8 ms·

Facebook's Little Red Book

544 points by heshiebee 2y ago

thanks_dang 2y ago
[flagged]
- pessimizer 2y ago
  "Facebook was not originally created to be a company, it was originally envisioned as a collective chronicle of who was hot, and who certainly was not."
projektfu 2y ago
Good job with the scan. I started reading the book and began to feel rage so I stopped after about 20 pages. Is it the most self-unaware book or just people trying their hand at PR?
- qsort 2y ago
  A little red book full of quotations from the chairman... Where else did I see this?
  - woodruffw 2y ago
    I think that's a very explicit, intentional reference.
  - thanks_dang 2y ago
    Is it too early to start a first print of paulgraham.com? I want mine signed. I hope the cover is orange.
    - 8f2ab37a-ed6c 2y ago
      Actually you can download the whole thing by using https://github.com/ofou/graham-essays https://github.com/ofou/graham-essays , and then I imagine you can pipe it into pandoc or something of the sort to create a PDF. And then you can send that over to https://www.blurb.com/pdf-to-book https://www.blurb.com/pdf-to-book or similar providers to get it printed. When I attempted this once, I couldn't get the pages to be formatted nicely like a book, and the number of pages I ended up with was close to 1500 or something along those lines, which ends up costing you $100+ to print out with one of these services. However I suspect that if someone were to typeset the essays nicely, it'd be an amazing coffee table book.
- com2kid 2y ago
  This was 2012. There was still hope and optimism in the tech space. The Internet had helped overturn powerful regimes and given voice to the disenfranchised. There was the idea that person to person public discourse could resolve many societal problems. Smartphones had exploded just 6 years prior and they were already making inroads into traditionally underserved and neglected communities around the world, helping farmers improve yields and young women become self sufficient so they could escape forced marriages. The idea that we could join together and share ideas and make the world a better place isn't a wrong idea, it is just one that got subverted once it was realized that inciting anger in users lead to more usage and thus more ad impressions.
  - dgfitz 2y ago
    > There was the idea that person to person public discourse could resolve many societal problems. Nobody thought this.
    - karmajunkie 2y ago
      I hate to break the news to you, but literally millions believed it. There's still more than a (very overprivileged) few who still believe it.
      - dgfitz 2y ago
        Sorry, nobody “educated” believed this.
        notacoward 2y ago
        That might be the most blatant "no true Scotsman" I've ever seen. Practically out of a textbook. I'm educated. I and hundreds of coworkers at multiple companies still believed it in 2012. You said something that is simply, provably untrue.
        dgfitz 2y ago
- woodruffw 2y ago
  I think in 2012, SV startups (and especially social media startups) were still getting high on their own supply: there was a seemingly genuine groundswell belief that unilaterally connecting the world would be a force for good, rather than a mere reconfiguration of powers. (I don't think Zuckerberg himself is a true believer, but I do think that the people who wrote and read this book in 2012 probably believed it. This was the same year as the Arab Spring, after all.)
  - junon 2y ago
    Yes, this. I was at Uber in SF around 2016 or so when they did their "pixels and bits" rebrand which felt very similar. It felt very... "we are messiahs"? Most people felt it, only the people with the highest paychecks (or managers) played into it. After hearing the core values of the company thrown around in regular speech so often most people got kind of numb to anything corporate (e.g. "I really like that you're always hustling so hard but I would love to see you do a bit more toe stepping"). I left SF a year or so after that so I wonder if that whole approach has changed in the bigger offices or not. Being in Europe now most people here (most ..) wouldn't play into it I don't think. Retrospectively feels very American. --- EDIT: Actually it's kind of hard to find info on the rebrand now. There's the announcement[0] but that only seems to allude to the weird philosophical aspect of it in the description, which leads me to believe they never published it publicly. > The new Uber brand system is made up of primary and secondary components that tell the story of technology moving the physical world. Today, we're rolling out a new look and feel that celebrates the cities we're in and the technology that brings people what they want, when they want it. It was more than just "primary and secondary components", they had somehow likened people and pixels together and were trying to create some weird (but similar) narrative of "connecting everything through transport" or whatever. I think the idea was that they wanted to start breaking into more verticals, a la UberEATS and whatnot, but I distinctly remember hearing a lot of "what ifs" about freight, air, etc. that I think were mostly fluff chatter to hype up the rebrand. Most people, even internally, hated it it, and shortly after that started monthly, then weekly, then at times daily new public scandals about the company or TK, so many people left shortly thereafter. [0] https://youtu.be/axjXNEordH8?feature=shared https://youtu.be/axjXNEordH8?feature=shared
- tokioyoyo 2y ago
  For better or worse, social media (I’d even go as far as saying Facebook) has changed the world. As cringey as that book sounds, people loved hopium of early 2010s. Maybe I was young and naive as well, but I also believed that such connections will unite the world somehow.
- Underpass9041 2y ago
  The amount of retcon in even the first few pages is comical, it comes across as the most tone deaf thing ever.
- deleted 2y ago
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- deleted 2y ago
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- tejohnso 2y ago
  What's so enraging? A company puts out some propaganda about how wonderfully world changing it is. Not all that unusual or unexpected.
- paulddraper 2y ago
  Huh? Smiling people drinking Pepsi, oil companies showing sun filtered through cornstalks....what's the difference?
- toast0 2y ago
  I could never figure out how much of the employee directed propaganda was from people who were doing it ironically and how much was from people who were drinking the Flavor Aid. I don't think I saw any posters about carpooling, but if there were any, reprints of the classic [1] would have fit right in with the rest of the posters. I'm pretty sure I saw this book, but I don't think I saved a copy I don't think they were still printing it when my employer was acquired. Unfortunately, the propaganda doesn't work Page 110 talks about building trust, but what has FB done to earn your trust lately? [1] https://fdr.artifacts.archives.gov/objects/17472/when-you-ride-alone-you-ride-with-hitler?ctx=bfb1c38c-8771-40b5-82a9-d61eaf9c3303&idx=1 https://fdr.artifacts.archives.gov/objects/17472/when-you-ri...
- yuliyp 2y ago
  I think the way to read it is as a few things: - An artifact intended to try to help solidify a sense of unity of mission and values - Internal cheerleading - A stake in the sand about things which did not fit in with the values. I read this at the time it showed up on everyone's desks (I wish I'd kept it, but I have no idea where it is). Employees naturally rolled their eyes at some of the excessive optimism in some places, but generally it got the ethos right. That some of the boldest statements have fallen by the wayside ("We don't build better services to make money; We make money to build better services", "Build Products around people, not data") is obviously disappointing, but I'd view what it was trying to do in the light of a piece of art that fell short of its goal rather than merely self-unaware. It was never intended as PR. It delivered its message via anecdotes and the experiences of working there, not in any way that would have anywhere close to the same meaning to the broader world.
whalesalad 2y ago
page 17. android operating system on an iphone 4. i'm crying right now, particularly the way this is juxtaposed with so many critical moments in history.
- Mogzol 2y ago
  I think it is meant to be a generic phone, the edges and front camera are wrong for an iphone, but then the home button is very distinctly an iphone. It is weird.
  - whalesalad 2y ago
    it's either an iphone 4 or iphone 5 in a case. the home button is an iconic giveaway.
- pests 2y ago
  I think that's a BlackBerry. The later Motion from 2017 had a singular button down there too. Could be an older version but can't find anything.
- croisillon 2y ago
  i don't think it's an iphone
  - firecall 2y ago
    Correct - it's not an iPhone. It's the Facebook Phone! (probably)
- duck 2y ago
  Could it be an iPod Touch?
- firecall 2y ago
  It is in fact the Facebook Phone! Or at least a mockup of one. It has the front-facing camera in the top right corner, which is a hint! Googling suggests the Facebook phone was an HTC device?
theideaofcoffee 2y ago
[flagged]
- paulddraper 2y ago
  Explain?
  - thanks_dang 2y ago
    [flagged]
  - ch71r22 2y ago
    The "Little Red Book" is the name of Mao Zedong's propaganda book. It's an example of indoctrination. Marshall McLuhan introduced the idea that the "medium is the message," which is heavily alluded to in this book with images of the printing press, etc. The idea is that changes in how information is shared play a bigger role than the actual content of the messages being exchanged. Chris Cox, the Chief Product Officer, used to regularly talk about McLuhan. McLuhan also envisioned trends in the change of information media culminating in a "global village," which Facebook echoes here in its mission of "making the world more open and connected." McLuhan expected that this would divide us more than it would unite us. So I think what the person you're replying to was saying Facebook's appropriation of Mao Zedong and Marshall McLuhan is... weird. Facebook is directly drawing from dictators' propaganda and a philosopher who predicted what Facebook would bring about, and didn't think it was a good thing.
- dangoodmanUT 2y ago
  [flagged]
grahamj 2y ago
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- woodruffw 2y ago
  Facebook is definitely a "great company" by Person of the Year rules[1]. There are some real whoppers on that list. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Person_of_the_Year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Person_of_the_Year
  - bee_rider 2y ago
    It is great in the sense that it is very large.
    - paxys 2y ago
      And has completely changed the world.
      - righthand 2y ago
        I think Google aped Facebook on world-changing by harvesting data and running algorithms to get you to scroll through a list. Changed the US might be more accurate.
        Zambyte 2y ago
        Limiting the influence of Facebook to the US doesn't seem necessary. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_genocide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_genocide
    - kibwen 2y ago
      Great like the Great War, or the Great Depression, or the Great Irish Famine?
- JKCalhoun 2y ago
  Ha ha, so it's more of a cautionary tale. I love those!
Towaway69 2y ago
page 27 > Zuckerbergs's Law: The amount each person shares doubles each year. I initially thought wealth, ideas and love was meant but no ... it's just data.
- dullcrisp 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - pc86 2y ago
    I looked up "psychohistory" and while the definition makes sense, I don't really understand what you mean by this comment.
    - dullcrisp 2y ago
      It just sounds vaguely prophetic like he thinks he knows how every person will behave for the foreseeable future. But I was referring to the fictional version from the Foundation series, not the apparently real (pseudo-)science that I didn’t know existed.
  - ninth_ant 2y ago
