-raising while reading the article. On the risk of blaming someone who was mind controlled into caring too much about ultimately unimportant, s…

> My thinking is... can you put this 100% on Sandberg? I mean, I get that the culture is bad, but there's two in this game. Maybe... turn off your phone for a day when you're giving birth?! Sure, but you can look at this in one of two ways. One is the way you seem to be angling for, where we have an employee who is so disturbingly eager to please that she continues to do work at absurd times when no one should ever e…

If Sandberg was a man it would not have happened.

Woman-on-Woman violence in the workplace has to stop, instead of trying to constantly take each other down they need to be better allies to other women.

Especially true for those that aspire to be role models for successful women and write books about how to "Lean In".

Re: Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg

#47

Post by js8 »

max_ wrote: post #24
kelnos wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly the "maximum big level" is something that reasonable people could disagree about, but I don't think a society is healthy when people can get as big as Zuckerberg, Musk, Altman, and Bezos have gotten. Individuals should not have that much power. It's not healthy.

It is definitely not healthy. But I don't think you can limit people's wealth and not call it communism. I think the real problem is abuse of power, not accumulation of it. Power cannot be eliminated. It will either end up in the hand of politicians (who are genuinely more evil than tech bros) or remain in hands of wealth creators. What we should do is focus of punishingpeople who abuse thier power.

> But I don't think you can limit people's wealth and not call it communism.

What is wrong with calling it communism? It's just a name.. You so much internalized "communism bad" that you look at a good idea and think it is bad because it reminds you something else that was implemented badly.

And by the way, you can also call it democratic socialism (democratic is really redundant).

Re: Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg

#48

Post by piaste »

max_ wrote: post #24
kelnos wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly the "maximum big level" is something that reasonable people could disagree about, but I don't think a society is healthy when people can get as big as Zuckerberg, Musk, Altman, and Bezos have gotten. Individuals should not have that much power. It's not healthy.

It is definitely not healthy. But I don't think you can limit people's wealth and not call it communism. I think the real problem is abuse of power, not accumulation of it. Power cannot be eliminated. It will either end up in the hand of politicians (who are genuinely more evil than tech bros) or remain in hands of wealth creators. What we should do is focus of punishingpeople who abuse thier power.

> But I don't think you can limit people's wealth and not call it communism.

Is that your actual objection? It sounds more like a smear by association.

Famously, the USA under Eisenhower had a top marginal tax rate of 90% on income over $200K - "merely" a few million dollars in modern-day money.

Was the Eisenhower administration Communist? If it wasn't, would it have become Communist if they had gone a bit further and added a marginal rate of 99% for income over oh, let's say $20M (a few hundred million dollars nowadays)?

I think if you traveled back in time and proposed such a bill, the reaction from folks like Senator McCarthy would not have been "that's Communism" but more likely "that's a ridiculous and useless bill, how could anyone ever accumulate that much personal wealth? It would be absurd".

Re: Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg

#49

Post by smokel »

isoprophlex wrote: post #7

Good to have more people expose the greedy, dictatorial, detrimental shitshow that is single individuals having an outsized control over important technology. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Noone should be as big as Zuck, Musk, Altman, Bezos... I had one moment of eyebrow-raising while reading the article. On the risk of blaming someone who was mind controlled into caring too much about ultimately unimportant, s…

> Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Might it be an option that correlation and causation are reversed here?

Given the amount of criticsm a typical leader of a large company, or even a country, gets these days, it is no wonder that people with narcissistic traits have an advantage. Somewhat more empathetic people would've given up already, either when they received a large enough reward, or whenever they got serious criticsm on bad practices.

Free tip for a better society: stop worshipping success.

Re: Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg

#50

Post by aoanevdus »

CaptainZapp wrote: post #4

She said Wynn-Williams’ allegations about Kaplan are false, and in a Thursday statement, she called the book “defamatory” and alleged that Wynn-Williams had skipped “the industry’s standard fact-checking process. (emph, mine) This, coming from a Meta spokesperson, is rather rich.

I’m curious what would be considered the industry standard for fact checking in tech. Does Google Search, Apple App Store, TikTok, Snapchat, Amazon store, etc. apply fact-checking to the content posted by users/sellers?

Or more abstractly, is fact-checking the responsibility of authors and content editors, or of platforms and infrastructure that spread the content?

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