Speed Bump

                                              
Mark Zuckerberg took the stand last week to testify in a lawsuit brought by grieving parents who believe their children were harmed by engagement with Meta’s social media platforms.
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Zuckerberg arrived at the courthouse still looking much like a teenage boy with his mop of curly brown hair.  He seemed out of place in his grown-up clothes, a suit and tie.  I watched this sober-faced man-boy, and I was reminded of images of young college-aged men on trial for the deaths of their fraternity brothers after a night of drunken hazing.

Zuckerberg did have a good idea while he was still in college.  Back in 2003, he seemed to understand the social needs of college students to connect, to be seen, heard, and liked.  It wasn’t long before he realized that all people have these same social needs, and Facebook for the masses was launched.  For most of us, connection remains the main reason we continue to use social media all of these years later.

Zuckerberg launched his career at Facebook with the motto:  Move fast and break things, a motto that has dominated the tech world.  In 2014 he updated the motto to “Move fast with a stable infrastructure,” whatever that means.  In any event, maybe it was too little too late.  Move fast and break things was too deep in the DNA of the entire industry.  And not just the tech industry, the contagion spread and created a pandemic that is apparent everywhere including our politics.  These folks seem to have grown up with the belief that “We’re cool because we’re careless.”  Think Facebook and the genocide in Myanmar, or Musk and DOGE.

Move fast and break things is what a child freeing himself from the restraint and security of his mother’s arms might be thinking. Move fast and break things might be the motto of a wrecking crew not a builder, a jewel thief not the jeweler.  Move fast and break things sounds like fun until it is time to clean up the debris field or until you cut off your own hands.  When every norm is broken, lives can be destroyed, and they are not so easily put back together as the grieving parents who filed these lawsuits complain. 

It is not the first time Zuckerberg has been called to account.  Many books have been written.  Members of the press have confronted him.  He has been called before Congress.  Perhaps Zuckerberg feels too big to fail and so he has not heeded the warnings.  Perhaps, like many powerful men, he believes the rules do not apply to him, or he deludes himself by believing that things are as he says they are because he says so.  Or maybe he is incapable of empathy and through his social media empire, he destroys empathy in others.

A business that is built on a model of scandalizing its patrons and promoting outrage will eventually become self-destructive.  When you see the scale of the damage influenced or caused by social media, you realize the depravity.  This model is not just breaking the rules of business; it is breaking people, breaking peace and order, breaking elections and democracy, breaking civilizations.

A strong footing in reality is the foundation of mental health. Social media has stolen reality in order to sell advertising.    Half of the country gets its news from social media where reporting is not balanced, fair or complete, where it is deliberately manipulated and sensationalized through disinformation in order to foster outrage, clicks, and sharing.  It normalizes political fear and hatred and increases suspiciousness.  It amplifies the demand for immediate answers which doesn’t allow experts time to do their work.  This furthers misinformation and loss of confidence in science, truth, and expertise.

Social media company owners cry “freedom,” to keep their malignant operations running, but what does that word “freedom" even mean when words are manipulated in such a predatory fashion?  Research shows how easily our minds can be influenced and our choices and behavior swayed.  All of this is well studied and applied by social media companies and marketers of every stripe.

Social media is programmed to appeal to our reptilian brains—brains that react without concern for their young or for others.  It makes people self-absorbed.  Technology is causing children to be confused about what it means to be alive, to be a human being.  It has changed the way we engage with others and work in groups.  It amplifies our primal instincts of fear and aggression.  As our machines get smarter and faster, we lose the higher functions of the mind like insight and empathy, functions that make us fully human and give us the capacity to anticipate and care about the consequences of our actions.

There are many industries in which moving fast is critical: think EMTs, firefighters, ER doctors and surgeons, people who repair our power lines and sewer pipes in the midst of storms…It is possible to think fast, act quickly and still maintain the structure and safety of individuals and society. 

What most of us want is to live in a world filled with compassion not hate and conflict.  We all want to feel inspired and optimistic not beaten and suspicious.   We need hope not despair.  We all want to be seen and heard, but the only way for society to survive is with shared truth based on facts and history.

It is all coming to a head, Mark Zuckerberg, the speed, the greed, and the misdeeds.  No kid goes off to college thinking he will kill a fellow student at a frat party.  And that brilliant kid sitting in his dorm room at Harvard who came up with the idea to connect us surely didn’t start out with the intention to push teenagers to suicide or countries to genocide.  You can do better than this.

Our parents never encouraged us to move fast and break things, but they did often remind us to be careful of the company we keep.