I picked up this book last year because of a really decent review in The Financial Times (worth noting the author’s husband works there). And while I agree with much of your analysis of the book’s flaws and the harsh legal action against SWW, I don’t share your view that it’s entertaining. I found it unnecessarily bitchy throughout.
Most striking is the extraordinary gap between how SWW presents herself and how she actually comes across. She repeatedly declares her diplomatic credentials — “I insist I know what I’m talking about, and given my years as a diplomat” — and pitches her role as someone who builds relationships before Facebook needs them. Yet the book is full of moments where she seems spectacularly out of her depth.
Take Myanmar, which becomes the moral centrepiece of the whole book. She flies out there because “someone needs to figure out what is going on.” Clearly, she’s the person for the job! She checks into a hotel with no electricity, no hot water, no food, and no internet. Seriously. It’s not like Myanmar didn’t offer hotels with these essentials for any diplomat or visitor to the country after all, the country was hosting a World Economic Forum event at that time! To her credit she secures a chat with Ang San Suu Kyi because her “diplomatic training” helped her locate the seating map! Honestly, I laughed out loud. When she leaves the hotel, she is incapable of arranging transport, considers hitchhiking on an empty road, has no local currency, no local language knowledge, jumps into a random car, and then tries to write down the name of a government department before remembering that Burmese uses a different script and has to resort to sign language and mime. FFS!
This isn’t the behaviour of a seasoned diplomat. It’s Murray from Flight of the Conchords! The comparison kept nagging at me throughout the book. She tells us she’s brilliant at diplomacy while showing us scene after scene of incompetence. She may well be likeable in person, but as an author, she’s strangely unaware of how these anecdotes, as well as the meanness and unnecessary bitchiness about others undermine her own authority.
Hi Ian. Just wanted to say that as well as enjoying the substack, I've got a lot out of reading your book 'Conflicted'.
I'm finding I'm having more interesting and stimulating conversations, especially as I'm no longer viewing them as a zero-sum game where my opinion must prevail for it to be successful. It means I can go into a conversation with curiosity and a readiness to be challenged and develop my views, without the need to be on the defensiveness from the start.
This is such a great example of a well-considered, even-handed, and yes, well-written review. There’s a lesson here for all of us in the power and truth of nuance and clear eyes (and a heart.) Well-done.
Maybe the reason the book’s sense of humour fades in 2016 is that it was around then that people started to hear about Facebook's dark side.
It was roughly around then that Facebook, coupled with the rise of its Whatsapp, was first charged with turning a blind eye to the way it spread misinformation and influenced elections - often, though not always, in favour of right-wing or far-right candidates.
We might never know to what extent misinformation on Facebook, WhatsApp and elsewhere online influenced recent elections but academic studies show there's little doubt their integrity was damaged - see Brazil (in 2018), Kenya and the Philippines, to name three major examples. (Moreover, the spread of misinformation and fake news affects much more than just elections.)
A lot of your post today is devoted to defending Zuckerberg. Yet the fact is that Facebook's algorithm is designed to reward inflammatory content. This is indefensible. Zuckerberg allowed Holocaust deniers to post their hate until 2020!
Define evil however you like but platforming Nazis until the pressure got too great is as good a guide as any in my eyes.
Zuck's position, and a necessary position for social media to function, is that he is not a publisher, and responsibility falls on the person who writes the post. Facebook aren't "turning a blind eye", they're not endorsing posts (across platforms there are billions of posts every day). If a post is actually illegal, then then law can be used to punish that person. If the post doesn't break the law then that is just free speech in action, and complaining about its influence sounds like sour grapes - the media celebrated Obama's use of FB and social media campaigning, the Advertising Age named him the "marketer of the year" in 2008.
I was planning to post something similar, but with a slightly different angle.
I think that it's fairly well-documented elsewhere that roughly mid-decade -- circa 2014 -- Facebook intentionally switched from a user-driven strategy of "connect people to friends and family" to an algorithmic-driven one that "drives maximal engagement (to maximize ad revenue)".
I don't have the impression that they were explicitly allowing Nazis and the like so much as not caring about the content of posts as long as those posts increased engagement with the platform, regardless of the societal consequences of doing so.
So "How Evil is Mark Zuckerberg?" depends on the degree to which you agree with Curtis Mayfield that "a hopeless sinner would hurt all mankind just to save his own".