    I’m quite confident this would have been based on metadata collected by Facebook from its user activity. The company has been extremely analytical about its own growth, and id be surprised if this wasn’t a conclusion from an in-house data scientist that just got Zuckerberg’s name stamped on it.
  - vineyardmike 2y ago
    While I’m sure Facebook had data to roughly justify this, just like Moores Law, I’m sure this is equal parts back-projection as prophetic declaration of intent. For Facebook, they needed the cultural expectation to be ever-increasing data sharing. They (along with other companies) facilitated the creation of tools to share ever-increasing amounts of data.
    - 2y ago
genericspammer 2y ago
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- deleted 2y ago
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- AyyEye 2y ago
  > They "trust me". Dumb fucks
- edm0nd 2y ago
  bro came back on an alt account to respam their own shitty rant lol
- hobom 2y ago
  As far as I know that was a distinct, previous endeavor. Only afterwards did the Vinklevoi approach him to make the website, an idea which he then allegedly ran with on his own.
paxys 2y ago
I think people here are too young to remember the tech industry in 2012. None of the images and ideas conveyed in this book (printing press, cave art, fall of the Berlin wall, Arab Spring, particle accelerators) were outlandish for the time and space it was printed in. Tech was all about optimism and idealism. Everyone in silicon valley knew they were changing the world for the better, and tech was the missing piece all along. Silly people would finally all stop fighting and get along now that they had Facebook and Twitter and iPhones.
- stiltzkin 2y ago
  HN before 2012 was way different back then too.
- bbqfog 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - therein 2y ago
    Yes but people talked about it even less than they do today. Back then you could say connecting people is always a good thing and people didn't challenge that openly like we do today.
    - tsunamifury 2y ago
      The average 1st world citizen didn't comprehend how expanding networks meant centralizing power in even fewer hands. We still dont see it yet today. Not fully
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    OP didn’t make a statement about the facts on the ground, but the culture and myths of the time. (If you think the villainy myths we tell ourselves today are more grounded in truth, they’re not. We’re always in a narrative. And there is nothing wrong with collective narratives.)
    - 2y ago
mawise 2y ago
It's funny; as I've been working on Haven[1], one of my guiding lights is what Facebook _could have been_[2]. To that end the opening section is really inspiring. This is describing a world where digital tools enhance your friendships. I think that's still possible and still a worthwhile goal--I just don't think it can be done by an entity with a corporate incentive structure. Those incentives will always tend towards enshittification[3]. [1]: https://havenweb.org https://havenweb.org [2]: https://havenweb.org/2022/11/02/facebook-lie.html https://havenweb.org/2022/11/02/facebook-lie.html [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification# https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification#
- nashashmi 2y ago
  > what Facebook _could have been_ In 2010, facebook changed. Twitter was cooler. Myspace was more money. So facebook took a page out of their platforms. In 2012, facebook went to Washington DC. In 2016, Washington DC went to facebook. When did facebook change? When zuck lost control of it after sandberg came on board. When did zuck get control? When zuck changed to be in alliance with the master plan… which was take control of the world… politically. Remember zuck running for election?
  - ninth_ant 2y ago
    Oh my god, no. Zuck had — and I believe still has — complete control of the company. Demonizing Sandberg and lionizing Zuckerberg is a complete disservice to reality. It was the focus on growth and not money that ruined everything. Many changes occurred in this period. I was there. A big change is that ads became profitable. I think it’s fair to say this change was sudden. Facebook went from being scrappy and underfunded to being wealthy and powerful. At the same time, the growth had eclipsed competitors and Google Plus came and went. The media tone and coverage changed from “oh this startup is doing neat stuff” to a point concern for data privacy and the implosion of journalism revenue. So they became a lot more influential culturally. Being suddenly wealthy and influential but with a cultural mentality of being a scrappy and upstart— something this book accurately reflects — lead to hubris. The focus on hypergrowth which had served them well from a small startup — under the umbrella of this hubris — led to events like the Cambridge Analytica disaster. Insufficient care was being placed on how data could be collected and misused by others, growth took priority. This focus on Hypergrowth meant that changes that responded well in metrics got pushed. The longer-term damage of people not enjoying their experiences wasn’t a high enough ranked metric compared to engagement and user metrics. None of this was Sandberg’s fault. She was an extremely competent manager and is brilliant. Absolutely she was instrumental in leading Facebook to profitability but this push wasn’t a big factor in their decline. Instead, Facebook got too big way too fast and the employees and Zuck didn’t have the mindset shift needed to consider everything as it was happening. Yes, money ruined everything eventually — but that came later. The most crucial damage had already happened — people gave up on trust that Facebook could handle their data responsibly, and trust that they’d have a good experience on the site. I could go on but that’s enough.
nashashmi 2y ago
Is there a version I can read without the pictures? Just the manifesto? I’d like to know how big this “book” is actually?
- dangoodmanUT 2y ago
  You can probably parse this out really fast with OCR
  - latexr 2y ago
    Did just that with some random online tool and it said it found just under 7000 words. Probably also counting words in the images, though.
- mgiampapa 2y ago
  Physically it's 4 1/4 x 7 x 5/16. Word count isn't much.
lbrito 2y ago
Web 2.0-era peak hubris. A decade later, its hard to decide if this looks delusional or prophetic - they did change societies, but probably not in the ways they ostensibly wanted to be recognized for changing.
- scrubs 2y ago
  Bingo ... let's not confuse a techie for a messaging app selling ad data as a tech savant (almost) brilliantly predicting the future because it tries to bootstrap itself into the stratosphere with a flourish of art copy & paste by association with pictures of CERN, Egyptian hieroglyphics and so on. The latter are cool ... and stand well in time. CERN requires something a tad more complicated that pushing around "lol :)" over tcp-ip done before them + "big data" analysis to sell it to morons on madison street. Claude Shannon, von Neumann, creators of the transistor, capacitors, languages, algos etc are the cool+smart kids ... not Zuckerberg. Not Facebook. "Move fast and break" things has some tactical truth in larthargic companies, but averaged over time is asymptomatically a zero. It's just SV frat boy talk. Enough.
zoklet-enjoyer 2y ago
This looks like an Instagram feed. Is it a coincidence that they purchased Instagram in April 2012?
worik 2y ago
I find this terribly sad.
- fargle 2y ago
  particularly the bit where they are painting over the old Sun Microsystems sign. a solid engineering company that actually build good stuff, destroyed in collateral damage from the dot-com bust, sold off to oracle of all things. now further being humiliated by this narcissistic, exploitative, personality-disorder-masquerading-as-a-service company?
  - yuliyp 2y ago
    Huh? That's a weird take. What should they have done? Left the entrance to their headquarters with a Sun Microsystems logo rather than their own? The Sun Microsystems sign continues to be there at the end of Willow Road, just facing toward the campus vs toward the street. This is doing more to honor Sun than any other realistic choice they could have made.
    - 52-6F-62 2y ago
      The message in the book seems to be that Sun failed out of weakness and it could happen to fb as well if they don’t eat the world.
      - fargle 2y ago
        which is just so narcissistic! the way i see it sun failed because it was a well run sensible company that made good products, that were liked by its customers, and not eat the world. and that's not what succeeds. so FB will do just fine, if i'm right about that.
    - fargle 2y ago
      i didn't say there was anything that FB should have done different. it's just sad. it's sad to see a genuinely good company gone and replaced by a slimy one. actually if you include oracle, two slimy ones. who are both inarguably far more successful. it's sad because it's a statement about what our current economy values and what it does not. and to any of you who have the word "engineer" or "scientist" in your job title: it's definitely not those things.
deadbabe 2y ago
Anywhere to find an original copy of one of these?
- evanelias 2y ago
  Two copies have sold on ebay over the past month, with each listed at $1000 despite being later prints and having slight damage. That price seems absolutely bonkers to me. The copy in the scan has a 2014 date, suggesting they were still giving the book to new hires in 2014 or maybe 2015. (I was hired in mid 2013 and my copy has a 2012 date.) So based on company headcount those years and accounting for turnover, I would guess the total print run was at least 10,000... there are definitely copies of it around.
  - deadbabe 2y ago
    Maybe someone can put up their copy on eBay if they read this
chucknthem 2y ago
I remember this. Wish I'd kept my little piece of history. Written at a time when people were still optimistic and hopeful about tech.
- jonas21 2y ago
  Lots of people are still optimistic about tech. They just generally don't have time to get into silly arguments about it on HN.
  - dowager_dan99 2y ago
    You're right - but also very wrong. People can be optimistic while still having an existential crisis about what they see/feel is happening. That's what makes them believe they can influence and change the world, and why they even try. What we're seeing in tech today feels like it started in the 80's, and before that point computers, etc. were viewed by some as the downfall of humankind and by others the saviour.
    - UncleOxidant 2y ago
      Oh, man, I can still remember how when barcodes started showing up on products in the late 70s that there were people saying it was the mark of the beast or a precursor to it or that it was some government ploy.
      - int_19h 2y ago
        They still say that, by the way.
  - aprilthird2021 2y ago
    Eh, people back then were optimistic about tech AND had time to get into silly arguments about it on HN. So something's changed
    - sumeno 2y ago
mparnisari 2y ago
Okay, so Facebook started as a way to interconnect people. But it's a business, so it has to make money to survive. So they added ads. And now my feed is 99% ads, 1% updates from my friends. Sooooo mission accomplished, right? Right?
- exe34 2y ago
  you get updates from your friends? the only reason I have Facebook is to see pictures of cats, but it insists on showing me hamas propaganda ai-slop.
  - mparnisari 2y ago
    Yes. I get updates from my local community
    - concerndc1tizen 2y ago
      There is no shared experience of social media - that's what makes it hard to talk about, and keeps everyone in disagreement, because everyone has different perspectives. By design.
      - exe34 2y ago
        I think it's my own fault, I should never have engaged with the numpties. But I do wish the Facebook feed would include more stuff from the cats groups I follow instead of the rage bait.
- 1970-01-01 2y ago
