In early 2009, I offered the world a piece of tech that I’ve pretty much regretted ever since: I told everyone to join Facebook.
Actually, that’s putting it mildly. I didn’t just tell people. I spoke. I mocked. As I wrote in Slate, I nearly reached through the screen, grabbed Facebook skeptics by the lapel and scolded them for being pompous, joyless Luddites. “There’s no good reason to avoid Facebook anymore,” I wrote shortly after the then five-year company announced it would grow to 150 million users worldwide. “The site has crossed a threshold — it’s now so widespread that it’s fast becoming a routine tool for social interaction, such as email and antiperspirant.”
Not only was I wrong about Facebook; I had the exact opposite. Had we all decided to leave Facebook then or at some point after that, the internet and maybe the world would be a better place now. The question of how much better and in what way is the subject of much debate. It may be decades before we have any idea whether Facebook in general and social networks more generally have improved or destroyed society.
But whatever the outcome of that bigger debate, my 2009 admonition to people to go all-in on Facebook still makes me cringe. My argument suffers from the same flaws that I regularly climb into my mainstream media soapbox to expose in tech bros: an inability to seriously consider the implications of an invention as it becomes entrenched in society; a deep trust in networks, in the idea that allowing people to associate more freely would mainly benefit society; and too much affection for the culture of Silicon Valley and the idea that the people who made something should have some idea what to do with it.
I should have known better. At that time, I had been involved in technology for almost ten years. I’d written about the ways companies were trying to take control of the Internet, and I’d been concerned about how the Internet might unravel the social fabric. Just the year before, I’d published a book explaining how digital media accelerated our shift to what I called a “post-fact” world. So why was I pushing Facebook on the masses at the beginning of 2009? I have three answers.
I was swept up in the excitement of new technology.
Facebook hadn’t yet become the world’s largest social network — it would beat MySpace later in 2009. But by that time, founded in 2004 by Harvard sophomore Mark Zuckerberg, it had set itself apart from dozens of competitors primarily for its operational excellence: Facebook worked, it was relatively easy to use, it was full of real people using their real names. posts and it had relatively more robust privacy controls than many of its competitors (this is true! Facebook was once one of the more privacy-conscious social networks). I noticed that social networks got better as more people used them; it seemed reasonable that at some point one social network would gain widespread adoption and become a comprehensive directory to connect everyone.
This was the crux of my argument. I was charmed by the usefulness of Facebook – the magic of looking up someone and finding that exact person, something that doesn’t sound impressive today, but was simply stunning back then. As an immigrant, I had also delved into the world-shrinking implications of such a network. Before Facebook, I felt completely cut off from my family in South Africa. Then, in 2007 and 2008, many of them started joining Facebook. Suddenly I had a panoramic view of their distant lives, and they had a view of mine – which isn’t as annoying as it sounds. Indeed, I felt connected to them in ways that had never been possible before. How can such a connection be bad for us?
I failed to consider the far-reaching implications of Facebook’s ubiquity.
During the first decade of the new millennium, the tech industry exploded with a slew of new inventions. In addition to the rise of social networking, the 2000s brought us “user-generated” content sites like Flickr, YouTube, and Reddit; powerful cloud-based applications such as Gmail, Google Maps and, for developers, Amazon Web Services; digital media services such as the iTunes Store and Netflix’s online streaming service; and, with the 2007 introduction of Apple’s iPhone, widespread Internet access via touch-screen phones.
What I hadn’t thought about was how all these different new things would interact, especially as more people went online. In 2009, the Internet was still largely stationary – only a third of Americans used phones to get online. That created a wide gap between what happened ‘online’ and ‘offline’. Whatever horrors haunt the digital realm, they couldn’t buzz you around in your pocket anywhere, anytime.
Of course, it would have been impossible to predict the effects of the Internet’s presence in our lives. But by calling on everyone to get on Facebook, I should have guessed better what could go wrong if we all did. What would be the privacy implications if we all used Facebook on our phones – how much could this one service find out about you by being in your pocket all the time? How would Facebook’s ability to bring people together work out in the world — would it be a greater boon to freedom fighters fighting repressive governments, or would it, say, help disadvantaged Americans attack their Capitol? What would be the implications for speech and media if this one company became a central clearing house in the global discourse?
These are difficult questions, some of which are impossible to answer now, let alone then. But I should have at least thought of asking them.
I trusted techs.
My article was published the week before the inauguration of the country’s first black president, whose campaign had used social networking and other digital innovations in ways never before seen in a presidential race. I also wrote in the depths of a recession brought on by the collapse of the world’s financial system, a crash widely seen as the handiwork of Wall Street. This was the mood that permeated the media and politics in the late 2000s: Wall Street had ruined the world. Silicon Valley could make it right.
We are still in the midst of the digital takeover of real life, and we probably won’t know for many years how this all plays out. And it may not matter now: social networks are here to stay. But what bothers me is the unparalleled power that people like Zuckerberg have been given through their inventions. It doesn’t seem in any way good for society—for the economy, for politics, for a basic sense of equality—that a handful of $100 billion or even trillion dollar companies control such vast swathes of the internet.
This problem, the power of the tech giants, was cherished in the Obama administration. It’s a direct result of the atmosphere I’m describing – the feeling that tech people knew what they were doing, that they were the good guys, that their inventions would save the day. Obama’s regulators allowed Facebook to buy up its biggest competitors — Instagram first, then WhatsApp — and failed to crack down on its recklessness with users’ private data. Google representatives visited the White House on average more than once a week for much of Obama’s two terms, far more than the administration’s such meetings with other companies.
I wish I could tell you that I criticized these mergers and the intimacy of the Obama White House with technology, but, like many others in the press, I didn’t until many years later. In the late 2000s and early 2010s, I was far too timid about the growing power of technology; I saw it happen, but seldom pointed out its dangers. I regret that.
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