Super review. I laughed out loud, again, at the "Don't mention the war" passage. I felt there was some decent analysis of the industry towards the very end and I wondered if the publishers had encouraged the book's heavy emphasis on comedy and sometimes faux shlock. I feel like the author's capable of a cleverer book, but the one she's produced is a fun read. One thing I did find odd, for a former diplomat, was her lapse into racial trope at points: Foreign countries are characterised by chaos; a perfectly capable Malaysian taxi driver is presented as typically inept.
I wonder if, by 2016, the company isn’t just a business providing tools, but something closer to global social infrastructure. In that sense, the issue isn’t simply one of product design or individual responsibility, but of governance, or the avoidance of governance. And I think it’s clear that there were people inside Facebook who could absolutely see what was coming. And the question that Empire of AI also raises - if it’s infrastructure, who should govern it and how?
This builds on a discussion with a journalist writing for Wired at a conference in San Francisco in the mid-2010s. We were both attending a workshop on behaviour change and talking about Skinner and the longer-term consequences of those design approaches.
So, not an environment in the sense of something we couldn’t live without, but closer to a system that structures how social and political life operates at scale.
By 2016, Facebook was already one of the primary channels for news, campaigning and social interaction in many places. It also shapes behaviour at scale through recommendation loops and feedback mechanisms, making it less a tool and more of an environment people operate within.
This is another keeper. I think the tendency to ascribe malevolent powers to certain tech agents while never addressing persistent human failings is risibly simplistic. I'm writing something at the moment about this, in the context of AI, which seems to be subject to a surge in luddite sentiment. This book will not be nestling on the shelf here, anytime. Unlike John & Paul, which I'm still processing 2 weeks after finishing it.
This is a great review, feels a good balance and does make me want to read the book! Just as an aside I wonder what the terms were of SWW's severance. If she signed a severance that says she must pay $50K for each negative statement, you'd hope that she got a good pay out, or perhaps it was all tied up with her exercising (cashing in) her Options.
I just bought this book at the airport as an in flight read and waited to read your review until I had finished most of it.
What a super fun bitchy gossip with wine after work book! I mean, all the anecdotes are pretty descriptive and I would have valued more “because” or “and so…” analysis but it’s a very funny slagging off :)
Even though you’re right that ‘none of us saw this coming’ - that cute cat videos would morph into toxic radicalisation - I think you’re being too soft on MZ et al and being a bit disingenuous . He wanted the spoils but not the responsibility of being a de facto publisher.
And I note you’re quite quick to dismiss the real world impact of FB, specifically the 2016 election and in general. Generally, I look at what’s happening to people’s jobs/ finances/ prospects to understand electoral behaviour, especially the rise of populists- as history shows. I think you’re too quick however in dismissing FB’s role. Their scale and ability to enable messages to be targeted at specific individuals is qualitatively different than, say, Daily Mail headlines. FB has deliberately built a platform to whip up human’s tendency to be tribal and latch onto blunt headlines.
Saying “oh well Obama did it” (1) my guess is that nearly a decade earlier, his campaign using FB must have played a lesser role because fewer people were on it and (2) Obama wasn’t saying toxic nonsense, divorced from reality unlike Trump.
But IMO ultimately it’s BS to suggest FB et al aren’t publishers.
I don’t think I was quick to dismiss FB’s role in the 2016, I took my time and provided a bunch of evidence from the polisci literature on that election and elections generally.
I agree, Emily, to the extent that few of us understand how FB and other platforms 'work' in terms of human brain functioning. After reading Robert Sapolsky's book Behave (but not yet 'Determined') I'm inclined to think our belief in free will is something we cling on to despite and not because of evidence.
"When people talk about the bravery of whistleblowers, this is what they mean."
I disagree. This individual signed a settlement agreement - presumably in exchange for large sums of money - whilst exiting FB. In exchange for the bag of gold, SWW presumably agreed a non-disparagement/confidentiality type clause. Said individual subsequently changed their mind and wanted to write a book. I don't presume to know their intentions, but I question whether their motivations are exclusively altruistic.
I find it difficult to raise sympathy in this situation, not do I identify with SWW as a true whistleblower.
I'm inclined to agree with your general read on Facebook's impact on our lives, even without having read the book. I also don't believe that Zuck is evil, but at a certain point negligence can approach the same point, especially when it's negligence is service of personal gain.
I picked up this book last year because of a really decent review in The Financial Times (worth noting the author’s husband works there). And while I agree with much of your analysis of the book’s flaws and the harsh legal action against SWW, I don’t share your view that it’s entertaining. I found it unnecessarily bitchy throughout.