  Facebook was started as a way for college boys to gleam full names, pictures, and other personal information of college girls. When it was just this, it was actually wonderful and mostly innocent kids having fun. But Zuck was greedy, and eventually it evolved into yet another of the online behemoths that can only thrive by selling as much of your private data as it can get away with. As such, it is no longer special, and therefore it is ripe for disruption.
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
Ben Barry's page on the book from his website archive: https://v1.benbarry.com/project/facebooks-book https://v1.benbarry.com/project/facebooks-book
Animats 2y ago
Just read the whole thing. Not one word about ads. From the 2014 book: Remember, people don't use Facebook because they like us. They use it because they like their friends. Where that went: We have the power to cut them off from their friends. So we can control everything they see. Muahahaha!
ribadeo 2y ago
There are STILL people drinking the techno-utopian kool-aid. Plenty of folks think Musk will do something smart someday, for humanity's benefit, despite all evidence to the contrary. I was here when the web showed up, and I can honestly state that we featured blatant techno-utopian rhetoric in nearly every aspect of the industry, as well as our underground nocturnal allegedly musical entertainment. I now feel rather dumb, aka a product of my time, but the notion that inventing tools would lead to them automatically being used for good was prevalent, if specious.
- vundercind 2y ago
  Similar journey here. I think I’ve become some variety of techno-determinist pessimist. We are what technology lets us be, including when it comes to ethics and government. And major inventions aren’t guaranteed to push the space of the possible in the right direction—but neither can we avoid these changes, as effectively sounding the alarm early enough to matter, while also correctly calling which are bad and how they’re bad, is too hard to practically happen. Freedom’s a fleeting gift of circumstance, and the world is a machine none of us control and that’s often bad and sometimes destroys important things, I guess is where I’m at now. I’d definite press a button to permanent un-invent the Internet, if someone put it in front of me.
- toast0 2y ago
  > Plenty of folks think Musk will do something smart someday, for humanity's benefit, despite all evidence to the contrary. It's taking a little bit longer than I thought, but isn't the destruction of Twitter a positive for humanity? :P
- Nasrudith 2y ago
  Tools which are not invented cannot be used for good, there is some logic behind that. It is necessary but not sufficient for good. There is also fundamentally a tension between freedom and good. Since being free to use technology also includes being able to use it for evil. Not to mention the track record of trying to enforce "goodness" has been less than promising historically. And that is before the inherent fundamentals of dual use. There is nothing we could do to keep fire from being fundamentally capable both of keeping someone alive by preventing freezing to death, and sterilization and is usable as a self-replicating weapon of destruction. Basically you can only control how well our surroundings handle being set on fire, not make arson an impossibility.
__MatrixMan__ 2y ago
There's a lot of altruistic sounding stuff about connection in there, but it's hard to believe it's sincere when their product is a space where paid accounts don't have to bother with consent.
- disgruntledphd2 2y ago
  This was a very, very different time and written by a company that no longer exists.
jmyeet 2y ago
How far we've come in a little over a decade. If you're working for Big Tech now, you're basically working for a defense contractor. Amazon, Microsoft, Google or Meta are really no different to Boeing, Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman. Meta was culpable in the Rohingya genocide [1], builds AI for the military [2], silences content about Palestine (with deep ties to the Netanyahu government) [3] and Zuckerberg is cozying up to the incoming Trump administration [4]. We're so far away from Sergey Brin's principled stance against China [5]. You can find similar lists to the above for Google, Microsoft or Amazon. [1]: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-facebooks-systems-promoted-violence-against-rohingya-meta-owes-reparations-new-report/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb... [2]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/nov/05/meta-allows-national-security-defense-contractors-use-llama-ai https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/nov/05/meta-allo... [3]: https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/systemic-censorship-palestine-content-instagram-and https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/... [4]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c87x98q8y08o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c87x98q8y08o [5]: https://archive.is/tOWfY https://archive.is/tOWfY
- KerrAvon 2y ago
  re: 4 -- Facebook and reactionary politics have been hand in hand from the beginning of general public access to Facebook -- the world would be in a much better place without it.
- NetOpWibby 2y ago
  I work at a fruit company in Cupertino and I felt disgusted when the CEO of said company was in the list of tech CEOs groveling to the incoming president. As idealistic as I am, I do understand that certain things need to be done for waves hand reasons, but...ugh. At least I'm not (directly) supporting war? I think? The world is feeling rather Cyberpunk 2077-ish so it's only a matter of time before I have no choice to trade in my values for the ability to support my family. I feel for people currently in that position.
  - 52-6F-62 2y ago
    I think its a very good sign to see people deep within the industry having emergent intuitions about the direction of the entity that puts food on their table… But please, please dedicate more time to reading outside your sphere and beyond video games. They can be a part of the path to enlightenment, but there is much more going on. None of the current status quo is a surprise to anyone who has been studying media or history or polemics or even poetry. In fact it’s just been agonizing to watch the cycles. Equip yourselves, because if you don’t people will use those unknown ideas against you and the wider world.
Frummy 2y ago
"complacency breeds complacency breeds complacency breeds complacency breeds complacency breeds complacency breeds complacency breeds complacency breeds complacency breeds complacency breeds complacency breeds complacency breeds complacency breeds complacency breeds complacency breeds complacency" So funny!
smnrg 2y ago
Design and content references must have felt like a cute satirical reference at the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotations_from_Chairman_Mao_Tse-tung https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotations_from_Chairman_Mao_T...
- tsunamifury 2y ago
  "We were going to change the world." And then they did... it was no accident
  - riiii 2y ago
    > We were going to change the world Ah, the importance of being specific. If you want to change your neighbourhood, you could start every morning by sweeping the pavement. Or you could leave a random dog turd. Both will accomplish your stated goal.
drivingmenuts 2y ago
[flagged]
- jbullock35 2y ago
  That was Aaron Sorkin’s story in The Social Network, but it seems to have been a fiction. Steven Levy’s history of the company is much more detailed (and Levy is trying to be faithful to the historical record, unlike Sorkin) – and it argues that there’s no evidence for this Sorkin story about Zuckerberg‘s motive.
swyx 2y ago
are there any pdf printing shops that cna take this pdf and ship it to us as a book?
forth_throwaway 2y ago
Facebook has usurped the legacy media that they mention in the Red Book. But their relationship to capital and government is the exact same as the legacy media they replaced, so instead of being disruptive they fill the same role --except this time with even more ruthless efficiency and profitability. "When education is not liberating, the dream of the oppressed is to become the oppressor."
tills13 2y ago
When it was produces, this was probably inspiring and effective. Retrospectively, it's a bit creepy and ominous.
- lelandfe 2y ago
  And naive. "When everyone has a printing press, the ones with the best ideas are the ones people listen to" – in a room full of voices, uncommonly is the best idea heard.
  - lupire 2y ago
    Tomato, tomahto; Naive, cynical; potato, potahto. "Best" in a Darwinian memetic sense of "optimized for reproduction and dissemination", not "accurate" or "helpful".
    - Liftyee 2y ago
      I wonder how loudness factors into that. Maybe ideas which make their "host" express them loudly have a higher chance of "infecting" others?
      - disqard 2y ago
        If you haven't already, you should check out Daniel Dennett's "From Bacteria to Bach and Back". I think you'll be susceptible to "catching" a lot of the ideas in there :)
      - lelandfe 2y ago
        Or express them at all. Ideas which when heard are likely to be repeated, loudly. ...We're basically describing idea zombies, a la Pontypool
dang 2y ago
All: if you're going to comment, please make sure you're following the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). That means posting out of curiosity, not indignation. Internet indignation is addictive, repetitive, and boring (and there's already too much of it here).
tsunamifury 2y ago
I think this all can be boiled down to to a true axiom of modern power: "Expand the network at all cost, and increase its engagement." This went from a little flippant red book to a credo that has now changed elections and democracy as well as culture and view of the human self. At the time it was radical idealism and today its something different, but its worth seeing and truly understanding.
rokob 2y ago
I still have my copy. I didn’t realize this was such a deep cut. My favorite part was the “Facebook was not created to be a business” quote being juxtaposed against Kevin Systrom saying “instagram was created to be a business” right after the acquisition.
bagels 2y ago
There's propaganda slogans/posters like this all over the Meta offices. One of them is "This is now your company". When the layoffs started happening, I started seeing these mocked, "This is no longer your company", etc.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
  Maybe they should shop here: https://despair.com/collections/demotivators https://despair.com/collections/demotivators
  - tdeck 2y ago
    Wow I remember seeing these in the 2000s. What a blast from the past!
- nitwit005 2y ago
  When I visited Facebook's HQ years ago, people had modified signs saying "Move fast and break things" by adding a prefix "Don't". I'm sure they knew this was propaganda. The little red book is a very clear reference (just do a search for "little red book" if anyone doesn't recognize the reference).
  - aristus 2y ago
    Mocking the signs at Facebook started literally the day after they appeared suddenly in the 1601 building. "Break fast and eat things", and so on. There was a very fancy print shop on site and we would work up spoofs on the same equipment. A large percentage of programmers of a certain generation got their start in the graphic design world.
- programmertote 2y ago
  Amazon also likes to tout their way of doing things as Amazon's peculiar culture. Some practices like reading the design proposal doc before starting the discussion about it looks right in general sense, but it usually turns out that almost all people who are invited to these meetings don't actually read that doc (instead are busy working on their tasks) or don't really have the depth to understand what's written in the doc in 15-30 mins. So what ends up happening is a lot of these meetings end up being dominated by whoever is the top dog (usually the guy with higher level in the room) in that meeting and the rest of the attendees end up listening to his/her opinion without much challenge (because most are intent on just getting out of that meeting). The whole 2+ years I was there (left because of 3-days RTO), I felt like it was a cult and some people seem to drink the kool-aid (or they are good at pretending to like the culture), but some like me, who are more skeptical, don't.
