Former Exec Who Said Facebook Was 'Destroying Society' Still Loves Facebook (gizmodo.com)

Remember that former Facebook exec who felt "tremendous guilt" about creating tools "that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works"? He's now walking back his criticism -- at least somewhat. Gizmodo reports: Palihapitiya said that he believes that "Facebook is a force for good in the world," and went on to express his belief that the social network is really trying to make its platform less of a hellish garbage fire of misinformation and election interference. "Facebook has made tremendous strides in coming to terms with its unforeseen influence and, more so than any of its peers, the team there has taken real steps to course correct," he wrote in the post... Facebook is certainly trying to soothe naysayers who think the platform might be rotting the brains of our youth -- a viewpoint that Sean Parker, Facebook's first president, essentially expressed last month... For Palihapitiya's part, Thursday night's statement wasn't a total reversal of his original claims, but seemingly an apologetic gesture toward Facebook (or perhaps friends still working at the company). Yes, social media has the capacity to utterly destroy us, but can't you see that Facebook is trying to be better?
His post argues social media platforms "have been used and abused in ways that we, their architects, never imagined.

"Much blame has been thrown and guilt felt, but the important thing is what we as an industry do now to ensure that our impact on society continues to be a positive one."

Comments

What Facebook is

[Ol Olsoc]

Facebook is a force for whatever the nature is of the people who use it.

After I was required to open a facebook account for what I am working on, family and friends found me. Some of them are a little interesting. The tragedy of the commons effect where the worst people who are yelling the loudest did a pretty good job of silencing decent folk, and the little endorphin buzz that many get from likes and replies allowed others to become addicted even as much of Facebook was upsetting or angering them.

The major shitstorm happened after teenagers largely abandoned Facebook and older people took over. So you have a addictive venue with a lot of assholes in the mix.

More damage control

[slshdtisctrldbysjws]

Facebook is evil and everyone with a brain knows it.

Facebook was so invested in because its potential to break down society was realized by its big investors. It wasn't a shot in the dark with their billions of dollars. It wasn't a surprise that social media would transform our society. They knew what it was to become and it profits them immensely.
Why do they want to break down society? Because they want to increase the level of control they have. Instead of programming society on the scale of groups, they want to control every atom; every individual, and open up new roads to exponentially more power.

People always explain away things like this saying "well that's just what people want and the company is just giving them what they want and making money, so this isn't really bad, this is progress! There's no conspiracy! People are smart, they aren't so easily suckered into things! They know what's good!"

The thing is that people are actually not that picky. They will accept just about ANY given solution for their basic needs as long as authority backs it consistently enough. So it becomes a question of what exactly we are progressing towards and who's interest it really is in.

Humans are not some transcendent creature with the guarantee of self awareness and intellect and rationality because of how much inherently better they are than all other life on Earth. These are optional features supported by a certain way of life. If you take away the nuances from the human way of life, if you take away the culture that support these higher functions, people go into "backward compatibility mode"; they re-adapt to a simpler, savage, prehistoric world. Simply put they devolve.

While most people don't know themselves well enough to see this, there are people who know this about humanity, and they know about it deeply. These people are leaders.
Leaders either choose to try to raise people up to their own level of awareness or leaders choose to plunge people down so they can never rise up. Leaders choose either cooperation or enslavement.

Humans are tribal creatures. They are beyond racist. They are beyond nepotistic. They will kill members of their own families who displease them. Humans are not only genocidal by default, they a fratricidal by default.
We can see this at every point in our history. We can see this in our close relatives like the chimpanzee that continue to live a way of life that we departed from eons ago.

Leaders cooperate and enslave in degrees. The closer you are to directly supporting the substance of the leader, that is, the more you share in common with the leader that you align with that leader's will, the more cooperation you will receive. The further, the more enslavement you will receive, up to the point that when your interests drift sufficiently you are immediately killed or otherwise neutralized.
What this amounts to is simple: as time goes on you will only become more distant and unable to adapt to the leader. The leader's own will replace everyone else. Eventually you drift into the zone of no return in relation to a current leader and unless the leader changes, your line will end: you, your family, your children all die and there are no more children thereafter.
Usually this takes a long time, so long that the diverse interests in the world shift and leaders change and most tribes survive at least long enough to make a compromise and intermingle with the dominant tribe. But things are becoming unusual: power is being consolidated on unprecedented scales with unprecedented stability, and it is making ever more exacting demands on its subjects as their numbers swell to challenge the Earth's ability to sustain them.
Humanity's genocidal nature has risen to the surface.

This all sounds very grim, until you consider the fact we've been up and down this situation for millions of years and have some pretty good solutions to the pitfalls and the problems that lead to them.
All the machinery is in place for us to CHOOSE our own leaders. A