Most striking is the extraordinary gap between how SWW presents herself and how she actually comes across. She repeatedly declares her diplomatic credentials — “I insist I know what I’m talking about, and given my years as a diplomat” — and pitches her role as someone who builds relationships before Facebook needs them. Yet the book is full of moments where she seems spectacularly out of her depth.
Take Myanmar, which becomes the moral centrepiece of the whole book. She flies out there because “someone needs to figure out what is going on.” Clearly, she’s the person for the job! She checks into a hotel with no electricity, no hot water, no food, and no internet. Seriously. It’s not like Myanmar didn’t offer hotels with these essentials for any diplomat or visitor to the country after all, the country was hosting a World Economic Forum event at that time! To her credit she secures a chat with Ang San Suu Kyi because her “diplomatic training” helped her locate the seating map! Honestly, I laughed out loud. When she leaves the hotel, she is incapable of arranging transport, considers hitchhiking on an empty road, has no local currency, no local language knowledge, jumps into a random car, and then tries to write down the name of a government department before remembering that Burmese uses a different script and has to resort to sign language and mime. FFS!
This isn’t the behaviour of a seasoned diplomat. It’s Murray from Flight of the Conchords! The comparison kept nagging at me throughout the book. She tells us she’s brilliant at diplomacy while showing us scene after scene of incompetence. She may well be likeable in person, but as an author, she’s strangely unaware of how these anecdotes, as well as the meanness and unnecessary bitchiness about others undermine her own authority.
Ha ha fair points
Hi Ian. Just wanted to say that as well as enjoying the substack, I've got a lot out of reading your book 'Conflicted'.
I'm finding I'm having more interesting and stimulating conversations, especially as I'm no longer viewing them as a zero-sum game where my opinion must prevail for it to be successful. It means I can go into a conversation with curiosity and a readiness to be challenged and develop my views, without the need to be on the defensiveness from the start.
Thank you.
Really great to hear this, thanks so much Greg!
This is such a great example of a well-considered, even-handed, and yes, well-written review. There’s a lesson here for all of us in the power and truth of nuance and clear eyes (and a heart.) Well-done.
Maybe the reason the book’s sense of humour fades in 2016 is that it was around then that people started to hear about Facebook's dark side.
It was roughly around then that Facebook, coupled with the rise of its Whatsapp, was first charged with turning a blind eye to the way it spread misinformation and influenced elections - often, though not always, in favour of right-wing or far-right candidates.
We might never know to what extent misinformation on Facebook, WhatsApp and elsewhere online influenced recent elections but academic studies show there's little doubt their integrity was damaged - see Brazil (in 2018), Kenya and the Philippines, to name three major examples. (Moreover, the spread of misinformation and fake news affects much more than just elections.)
A lot of your post today is devoted to defending Zuckerberg. Yet the fact is that Facebook's algorithm is designed to reward inflammatory content. This is indefensible. Zuckerberg allowed Holocaust deniers to post their hate until 2020!
Define evil however you like but platforming Nazis until the pressure got too great is as good a guide as any in my eyes.
Zuck's position, and a necessary position for social media to function, is that he is not a publisher, and responsibility falls on the person who writes the post. Facebook aren't "turning a blind eye", they're not endorsing posts (across platforms there are billions of posts every day). If a post is actually illegal, then then law can be used to punish that person. If the post doesn't break the law then that is just free speech in action, and complaining about its influence sounds like sour grapes - the media celebrated Obama's use of FB and social media campaigning, the Advertising Age named him the "marketer of the year" in 2008.
I was planning to post something similar, but with a slightly different angle.
I think that it's fairly well-documented elsewhere that roughly mid-decade -- circa 2014 -- Facebook intentionally switched from a user-driven strategy of "connect people to friends and family" to an algorithmic-driven one that "drives maximal engagement (to maximize ad revenue)".
I don't have the impression that they were explicitly allowing Nazis and the like so much as not caring about the content of posts as long as those posts increased engagement with the platform, regardless of the societal consequences of doing so.
So "How Evil is Mark Zuckerberg?" depends on the degree to which you agree with Curtis Mayfield that "a hopeless sinner would hurt all mankind just to save his own".