emilfihlman 2y ago
It's refreshing to see it said out loud today as an ideal, even if they didn't really believe it then nor today, the idea on page 24: "But what happens when everyone can put their message in front of a lot of people? When the playing field is level? When everyone has a printing press, the ones with the best ideas are the ones people listen to, Influence can no longer be owned, It must be earned." I wish people believe(d) in this still today, but we are in a jaded censorship world, and it seems that those who believe in it are labeled extremists.
- sneak 2y ago
  They should have known that if they built a giant centralized platform, the government would eventually come knocking.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - dredmorbius 2y ago
    s/government/governments/ Also corporations, political parties, propagandists, hucksters, and others. Pathogens co-evolve with their hosts.
    - sneak 2y ago
      There’s only one government that Facebook/Meta really has to obey, and that’s the one that can show up at Zucc’s houses with the CIA. The other ones are mostly optional.
      - dredmorbius 2y ago
        Localised bans are possible. Those threaten not only present userbase and revenue, but open up niches for alternatives favoured by that logal regime to become established. Weibo would be a prime example of that last dynamic, in China.
- lupire 2y ago
dluan 2y ago
Facebook somehow acquiring 小红书 would actually be a prescient move, but even that era seems forever ago.
- ncpa-cpl 2y ago
  I came looking for this, Is the Chinese instagram’s name, Little Red Book (小红书), related to Facebook’s Little Red Book, or just a coincidence?
  - dluan 2y ago
    lol, 小红书 as an idea was established way before facebook. facebook was just trying to use an adbuster's style approach, but actually during that time there were tons of subversive messages, e.g. mckenzie wark's "hacker manifesto" was commonly read and discussed. that whole hacker-chic is what facebook and PG modeled their entire personality off of. even though they might not have cared about edgy communism back then, the GNU manifesto written 20 years even earlier (and lots of FOSS warriors) certainly did. even back when facebook had their little print poster shop on their campus, a lot of hackers outside felt really grody seeing this anti-capitalist spirit co-opted by this financial behemoth. it was like every 2 weeks someone would know someone else's small startup get snapped up for $10s of millions here and there. it was like watching the air slowly get sucked out of a party.
  - pyrale 2y ago
    There’s another little red book which has ties to China and quite a bit more fame.
  - tivert 2y ago
    > Is the Chinese instagram’s name, Little Red Book (小红书), related to Facebook’s Little Red Book, or just a coincidence? I'd bet they're both related to Mao's Little Red Book. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotations_from_Chairman_Mao_Tse-tung https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotations_from_Chairman_Mao_T... You know, "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun," and stuff like that.
    - 2y ago
Shank 2y ago
I reconnected with a long-lost childhood friend that I barely remembered any detail other than her name via Facebook. It proved its worth to me that day, but the caveat is that I had to reach her mom, and that's because she actually stopped using it long prior. After we started talking (and eventually dating), she deleted her entire account / profile, which rendered her unfindable again. The main problem she had was that she wasn't benefiting from it, and they were sharing so much of her personal information that she didn't feel comfortable with it. It's an interesting juxtaposition, because had she not had a profile, I wouldn't have found her. But by that same measure, she found it invasive enough to delete her account. I think Facebook had a time and place for when connecting people was an innocent venture with largely altruistic goals. But like so many things, times have changed and the calculus for "maybe one day a special person will find me on Facebook" vs "creepily processing all personal information" has shifted. Most young people aren't on Facebook. The door has closed, and I'm not sure if it'll reopen any time soon.
oooyay 2y ago
Since this election has unfolded I've been thinking a lot about narratives and what they mean. Progress is largely based on narratives. They're the stories we tell ourselves to stay focused, motivated, and aligned. The narrative doesn't have to be true, it just needs to be a convincing story grounded in some reality (as it would seem). That got me thinking about the function of narratives versus truths, how they're related, and how they're distinct. Products like this book are just an internal narrative. It doesn't discount other narratives, such as villain narratives, where FB could have the best or worst of intentions and the outcomes are what we know them to be today regardless. Truth, on the other hand, is reserved for when the dust has settled, the facts are seldomly disputed, and are corroborated. Truth doesn't even need to be precise, it just needs to be accurate. Narratives are powerful in the moment and for momentum, truth is powerful across time. That said, even to truths there is a narrative.
- mettamage 2y ago
  Yea, I was just thinking that. Truth is a narrative too. There's one difference though: over time, truth will play out. Simple example: blood moon occurs, people think they'll die. And then the next morning comes around. With social systems, the truth takes a lot of time to truly unfold, but unfold it does.
  - oooyay 2y ago
    Yeah, very much agree. My point moreso was that the truth also needs a good narrative. I think we missed that this last election cycle. Isolated facts are not enough to convince people of a story, even if it will clearly play out as true.
    - mettamage 2y ago
      Yep, I agree. Truth needs a good narrative. What a time to be alive!
- dartharva 2y ago
  > Progress is largely based on narratives. They're the stories we tell ourselves to stay focused, motivated, and aligned. The narrative doesn't have to be true, it just needs to be a convincing story grounded in some reality (as it would seem). The "some reality" phrase is not needed. This is exactly how all human faiths and religions developed.
cynicalsecurity 2y ago
That books looks very cheesy. Seeing them claiming they had their focus on privacy is especially hilarious. Thanks for sharing it, but I'll delete it right away.
FactKnower69 2y ago
Truly disgusting juxtaposition between the marketing douchebags copy pasting pictures of the Berlin Wall and other vacuous feel-good pablum into the design bible of their MySpace knockoff, and the reality that said knockoff would later be best known for facilitating genocide in Myanmar
gerroo 2y ago
Thanks for sharing this :)
aratno 2y ago
Looks like this is slightly modified by the uploader: p94 says “Weaponize the cloud” with the Antimetal logo
po 2y ago
Historically, those who controlled the media controlled the message. If you're the only one with a printing press, you control what people read. Same with radio. Same with TV. But what happens when everyone can put their message in front of a lot of people? When the playing field is level? When everyone has a printing press, the ones with the best ideas are the ones people listen to. Influence can no longer be owned. It must be earned Man, Zuckerberg would be rolling over in his grave if he saw what happened in the following years and our current engagement/algorithmically-driven media ecosystem. I find this book to be a bit sad. I do believe they were trying to do all of this stuff but it definitely went off the rails.
- squigz 2y ago
  I think Zuckerberg is still alive and well aware of the current landscape.
  - momoschili 2y ago
    I think he was replaced by a robot at some point and is now in Cuba with JFK and Tupac
- 0x3444ac53 2y ago
  Whether or not Zuckerberg himself is alive (he is), this version of him is long dead. One of the sad realities of life under capitalism is that even if you go into something idealistic, hopeful, kind even, is that once it hits a certain scale the only thing you can do is succumb to some kind of greed. Even if you yourself try to resist, you'll be beat down by market forces until eventually you either give it all up and let someone else do the evil, or discard the idealism and say "That's just the way it is!" and look back on your idealism with shame and grief. Makes me sad too
  - dartharva 2y ago
    I wouldn't be so hasty in giving out such judgements, especially when Zuck is the only one among all big tech magnates to push for Open Source AI and LLMs.
stogot 2y ago
Was this copyrighted? I don’t see it in there, but can we print copies under US law if no copyright is present?
- tinco 2y ago
  No, copyright is an intrinsic thing. Copyright marks are half bullshit half indication of who owns it and since when.
ricardobeat 2y ago
> Changing how people communicate will always change the world > What happens when anyone can put their message in front of a lot of people? I think we’ve answered this question by now, and it’s not good. I wonder what Zuckerberg thinks of it…
udev4096 2y ago
Zuckerberg is too good with manipulating the engineers into believing this bullshit. I guess you really need fake inspiration to gobble up a big fat salary which is usually derived from unethical standards
incog_nit0 2y ago
As a jaded 40+ year old developer this got me choked up. I remember that optimistic view we all had of technology in our youth. For me the optimism was a little earlier than 2012 so maybe it goes hand in hand with being young and less experienced (jaded?). I agree with some of the other commenters that a corporate structure makes altruistic goals like these impossible. Only Wikipedia and The Internet Archive for me carry that feeling of goodwill still. I think OpenAI going from non-profit to profit will similarly erode the product as market incentives push it further away from what benefits the user most. Perhaps we need a corporate structure between a non-profit and a for-profit.
- Ylpertnodi 2y ago
  >Perhaps we need a corporate structure between a non-profit and a for-profit. ....a...Government?
  - tim333 2y ago
    Or B corp? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_Corporation_(certification) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_Corporation_(certification)
- allthing 2y ago
  A public benefit corporation is sort of something in between
- Willish42 2y ago
  > Perhaps we need a corporate structure between a non-profit and a for-profit Maybe a co-op (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative)? There are also "for-profit" like businesses that are oriented around a different goal than just profits, https://good.store/pages/good-store-about-us https://good.store/pages/good-store-about-us comes to mind.
sirspacey 2y ago
What a snapshot of history One of the things I’ve learned over the years is almost every company becomes the symbol of it’s anti-mission Root cause almost always seems to be trying to design PM performance around metrics Metrics are a poor framework for values
k310 2y ago
The flip side. (Turning the Sun Menlo Park sign around to say Facebook) Sad for me. As an S.E. (later called TPM) at Sun, I always busted my ass to meet customer needs technically, cost-wise (our group was Higher Educational Sales) and with dedication. I went to Sun after serving many years in computer support for Cal Berkeley, so I wore the customer's moccasins, so to speak. Our customers were indeed customers, not products. I loved it. Most of us, I think, were crazy for providing the best for customers, and I don't recall a book. We WERE the book.
timkofu 2y ago
Thanks for this.
muddi900 2y ago
This definitely published before Silicon Valley aired.
alberth 2y ago
The version linked below is of higher digital quality. https://spaccapeli.com/i-remastered-facebooks-little-red-book https://spaccapeli.com/i-remastered-facebooks-little-red-boo...

