> So maybe Zuck is telling the truth here, that they are trying to fix all this. But no one can see the forest from the trees.
Ah, this is what I think of as Schrodinger's Accountability. Zuckerberg and Facebook's senior execs are simultaneously: A) so brilliant for running Facebook that they deserve to be incredibly rich, and B) so normal that they can't possibly be expected to understand the consequences of their actions, and so are morally blameless. Heads they win, tails we lose.
I say it's one or the other. If Facebook is too big to be understood, it should be broken up into small enough units that mere mortals can see the forest and tend it responsibly. And if not, the execs should be morally and legally culpable for the harm it does.
You may be missing the point if you think your point is orthogonal to theirs. Mark Zuckerberg doesn't have to be painted as a reptiloid in order for his actions to be bad, or for those actions to cause harm. More than blaming shit needs to get fixed right? We can still hold people culpable, but we don't need to do that, don't need to indict anyone before trying to fix a problem that is self perpetuating due to individual incentives and a complete lack of oversight.
The senior execs are the ones who set up the incentive systems there. They are the ones who are richly paid to provide oversight. So either this is exactly what they want or they're hopelessly incompetent.
And yes, I think we should change the incentives. We should change them such that executives face direct personal punishment for negligent or intentional harm. We should have learned that lesson during the 2008 financial crisis, but instead nobody did time. The worst that happened was that some very rich people were forced to give back a modest percentage of their gains.
>>We should change them such that executives face direct personal punishment for negligent or intentional harm. We should have learned that lesson during the 2008 financial crisis, but instead nobody did time
does not contradict anything else.
But this
>>So either this is exactly what they want or they're hopelessly incompetent.
is incorrect. Those are not the only two options. Reality is typically more complex, and more boring than that. Doing harm does not require willful malice or profound stupidity and trying to reduce it down to that does no one any good.
Not that after investigation we could find that it was really one of those two cases for many people! But 'negligent harm', which is something you want people to be held accountable (me too!), does not require gross incompetence. It can be as simple as ignoring a couple inconvenient truths and being insulated from the consequences of ones decisions, or the cumulative outcome caused by the group.
I am saying that we end "being insulated from consequences" by choosing to reduce it down to those two options.
Think of it similar to handling explosives. Are they useful and important in society? Definitely. Are they subtle and complicated, such that working with them can easily harm somebody in ways that are not foreseeable to the naive? You bet.
But when somebody decides to create and apply explosives and hurts somebody, we don't just say, "Gosh, that's very complicated. Who could have known how it would work out?" We say, "You intentionally chose to work with something powerful and dangerous, so you're responsible for the harm you caused."
Is it more complicated? Sure. And I'm saying that when it comes to highly paid executives who seek out positions that put them in control of dangerous complexity, they become responsible for the outcomes.
They are already seen as responsible when it comes to anything good that happens on their watch, which is why they get paid such fast sums. I'm saying they should be seen as equally responsible when it comes to the harms. No more of this, "Oops we crashed the economy/poisoned a bunch of people/actively enabled genocide" stuff. All of that "more complex" reality becomes their problem if they are in control of it.
What does breaking up a company actually do for the consumer? I don't think telecoms are any better for the consumer decades after we broke Bell. There is strong incentive to just form a cartel like telecoms today rather than a competitive environment that is beneficial for the consumer.
The breakup was a huge win for consumers. Long-distance rates dropped significantly due to competition and the telephone system became much more open.
And I think it dramatically aided early internet adoption. If you read "When Wizards Stay Up Late" you'll see how big a barrier AT&T was to the adoption of packet-switched networks, rather than the circuit-switched networks they sold people. How far would the Internet had gotten if AT&T had banned home modems [1] or priced early ISPs out of existence? They would have vastly preferred something like AOL, not the Internet, which destroyed their long-distance call business entirely. Look at how they behaved with mobile apps up Apple launched the app store.
Our problem was that we didn't stick with it. Starting in the Reagan era, antitrust enforcement shifted toward much laxer standards. So AT&T reassembled itself as a (smaller) juggernaut and kept going.
[1] I realize this sounds insane now, but one of the things the DoJ sued for is "Obstructing the interconnection of customer provided terminal equipment and refusing to sell terminal equipment, such as telephones, automatic answering devices or switchboards, to subscribers".
It's hard to say how things would have gone differently, but I don't think it would have been much different. Looking at the ISP world today long after the dust settled, it's not that much different from the Bell era in terms of consumer choices. I have one choice in ISP for my address. A de facto monopoly entrenched by a lackadaisical attitude towards expanding infrastructure connectivity.
As I said, our problem was that we stopped holding monopolies to account. The Bell breakup was a last major success of the old approach to monopoly regulation. The reason you have one ISP is not the thinking that brought you the Bell break up, but what came after.
'Deserve to be rich' is the wrong frame. What is a sensible procedure to decide who deserves to be rich and who doesn't? The say so of powerful politicians? 'Raised to the top via a combination of skill, luck and shrewdness' is more accurate. The fundamental problem is that the world is governed by power laws. As the size of the ecosystem grows (hello globalization) at some point it becomes obvious that no humans can effectively control the largest of the emergent entities. We need to break up Facebook, we need to break up the Internet, we need to break up the global economic system. We need to add friction back into the world. A lot of friction.
Currently the worldwide hunger and infant mortality rates are at an all-time low while population is an all-time high (but the growth rate is quickly decreasing, so the threat of overpopulation has passed). Economic growth lifts a substantial chunk of that population out of poverty each year. Are you worried that you might immiserate or kill most of them when you break up the global economic system?
Ah, this is what I think of as Schrodinger's Accountability. Zuckerberg and Facebook's senior execs are simultaneously: A) so brilliant for running Facebook that they deserve to be incredibly rich, and B) so normal that they can't possibly be expected to understand the consequences of their actions, and so are morally blameless. Heads they win, tails we lose.
I say it's one or the other. If Facebook is too big to be understood, it should be broken up into small enough units that mere mortals can see the forest and tend it responsibly. And if not, the execs should be morally and legally culpable for the harm it does.