Super review. I laughed out loud, again, at the "Don't mention the war" passage. I felt there was some decent analysis of the industry towards the very end and I wondered if the publishers had encouraged the book's heavy emphasis on comedy and sometimes faux shlock. I feel like the author's capable of a cleverer book, but the one she's produced is a fun read. One thing I did find odd, for a former diplomat, was her lapse into racial trope at points: Foreign countries are characterised by chaos; a perfectly capable Malaysian taxi driver is presented as typically inept.
It’s funny my guess is the other way round, ie her natural bent is comedy but publishers needed a polemic/exposé
I wonder if, by 2016, the company isn’t just a business providing tools, but something closer to global social infrastructure. In that sense, the issue isn’t simply one of product design or individual responsibility, but of governance, or the avoidance of governance. And I think it’s clear that there were people inside Facebook who could absolutely see what was coming. And the question that Empire of AI also raises - if it’s infrastructure, who should govern it and how?
In what sense is fb or insta ‘infrastructure’? Most countries would get by fine without them, is my impression!
This builds on a discussion with a journalist writing for Wired at a conference in San Francisco in the mid-2010s. We were both attending a workshop on behaviour change and talking about Skinner and the longer-term consequences of those design approaches.
So, not an environment in the sense of something we couldn’t live without, but closer to a system that structures how social and political life operates at scale.
By 2016, Facebook was already one of the primary channels for news, campaigning and social interaction in many places. It also shapes behaviour at scale through recommendation loops and feedback mechanisms, making it less a tool and more of an environment people operate within.
This is another keeper. I think the tendency to ascribe malevolent powers to certain tech agents while never addressing persistent human failings is risibly simplistic. I'm writing something at the moment about this, in the context of AI, which seems to be subject to a surge in luddite sentiment. This book will not be nestling on the shelf here, anytime. Unlike John & Paul, which I'm still processing 2 weeks after finishing it.
This is a great review, feels a good balance and does make me want to read the book! Just as an aside I wonder what the terms were of SWW's severance. If she signed a severance that says she must pay $50K for each negative statement, you'd hope that she got a good pay out, or perhaps it was all tied up with her exercising (cashing in) her Options.
I just bought this book at the airport as an in flight read and waited to read your review until I had finished most of it.
What a super fun bitchy gossip with wine after work book! I mean, all the anecdotes are pretty descriptive and I would have valued more “because” or “and so…” analysis but it’s a very funny slagging off :)
Even though you’re right that ‘none of us saw this coming’ - that cute cat videos would morph into toxic radicalisation - I think you’re being too soft on MZ et al and being a bit disingenuous . He wanted the spoils but not the responsibility of being a de facto publisher.
And I note you’re quite quick to dismiss the real world impact of FB, specifically the 2016 election and in general. Generally, I look at what’s happening to people’s jobs/ finances/ prospects to understand electoral behaviour, especially the rise of populists- as history shows. I think you’re too quick however in dismissing FB’s role. Their scale and ability to enable messages to be targeted at specific individuals is qualitatively different than, say, Daily Mail headlines. FB has deliberately built a platform to whip up human’s tendency to be tribal and latch onto blunt headlines.
Saying “oh well Obama did it” (1) my guess is that nearly a decade earlier, his campaign using FB must have played a lesser role because fewer people were on it and (2) Obama wasn’t saying toxic nonsense, divorced from reality unlike Trump.
But IMO ultimately it’s BS to suggest FB et al aren’t publishers.
I don’t think I was quick to dismiss FB’s role in the 2016, I took my time and provided a bunch of evidence from the polisci literature on that election and elections generally.
Hmmm ok yes, that’s fair enough. On reflection I can see I’m applying the (IMO) strong real world influence of social media *now*, backwards to 2016.
I agree, Emily, to the extent that few of us understand how FB and other platforms 'work' in terms of human brain functioning. After reading Robert Sapolsky's book Behave (but not yet 'Determined') I'm inclined to think our belief in free will is something we cling on to despite and not because of evidence.
"When people talk about the bravery of whistleblowers, this is what they mean."
I disagree. This individual signed a settlement agreement - presumably in exchange for large sums of money - whilst exiting FB. In exchange for the bag of gold, SWW presumably agreed a non-disparagement/confidentiality type clause. Said individual subsequently changed their mind and wanted to write a book. I don't presume to know their intentions, but I question whether their motivations are exclusively altruistic.
I find it difficult to raise sympathy in this situation, not do I identify with SWW as a true whistleblower.
I'm inclined to agree with your general read on Facebook's impact on our lives, even without having read the book. I also don't believe that Zuck is evil, but at a certain point negligence can approach the same point, especially when it's negligence is service of personal gain.