544 points by heshiebee 2y ago

thanks_dang 2y ago

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pessimizer 2y ago
"Facebook was not originally created to be a company, it was originally envisioned as a collective chronicle of who was hot, and who certainly was not."

projektfu 2y ago

Good job with the scan. I started reading the book and began to feel rage so I stopped after about 20 pages. Is it the most self-unaware book or just people trying their hand at PR?

qsort 2y ago
A little red book full of quotations from the chairman... Where else did I see this?
- woodruffw 2y ago
  I think that's a very explicit, intentional reference.
- thanks_dang 2y ago
  Is it too early to start a first print of paulgraham.com? I want mine signed. I hope the cover is orange.
  - 8f2ab37a-ed6c 2y ago
    Actually you can download the whole thing by using https://github.com/ofou/graham-essays https://github.com/ofou/graham-essays , and then I imagine you can pipe it into pandoc or something of the sort to create a PDF. And then you can send that over to https://www.blurb.com/pdf-to-book https://www.blurb.com/pdf-to-book or similar providers to get it printed. When I attempted this once, I couldn't get the pages to be formatted nicely like a book, and the number of pages I ended up with was close to 1500 or something along those lines, which ends up costing you $100+ to print out with one of these services. However I suspect that if someone were to typeset the essays nicely, it'd be an amazing coffee table book.
com2kid 2y ago
This was 2012. There was still hope and optimism in the tech space. The Internet had helped overturn powerful regimes and given voice to the disenfranchised. There was the idea that person to person public discourse could resolve many societal problems. Smartphones had exploded just 6 years prior and they were already making inroads into traditionally underserved and neglected communities around the world, helping farmers improve yields and young women become self sufficient so they could escape forced marriages. The idea that we could join together and share ideas and make the world a better place isn't a wrong idea, it is just one that got subverted once it was realized that inciting anger in users lead to more usage and thus more ad impressions.
- dgfitz 2y ago
  > There was the idea that person to person public discourse could resolve many societal problems. Nobody thought this.
  - karmajunkie 2y ago
    I hate to break the news to you, but literally millions believed it. There's still more than a (very overprivileged) few who still believe it.
    - dgfitz 2y ago
      Sorry, nobody “educated” believed this.
      - notacoward 2y ago
        That might be the most blatant "no true Scotsman" I've ever seen. Practically out of a textbook. I'm educated. I and hundreds of coworkers at multiple companies still believed it in 2012. You said something that is simply, provably untrue.
        dgfitz 2y ago
woodruffw 2y ago
I think in 2012, SV startups (and especially social media startups) were still getting high on their own supply: there was a seemingly genuine groundswell belief that unilaterally connecting the world would be a force for good, rather than a mere reconfiguration of powers. (I don't think Zuckerberg himself is a true believer, but I do think that the people who wrote and read this book in 2012 probably believed it. This was the same year as the Arab Spring, after all.)
- junon 2y ago
  Yes, this. I was at Uber in SF around 2016 or so when they did their "pixels and bits" rebrand which felt very similar. It felt very... "we are messiahs"? Most people felt it, only the people with the highest paychecks (or managers) played into it. After hearing the core values of the company thrown around in regular speech so often most people got kind of numb to anything corporate (e.g. "I really like that you're always hustling so hard but I would love to see you do a bit more toe stepping"). I left SF a year or so after that so I wonder if that whole approach has changed in the bigger offices or not. Being in Europe now most people here (most ..) wouldn't play into it I don't think. Retrospectively feels very American. --- EDIT: Actually it's kind of hard to find info on the rebrand now. There's the announcement[0] but that only seems to allude to the weird philosophical aspect of it in the description, which leads me to believe they never published it publicly. > The new Uber brand system is made up of primary and secondary components that tell the story of technology moving the physical world. Today, we're rolling out a new look and feel that celebrates the cities we're in and the technology that brings people what they want, when they want it. It was more than just "primary and secondary components", they had somehow likened people and pixels together and were trying to create some weird (but similar) narrative of "connecting everything through transport" or whatever. I think the idea was that they wanted to start breaking into more verticals, a la UberEATS and whatnot, but I distinctly remember hearing a lot of "what ifs" about freight, air, etc. that I think were mostly fluff chatter to hype up the rebrand. Most people, even internally, hated it it, and shortly after that started monthly, then weekly, then at times daily new public scandals about the company or TK, so many people left shortly thereafter. [0] https://youtu.be/axjXNEordH8?feature=shared https://youtu.be/axjXNEordH8?feature=shared
tokioyoyo 2y ago
For better or worse, social media (I’d even go as far as saying Facebook) has changed the world. As cringey as that book sounds, people loved hopium of early 2010s. Maybe I was young and naive as well, but I also believed that such connections will unite the world somehow.
Underpass9041 2y ago
The amount of retcon in even the first few pages is comical, it comes across as the most tone deaf thing ever.
deleted 2y ago
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tejohnso 2y ago
What's so enraging? A company puts out some propaganda about how wonderfully world changing it is. Not all that unusual or unexpected.
paulddraper 2y ago
Huh? Smiling people drinking Pepsi, oil companies showing sun filtered through cornstalks....what's the difference?
toast0 2y ago
I could never figure out how much of the employee directed propaganda was from people who were doing it ironically and how much was from people who were drinking the Flavor Aid. I don't think I saw any posters about carpooling, but if there were any, reprints of the classic [1] would have fit right in with the rest of the posters. I'm pretty sure I saw this book, but I don't think I saved a copy I don't think they were still printing it when my employer was acquired. Unfortunately, the propaganda doesn't work Page 110 talks about building trust, but what has FB done to earn your trust lately? [1] https://fdr.artifacts.archives.gov/objects/17472/when-you-ride-alone-you-ride-with-hitler?ctx=bfb1c38c-8771-40b5-82a9-d61eaf9c3303&idx=1 https://fdr.artifacts.archives.gov/objects/17472/when-you-ri...
yuliyp 2y ago
I think the way to read it is as a few things: - An artifact intended to try to help solidify a sense of unity of mission and values - Internal cheerleading - A stake in the sand about things which did not fit in with the values. I read this at the time it showed up on everyone's desks (I wish I'd kept it, but I have no idea where it is). Employees naturally rolled their eyes at some of the excessive optimism in some places, but generally it got the ethos right. That some of the boldest statements have fallen by the wayside ("We don't build better services to make money; We make money to build better services", "Build Products around people, not data") is obviously disappointing, but I'd view what it was trying to do in the light of a piece of art that fell short of its goal rather than merely self-unaware. It was never intended as PR. It delivered its message via anecdotes and the experiences of working there, not in any way that would have anywhere close to the same meaning to the broader world.

whalesalad 2y ago

page 17. android operating system on an iphone 4. i'm crying right now, particularly the way this is juxtaposed with so many critical moments in history.

Mogzol 2y ago
I think it is meant to be a generic phone, the edges and front camera are wrong for an iphone, but then the home button is very distinctly an iphone. It is weird.
- whalesalad 2y ago
  it's either an iphone 4 or iphone 5 in a case. the home button is an iconic giveaway.
pests 2y ago
I think that's a BlackBerry. The later Motion from 2017 had a singular button down there too. Could be an older version but can't find anything.
croisillon 2y ago
i don't think it's an iphone
- firecall 2y ago
  Correct - it's not an iPhone. It's the Facebook Phone! (probably)
duck 2y ago
Could it be an iPod Touch?
firecall 2y ago
It is in fact the Facebook Phone! Or at least a mockup of one. It has the front-facing camera in the top right corner, which is a hint! Googling suggests the Facebook phone was an HTC device?

theideaofcoffee 2y ago

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paulddraper 2y ago
Explain?
- thanks_dang 2y ago
  [flagged]
- ch71r22 2y ago
  The "Little Red Book" is the name of Mao Zedong's propaganda book. It's an example of indoctrination. Marshall McLuhan introduced the idea that the "medium is the message," which is heavily alluded to in this book with images of the printing press, etc. The idea is that changes in how information is shared play a bigger role than the actual content of the messages being exchanged. Chris Cox, the Chief Product Officer, used to regularly talk about McLuhan. McLuhan also envisioned trends in the change of information media culminating in a "global village," which Facebook echoes here in its mission of "making the world more open and connected." McLuhan expected that this would divide us more than it would unite us. So I think what the person you're replying to was saying Facebook's appropriation of Mao Zedong and Marshall McLuhan is... weird. Facebook is directly drawing from dictators' propaganda and a philosopher who predicted what Facebook would bring about, and didn't think it was a good thing.
dangoodmanUT 2y ago
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grahamj 2y ago

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woodruffw 2y ago
Facebook is definitely a "great company" by Person of the Year rules[1]. There are some real whoppers on that list. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Person_of_the_Year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Person_of_the_Year
- bee_rider 2y ago
  It is great in the sense that it is very large.
  - paxys 2y ago
    And has completely changed the world.
    - righthand 2y ago
      I think Google aped Facebook on world-changing by harvesting data and running algorithms to get you to scroll through a list. Changed the US might be more accurate.
      - Zambyte 2y ago
        Limiting the influence of Facebook to the US doesn't seem necessary. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_genocide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_genocide
  - kibwen 2y ago
    Great like the Great War, or the Great Depression, or the Great Irish Famine?
JKCalhoun 2y ago
Ha ha, so it's more of a cautionary tale. I love those!

Towaway69 2y ago

page 27 > Zuckerbergs's Law: The amount each person shares doubles each year. I initially thought wealth, ideas and love was meant but no ... it's just data.

dullcrisp 2y ago
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- pc86 2y ago
  I looked up "psychohistory" and while the definition makes sense, I don't really understand what you mean by this comment.
  - dullcrisp 2y ago
    It just sounds vaguely prophetic like he thinks he knows how every person will behave for the foreseeable future. But I was referring to the fictional version from the Foundation series, not the apparently real (pseudo-)science that I didn’t know existed.
- ninth_ant 2y ago
  I’m quite confident this would have been based on metadata collected by Facebook from its user activity. The company has been extremely analytical about its own growth, and id be surprised if this wasn’t a conclusion from an in-house data scientist that just got Zuckerberg’s name stamped on it.
- vineyardmike 2y ago
  While I’m sure Facebook had data to roughly justify this, just like Moores Law, I’m sure this is equal parts back-projection as prophetic declaration of intent. For Facebook, they needed the cultural expectation to be ever-increasing data sharing. They (along with other companies) facilitated the creation of tools to share ever-increasing amounts of data.
  - 2y ago

genericspammer 2y ago

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deleted 2y ago
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AyyEye 2y ago
> They "trust me". Dumb fucks
edm0nd 2y ago
bro came back on an alt account to respam their own shitty rant lol
hobom 2y ago
As far as I know that was a distinct, previous endeavor. Only afterwards did the Vinklevoi approach him to make the website, an idea which he then allegedly ran with on his own.

paxys 2y ago

I think people here are too young to remember the tech industry in 2012. None of the images and ideas conveyed in this book (printing press, cave art, fall of the Berlin wall, Arab Spring, particle accelerators) were outlandish for the time and space it was printed in. Tech was all about optimism and idealism. Everyone in silicon valley knew they were changing the world for the better, and tech was the missing piece all along. Silly people would finally all stop fighting and get along now that they had Facebook and Twitter and iPhones.

stiltzkin 2y ago
HN before 2012 was way different back then too.
bbqfog 2y ago
[flagged]
- therein 2y ago
  Yes but people talked about it even less than they do today. Back then you could say connecting people is always a good thing and people didn't challenge that openly like we do today.
  - tsunamifury 2y ago
    The average 1st world citizen didn't comprehend how expanding networks meant centralizing power in even fewer hands. We still dont see it yet today. Not fully
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  OP didn’t make a statement about the facts on the ground, but the culture and myths of the time. (If you think the villainy myths we tell ourselves today are more grounded in truth, they’re not. We’re always in a narrative. And there is nothing wrong with collective narratives.)
  - 2y ago

mawise 2y ago

It's funny; as I've been working on Haven[1], one of my guiding lights is what Facebook _could have been_[2]. To that end the opening section is really inspiring. This is describing a world where digital tools enhance your friendships. I think that's still possible and still a worthwhile goal--I just don't think it can be done by an entity with a corporate incentive structure. Those incentives will always tend towards enshittification[3]. [1]: https://havenweb.org https://havenweb.org [2]: https://havenweb.org/2022/11/02/facebook-lie.html https://havenweb.org/2022/11/02/facebook-lie.html [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification# https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification#

nashashmi 2y ago
> what Facebook _could have been_ In 2010, facebook changed. Twitter was cooler. Myspace was more money. So facebook took a page out of their platforms. In 2012, facebook went to Washington DC. In 2016, Washington DC went to facebook. When did facebook change? When zuck lost control of it after sandberg came on board. When did zuck get control? When zuck changed to be in alliance with the master plan… which was take control of the world… politically. Remember zuck running for election?
- ninth_ant 2y ago
  Oh my god, no. Zuck had — and I believe still has — complete control of the company. Demonizing Sandberg and lionizing Zuckerberg is a complete disservice to reality. It was the focus on growth and not money that ruined everything. Many changes occurred in this period. I was there. A big change is that ads became profitable. I think it’s fair to say this change was sudden. Facebook went from being scrappy and underfunded to being wealthy and powerful. At the same time, the growth had eclipsed competitors and Google Plus came and went. The media tone and coverage changed from “oh this startup is doing neat stuff” to a point concern for data privacy and the implosion of journalism revenue. So they became a lot more influential culturally. Being suddenly wealthy and influential but with a cultural mentality of being a scrappy and upstart— something this book accurately reflects — lead to hubris. The focus on hypergrowth which had served them well from a small startup — under the umbrella of this hubris — led to events like the Cambridge Analytica disaster. Insufficient care was being placed on how data could be collected and misused by others, growth took priority. This focus on Hypergrowth meant that changes that responded well in metrics got pushed. The longer-term damage of people not enjoying their experiences wasn’t a high enough ranked metric compared to engagement and user metrics. None of this was Sandberg’s fault. She was an extremely competent manager and is brilliant. Absolutely she was instrumental in leading Facebook to profitability but this push wasn’t a big factor in their decline. Instead, Facebook got too big way too fast and the employees and Zuck didn’t have the mindset shift needed to consider everything as it was happening. Yes, money ruined everything eventually — but that came later. The most crucial damage had already happened — people gave up on trust that Facebook could handle their data responsibly, and trust that they’d have a good experience on the site. I could go on but that’s enough.

nashashmi 2y ago

Is there a version I can read without the pictures? Just the manifesto? I’d like to know how big this “book” is actually?

dangoodmanUT 2y ago
You can probably parse this out really fast with OCR
- latexr 2y ago
  Did just that with some random online tool and it said it found just under 7000 words. Probably also counting words in the images, though.
mgiampapa 2y ago
Physically it's 4 1/4 x 7 x 5/16. Word count isn't much.

lbrito 2y ago

Web 2.0-era peak hubris. A decade later, its hard to decide if this looks delusional or prophetic - they did change societies, but probably not in the ways they ostensibly wanted to be recognized for changing.

scrubs 2y ago
Bingo ... let's not confuse a techie for a messaging app selling ad data as a tech savant (almost) brilliantly predicting the future because it tries to bootstrap itself into the stratosphere with a flourish of art copy & paste by association with pictures of CERN, Egyptian hieroglyphics and so on. The latter are cool ... and stand well in time. CERN requires something a tad more complicated that pushing around "lol :)" over tcp-ip done before them + "big data" analysis to sell it to morons on madison street. Claude Shannon, von Neumann, creators of the transistor, capacitors, languages, algos etc are the cool+smart kids ... not Zuckerberg. Not Facebook. "Move fast and break" things has some tactical truth in larthargic companies, but averaged over time is asymptomatically a zero. It's just SV frat boy talk. Enough.

zoklet-enjoyer 2y ago

This looks like an Instagram feed. Is it a coincidence that they purchased Instagram in April 2012?

worik 2y ago

I find this terribly sad.

fargle 2y ago
particularly the bit where they are painting over the old Sun Microsystems sign. a solid engineering company that actually build good stuff, destroyed in collateral damage from the dot-com bust, sold off to oracle of all things. now further being humiliated by this narcissistic, exploitative, personality-disorder-masquerading-as-a-service company?
- yuliyp 2y ago
  Huh? That's a weird take. What should they have done? Left the entrance to their headquarters with a Sun Microsystems logo rather than their own? The Sun Microsystems sign continues to be there at the end of Willow Road, just facing toward the campus vs toward the street. This is doing more to honor Sun than any other realistic choice they could have made.
  - 52-6F-62 2y ago
    The message in the book seems to be that Sun failed out of weakness and it could happen to fb as well if they don’t eat the world.
    - fargle 2y ago
      which is just so narcissistic! the way i see it sun failed because it was a well run sensible company that made good products, that were liked by its customers, and not eat the world. and that's not what succeeds. so FB will do just fine, if i'm right about that.
  - fargle 2y ago
    i didn't say there was anything that FB should have done different. it's just sad. it's sad to see a genuinely good company gone and replaced by a slimy one. actually if you include oracle, two slimy ones. who are both inarguably far more successful. it's sad because it's a statement about what our current economy values and what it does not. and to any of you who have the word "engineer" or "scientist" in your job title: it's definitely not those things.

deadbabe 2y ago

Anywhere to find an original copy of one of these?

evanelias 2y ago
Two copies have sold on ebay over the past month, with each listed at $1000 despite being later prints and having slight damage. That price seems absolutely bonkers to me. The copy in the scan has a 2014 date, suggesting they were still giving the book to new hires in 2014 or maybe 2015. (I was hired in mid 2013 and my copy has a 2012 date.) So based on company headcount those years and accounting for turnover, I would guess the total print run was at least 10,000... there are definitely copies of it around.
- deadbabe 2y ago
  Maybe someone can put up their copy on eBay if they read this

chucknthem 2y ago

I remember this. Wish I'd kept my little piece of history. Written at a time when people were still optimistic and hopeful about tech.

jonas21 2y ago
Lots of people are still optimistic about tech. They just generally don't have time to get into silly arguments about it on HN.
- dowager_dan99 2y ago
  You're right - but also very wrong. People can be optimistic while still having an existential crisis about what they see/feel is happening. That's what makes them believe they can influence and change the world, and why they even try. What we're seeing in tech today feels like it started in the 80's, and before that point computers, etc. were viewed by some as the downfall of humankind and by others the saviour.
  - UncleOxidant 2y ago
    Oh, man, I can still remember how when barcodes started showing up on products in the late 70s that there were people saying it was the mark of the beast or a precursor to it or that it was some government ploy.
    - int_19h 2y ago
      They still say that, by the way.
- aprilthird2021 2y ago
  Eh, people back then were optimistic about tech AND had time to get into silly arguments about it on HN. So something's changed
  - sumeno 2y ago

mparnisari 2y ago

Okay, so Facebook started as a way to interconnect people. But it's a business, so it has to make money to survive. So they added ads. And now my feed is 99% ads, 1% updates from my friends. Sooooo mission accomplished, right? Right?

exe34 2y ago
you get updates from your friends? the only reason I have Facebook is to see pictures of cats, but it insists on showing me hamas propaganda ai-slop.
- mparnisari 2y ago
  Yes. I get updates from my local community
  - concerndc1tizen 2y ago
    There is no shared experience of social media - that's what makes it hard to talk about, and keeps everyone in disagreement, because everyone has different perspectives. By design.
    - exe34 2y ago
      I think it's my own fault, I should never have engaged with the numpties. But I do wish the Facebook feed would include more stuff from the cats groups I follow instead of the rage bait.
1970-01-01 2y ago
Facebook was started as a way for college boys to gleam full names, pictures, and other personal information of college girls. When it was just this, it was actually wonderful and mostly innocent kids having fun. But Zuck was greedy, and eventually it evolved into yet another of the online behemoths that can only thrive by selling as much of your private data as it can get away with. As such, it is no longer special, and therefore it is ripe for disruption.

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

Ben Barry's page on the book from his website archive: https://v1.benbarry.com/project/facebooks-book https://v1.benbarry.com/project/facebooks-book

Animats 2y ago

Just read the whole thing. Not one word about ads. From the 2014 book: Remember, people don't use Facebook because they like us. They use it because they like their friends. Where that went: We have the power to cut them off from their friends. So we can control everything they see. Muahahaha!

ribadeo 2y ago

There are STILL people drinking the techno-utopian kool-aid. Plenty of folks think Musk will do something smart someday, for humanity's benefit, despite all evidence to the contrary. I was here when the web showed up, and I can honestly state that we featured blatant techno-utopian rhetoric in nearly every aspect of the industry, as well as our underground nocturnal allegedly musical entertainment. I now feel rather dumb, aka a product of my time, but the notion that inventing tools would lead to them automatically being used for good was prevalent, if specious.

vundercind 2y ago
Similar journey here. I think I’ve become some variety of techno-determinist pessimist. We are what technology lets us be, including when it comes to ethics and government. And major inventions aren’t guaranteed to push the space of the possible in the right direction—but neither can we avoid these changes, as effectively sounding the alarm early enough to matter, while also correctly calling which are bad and how they’re bad, is too hard to practically happen. Freedom’s a fleeting gift of circumstance, and the world is a machine none of us control and that’s often bad and sometimes destroys important things, I guess is where I’m at now. I’d definite press a button to permanent un-invent the Internet, if someone put it in front of me.
toast0 2y ago
> Plenty of folks think Musk will do something smart someday, for humanity's benefit, despite all evidence to the contrary. It's taking a little bit longer than I thought, but isn't the destruction of Twitter a positive for humanity? :P
Nasrudith 2y ago
Tools which are not invented cannot be used for good, there is some logic behind that. It is necessary but not sufficient for good. There is also fundamentally a tension between freedom and good. Since being free to use technology also includes being able to use it for evil. Not to mention the track record of trying to enforce "goodness" has been less than promising historically. And that is before the inherent fundamentals of dual use. There is nothing we could do to keep fire from being fundamentally capable both of keeping someone alive by preventing freezing to death, and sterilization and is usable as a self-replicating weapon of destruction. Basically you can only control how well our surroundings handle being set on fire, not make arson an impossibility.

__MatrixMan__ 2y ago

There's a lot of altruistic sounding stuff about connection in there, but it's hard to believe it's sincere when their product is a space where paid accounts don't have to bother with consent.

disgruntledphd2 2y ago
This was a very, very different time and written by a company that no longer exists.

jmyeet 2y ago

How far we've come in a little over a decade. If you're working for Big Tech now, you're basically working for a defense contractor. Amazon, Microsoft, Google or Meta are really no different to Boeing, Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman. Meta was culpable in the Rohingya genocide [1], builds AI for the military [2], silences content about Palestine (with deep ties to the Netanyahu government) [3] and Zuckerberg is cozying up to the incoming Trump administration [4]. We're so far away from Sergey Brin's principled stance against China [5]. You can find similar lists to the above for Google, Microsoft or Amazon. [1]: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-facebooks-systems-promoted-violence-against-rohingya-meta-owes-reparations-new-report/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb... [2]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/nov/05/meta-allows-national-security-defense-contractors-use-llama-ai https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/nov/05/meta-allo... [3]: https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/systemic-censorship-palestine-content-instagram-and https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/... [4]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c87x98q8y08o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c87x98q8y08o [5]: https://archive.is/tOWfY https://archive.is/tOWfY

KerrAvon 2y ago
re: 4 -- Facebook and reactionary politics have been hand in hand from the beginning of general public access to Facebook -- the world would be in a much better place without it.
NetOpWibby 2y ago
I work at a fruit company in Cupertino and I felt disgusted when the CEO of said company was in the list of tech CEOs groveling to the incoming president. As idealistic as I am, I do understand that certain things need to be done for waves hand reasons, but...ugh. At least I'm not (directly) supporting war? I think? The world is feeling rather Cyberpunk 2077-ish so it's only a matter of time before I have no choice to trade in my values for the ability to support my family. I feel for people currently in that position.
- 52-6F-62 2y ago
  I think its a very good sign to see people deep within the industry having emergent intuitions about the direction of the entity that puts food on their table… But please, please dedicate more time to reading outside your sphere and beyond video games. They can be a part of the path to enlightenment, but there is much more going on. None of the current status quo is a surprise to anyone who has been studying media or history or polemics or even poetry. In fact it’s just been agonizing to watch the cycles. Equip yourselves, because if you don’t people will use those unknown ideas against you and the wider world.

Frummy 2y ago

"complacency breeds complacency breeds complacency breeds complacency breeds complacency breeds complacency breeds complacency breeds complacency breeds complacency breeds complacency breeds complacency breeds complacency breeds complacency breeds complacency breeds complacency breeds complacency" So funny!

smnrg 2y ago

Design and content references must have felt like a cute satirical reference at the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotations_from_Chairman_Mao_Tse-tung https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotations_from_Chairman_Mao_T...

tsunamifury 2y ago
"We were going to change the world." And then they did... it was no accident
- riiii 2y ago
  > We were going to change the world Ah, the importance of being specific. If you want to change your neighbourhood, you could start every morning by sweeping the pavement. Or you could leave a random dog turd. Both will accomplish your stated goal.

drivingmenuts 2y ago

[flagged]

jbullock35 2y ago
That was Aaron Sorkin’s story in The Social Network, but it seems to have been a fiction. Steven Levy’s history of the company is much more detailed (and Levy is trying to be faithful to the historical record, unlike Sorkin) – and it argues that there’s no evidence for this Sorkin story about Zuckerberg‘s motive.

swyx 2y ago

are there any pdf printing shops that cna take this pdf and ship it to us as a book?

forth_throwaway 2y ago

Facebook has usurped the legacy media that they mention in the Red Book. But their relationship to capital and government is the exact same as the legacy media they replaced, so instead of being disruptive they fill the same role --except this time with even more ruthless efficiency and profitability. "When education is not liberating, the dream of the oppressed is to become the oppressor."

tills13 2y ago

When it was produces, this was probably inspiring and effective. Retrospectively, it's a bit creepy and ominous.

lelandfe 2y ago
And naive. "When everyone has a printing press, the ones with the best ideas are the ones people listen to" – in a room full of voices, uncommonly is the best idea heard.
- lupire 2y ago
  Tomato, tomahto; Naive, cynical; potato, potahto. "Best" in a Darwinian memetic sense of "optimized for reproduction and dissemination", not "accurate" or "helpful".
  - Liftyee 2y ago
    I wonder how loudness factors into that. Maybe ideas which make their "host" express them loudly have a higher chance of "infecting" others?
    - disqard 2y ago
      If you haven't already, you should check out Daniel Dennett's "From Bacteria to Bach and Back". I think you'll be susceptible to "catching" a lot of the ideas in there :)
    - lelandfe 2y ago
      Or express them at all. Ideas which when heard are likely to be repeated, loudly. ...We're basically describing idea zombies, a la Pontypool

dang 2y ago

All: if you're going to comment, please make sure you're following the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). That means posting out of curiosity, not indignation. Internet indignation is addictive, repetitive, and boring (and there's already too much of it here).

tsunamifury 2y ago

I think this all can be boiled down to to a true axiom of modern power: "Expand the network at all cost, and increase its engagement." This went from a little flippant red book to a credo that has now changed elections and democracy as well as culture and view of the human self. At the time it was radical idealism and today its something different, but its worth seeing and truly understanding.

rokob 2y ago

I still have my copy. I didn’t realize this was such a deep cut. My favorite part was the “Facebook was not created to be a business” quote being juxtaposed against Kevin Systrom saying “instagram was created to be a business” right after the acquisition.

bagels 2y ago

There's propaganda slogans/posters like this all over the Meta offices. One of them is "This is now your company". When the layoffs started happening, I started seeing these mocked, "This is no longer your company", etc.

ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
Maybe they should shop here: https://despair.com/collections/demotivators https://despair.com/collections/demotivators
- tdeck 2y ago
  Wow I remember seeing these in the 2000s. What a blast from the past!
nitwit005 2y ago
When I visited Facebook's HQ years ago, people had modified signs saying "Move fast and break things" by adding a prefix "Don't". I'm sure they knew this was propaganda. The little red book is a very clear reference (just do a search for "little red book" if anyone doesn't recognize the reference).
- aristus 2y ago
  Mocking the signs at Facebook started literally the day after they appeared suddenly in the 1601 building. "Break fast and eat things", and so on. There was a very fancy print shop on site and we would work up spoofs on the same equipment. A large percentage of programmers of a certain generation got their start in the graphic design world.
programmertote 2y ago
Amazon also likes to tout their way of doing things as Amazon's peculiar culture. Some practices like reading the design proposal doc before starting the discussion about it looks right in general sense, but it usually turns out that almost all people who are invited to these meetings don't actually read that doc (instead are busy working on their tasks) or don't really have the depth to understand what's written in the doc in 15-30 mins. So what ends up happening is a lot of these meetings end up being dominated by whoever is the top dog (usually the guy with higher level in the room) in that meeting and the rest of the attendees end up listening to his/her opinion without much challenge (because most are intent on just getting out of that meeting). The whole 2+ years I was there (left because of 3-days RTO), I felt like it was a cult and some people seem to drink the kool-aid (or they are good at pretending to like the culture), but some like me, who are more skeptical, don't.

emilfihlman 2y ago

It's refreshing to see it said out loud today as an ideal, even if they didn't really believe it then nor today, the idea on page 24: "But what happens when everyone can put their message in front of a lot of people? When the playing field is level? When everyone has a printing press, the ones with the best ideas are the ones people listen to, Influence can no longer be owned, It must be earned." I wish people believe(d) in this still today, but we are in a jaded censorship world, and it seems that those who believe in it are labeled extremists.

sneak 2y ago
They should have known that if they built a giant centralized platform, the government would eventually come knocking.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- dredmorbius 2y ago
  s/government/governments/ Also corporations, political parties, propagandists, hucksters, and others. Pathogens co-evolve with their hosts.
  - sneak 2y ago
    There’s only one government that Facebook/Meta really has to obey, and that’s the one that can show up at Zucc’s houses with the CIA. The other ones are mostly optional.
    - dredmorbius 2y ago
      Localised bans are possible. Those threaten not only present userbase and revenue, but open up niches for alternatives favoured by that logal regime to become established. Weibo would be a prime example of that last dynamic, in China.
lupire 2y ago

dluan 2y ago

Facebook somehow acquiring 小红书 would actually be a prescient move, but even that era seems forever ago.

ncpa-cpl 2y ago
I came looking for this, Is the Chinese instagram’s name, Little Red Book (小红书), related to Facebook’s Little Red Book, or just a coincidence?
- dluan 2y ago
  lol, 小红书 as an idea was established way before facebook. facebook was just trying to use an adbuster's style approach, but actually during that time there were tons of subversive messages, e.g. mckenzie wark's "hacker manifesto" was commonly read and discussed. that whole hacker-chic is what facebook and PG modeled their entire personality off of. even though they might not have cared about edgy communism back then, the GNU manifesto written 20 years even earlier (and lots of FOSS warriors) certainly did. even back when facebook had their little print poster shop on their campus, a lot of hackers outside felt really grody seeing this anti-capitalist spirit co-opted by this financial behemoth. it was like every 2 weeks someone would know someone else's small startup get snapped up for $10s of millions here and there. it was like watching the air slowly get sucked out of a party.
- pyrale 2y ago
  There’s another little red book which has ties to China and quite a bit more fame.
- tivert 2y ago
  > Is the Chinese instagram’s name, Little Red Book (小红书), related to Facebook’s Little Red Book, or just a coincidence? I'd bet they're both related to Mao's Little Red Book. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotations_from_Chairman_Mao_Tse-tung https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotations_from_Chairman_Mao_T... You know, "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun," and stuff like that.
  - 2y ago

Shank 2y ago

I reconnected with a long-lost childhood friend that I barely remembered any detail other than her name via Facebook. It proved its worth to me that day, but the caveat is that I had to reach her mom, and that's because she actually stopped using it long prior. After we started talking (and eventually dating), she deleted her entire account / profile, which rendered her unfindable again. The main problem she had was that she wasn't benefiting from it, and they were sharing so much of her personal information that she didn't feel comfortable with it. It's an interesting juxtaposition, because had she not had a profile, I wouldn't have found her. But by that same measure, she found it invasive enough to delete her account. I think Facebook had a time and place for when connecting people was an innocent venture with largely altruistic goals. But like so many things, times have changed and the calculus for "maybe one day a special person will find me on Facebook" vs "creepily processing all personal information" has shifted. Most young people aren't on Facebook. The door has closed, and I'm not sure if it'll reopen any time soon.

oooyay 2y ago

Since this election has unfolded I've been thinking a lot about narratives and what they mean. Progress is largely based on narratives. They're the stories we tell ourselves to stay focused, motivated, and aligned. The narrative doesn't have to be true, it just needs to be a convincing story grounded in some reality (as it would seem). That got me thinking about the function of narratives versus truths, how they're related, and how they're distinct. Products like this book are just an internal narrative. It doesn't discount other narratives, such as villain narratives, where FB could have the best or worst of intentions and the outcomes are what we know them to be today regardless. Truth, on the other hand, is reserved for when the dust has settled, the facts are seldomly disputed, and are corroborated. Truth doesn't even need to be precise, it just needs to be accurate. Narratives are powerful in the moment and for momentum, truth is powerful across time. That said, even to truths there is a narrative.

mettamage 2y ago
Yea, I was just thinking that. Truth is a narrative too. There's one difference though: over time, truth will play out. Simple example: blood moon occurs, people think they'll die. And then the next morning comes around. With social systems, the truth takes a lot of time to truly unfold, but unfold it does.
- oooyay 2y ago
  Yeah, very much agree. My point moreso was that the truth also needs a good narrative. I think we missed that this last election cycle. Isolated facts are not enough to convince people of a story, even if it will clearly play out as true.
  - mettamage 2y ago
    Yep, I agree. Truth needs a good narrative. What a time to be alive!
dartharva 2y ago
> Progress is largely based on narratives. They're the stories we tell ourselves to stay focused, motivated, and aligned. The narrative doesn't have to be true, it just needs to be a convincing story grounded in some reality (as it would seem). The "some reality" phrase is not needed. This is exactly how all human faiths and religions developed.

cynicalsecurity 2y ago

That books looks very cheesy. Seeing them claiming they had their focus on privacy is especially hilarious. Thanks for sharing it, but I'll delete it right away.

FactKnower69 2y ago

Truly disgusting juxtaposition between the marketing douchebags copy pasting pictures of the Berlin Wall and other vacuous feel-good pablum into the design bible of their MySpace knockoff, and the reality that said knockoff would later be best known for facilitating genocide in Myanmar

gerroo 2y ago

Thanks for sharing this :)

aratno 2y ago

Looks like this is slightly modified by the uploader: p94 says “Weaponize the cloud” with the Antimetal logo

po 2y ago

Historically, those who controlled the media controlled the message. If you're the only one with a printing press, you control what people read. Same with radio. Same with TV. But what happens when everyone can put their message in front of a lot of people? When the playing field is level? When everyone has a printing press, the ones with the best ideas are the ones people listen to. Influence can no longer be owned. It must be earned Man, Zuckerberg would be rolling over in his grave if he saw what happened in the following years and our current engagement/algorithmically-driven media ecosystem. I find this book to be a bit sad. I do believe they were trying to do all of this stuff but it definitely went off the rails.

squigz 2y ago
I think Zuckerberg is still alive and well aware of the current landscape.
- momoschili 2y ago
  I think he was replaced by a robot at some point and is now in Cuba with JFK and Tupac
0x3444ac53 2y ago
Whether or not Zuckerberg himself is alive (he is), this version of him is long dead. One of the sad realities of life under capitalism is that even if you go into something idealistic, hopeful, kind even, is that once it hits a certain scale the only thing you can do is succumb to some kind of greed. Even if you yourself try to resist, you'll be beat down by market forces until eventually you either give it all up and let someone else do the evil, or discard the idealism and say "That's just the way it is!" and look back on your idealism with shame and grief. Makes me sad too
- dartharva 2y ago
  I wouldn't be so hasty in giving out such judgements, especially when Zuck is the only one among all big tech magnates to push for Open Source AI and LLMs.

stogot 2y ago

Was this copyrighted? I don’t see it in there, but can we print copies under US law if no copyright is present?

tinco 2y ago
No, copyright is an intrinsic thing. Copyright marks are half bullshit half indication of who owns it and since when.

ricardobeat 2y ago

> Changing how people communicate will always change the world > What happens when anyone can put their message in front of a lot of people? I think we’ve answered this question by now, and it’s not good. I wonder what Zuckerberg thinks of it…

udev4096 2y ago

Zuckerberg is too good with manipulating the engineers into believing this bullshit. I guess you really need fake inspiration to gobble up a big fat salary which is usually derived from unethical standards

incog_nit0 2y ago

As a jaded 40+ year old developer this got me choked up. I remember that optimistic view we all had of technology in our youth. For me the optimism was a little earlier than 2012 so maybe it goes hand in hand with being young and less experienced (jaded?). I agree with some of the other commenters that a corporate structure makes altruistic goals like these impossible. Only Wikipedia and The Internet Archive for me carry that feeling of goodwill still. I think OpenAI going from non-profit to profit will similarly erode the product as market incentives push it further away from what benefits the user most. Perhaps we need a corporate structure between a non-profit and a for-profit.

Ylpertnodi 2y ago
>Perhaps we need a corporate structure between a non-profit and a for-profit. ....a...Government?
- tim333 2y ago
  Or B corp? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_Corporation_(certification) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_Corporation_(certification)
allthing 2y ago
A public benefit corporation is sort of something in between
Willish42 2y ago
> Perhaps we need a corporate structure between a non-profit and a for-profit Maybe a co-op (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative)? There are also "for-profit" like businesses that are oriented around a different goal than just profits, https://good.store/pages/good-store-about-us https://good.store/pages/good-store-about-us comes to mind.

sirspacey 2y ago

What a snapshot of history One of the things I’ve learned over the years is almost every company becomes the symbol of it’s anti-mission Root cause almost always seems to be trying to design PM performance around metrics Metrics are a poor framework for values

k310 2y ago

The flip side. (Turning the Sun Menlo Park sign around to say Facebook) Sad for me. As an S.E. (later called TPM) at Sun, I always busted my ass to meet customer needs technically, cost-wise (our group was Higher Educational Sales) and with dedication. I went to Sun after serving many years in computer support for Cal Berkeley, so I wore the customer's moccasins, so to speak. Our customers were indeed customers, not products. I loved it. Most of us, I think, were crazy for providing the best for customers, and I don't recall a book. We WERE the book.

timkofu 2y ago

Thanks for this.

muddi900 2y ago

This definitely published before Silicon Valley aired.

alberth 2y ago

The version linked below is of higher digital quality. https://spaccapeli.com/i-remastered-facebooks-little-red-book https://spaccapeli.com/i-remastered-facebooks-little-red-boo...