[D66] Facebook Is a Doomsday Machine

[R.O.]

  Facebook Is a Doomsday Machine

By
Adrienne LaFrance
theatlantic.com
19 min
View Original 
<https://getpocket.com/redirect?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theatlantic.com%2Ftechnology%2Farchive%2F2020%2F12%2Ffacebook-doomsday-machine%2F617384%2F>

The architecture of the modern web poses grave threats to humanity. It’s 
not too late to save ourselves.

The Doomsday Machine was never supposed to exist. It was meant to be a 
thought experiment that went like this: Imagine a device built with the 
sole purpose of destroying all human life. Now suppose that machine is 
buried deep underground, but connected to a computer, which is in turn 
hooked up to sensors in cities and towns across the United States.

The sensors are designed to sniff out signs of the impending 
apocalypse—not to prevent the end of the world, but to complete it. If 
radiation levels suggest nuclear explosions in, say, three American 
cities simultaneously, the sensors notify the Doomsday Machine, which is 
programmed to detonate several nuclear warheads in response. At that 
point, there is no going back. The fission chain reaction that produces 
an atomic explosion is initiated enough times over to extinguish all 
life on Earth. There is a terrible flash of light, a great booming 
sound, then a sustained roar. We have a word for the scale of 
destruction that the Doomsday Machine would unleash: /megadeath. /

Nobody is pining for megadeath. But megadeath is not the only thing that 
makes the Doomsday Machine petrifying. The real terror is in its 
autonomy, this idea that it would be programmed to detect a series of 
environmental inputs, then to act, without human interference. “There is 
no chance of human intervention, control, and final decision,” wrote the 
military strategist Herman Kahn in his 1960 book, /On Thermonuclear 
War/, which laid out the hypothetical for a Doomsday Machine. The 
concept was to render nuclear war unwinnable, and therefore unthinkable.

Kahn concluded that automating the extinction of all life on Earth would 
be immoral. Even an infinitesimal risk of error is too great to justify 
the Doomsday Machine’s existence. “And even if we give up the computer 
and make the Doomsday Machine reliably controllable by decision makers,” 
Kahn wrote, “it is still not controllable enough.” No machine should be 
that powerful by itself—but no one person should be either.

The Soviets really did make a version of the Doomsday Machine during the 
Cold War. They nicknamed it “Dead Hand.” But so far, somewhat 
miraculously, we have figured out how to live with the bomb. Now we need 
to learn how to survive the social web.

People tend to complain about Facebook as if something recently curdled. 
There’s a notion that the social web was once useful, or at least that 
it could have been good, if only we had pulled a few levers: some 
moderation and fact-checking here, a bit of regulation there, perhaps a 
federal antitrust lawsuit. But that’s far too sunny and shortsighted a 
view. Today’s social networks, Facebook chief among them, were built to 
encourage the things that make them so harmful. It is in their very 
architecture.

I’ve been thinking for years about what it would take to make the social 
web magical in all the right ways—less extreme, less toxic, more 
true—and I realized only recently that I’ve been thinking far too 
narrowly about the problem. I’ve long wanted Mark Zuckerberg to admit 
that Facebook is a media company 
<https://twitter.com/AdrienneLaF/status/910493155421822976>, to take 
responsibility for the informational environment he created in the same 
way that the editor of a magazine would. (I pressed him on this once 
<https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/05/mark-zuckerberg-doesnt-understand-journalism/559424/> 
and he laughed.) In recent years, as Facebook’s mistakes have compounded 
and its reputation has tanked, it has become clear that negligence is 
only part of the problem. No one, not even Mark Zuckerberg, can control 
the product he made. I’ve come to realize that Facebook is not a media 
company. It’s a Doomsday Machine.

Read: Breaking up Facebook isn’t enough 
<https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/05/chris-hughess-call-break-facebook-isnt-enough/589138/>

The social web is doing exactly what it was built for. Facebook does not 
exist to seek truth and report it, or to improve civic health, or to 
hold the powerful to account, or to represent the interests of its 
users, though these phenomena may be occasional by-products of its 
existence. The company’s early mission was to “give people the power to 
share and make the world more open and connected.” Instead, it took the 
concept of “community” and sapped it of all moral meaning. The rise of 
QAnon, 
<https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/06/qanon-nothing-can-stop-what-is-coming/610567/> 
for example, is one of the social web’s logical conclusions. That’s 
because Facebook—along with Google and YouTube—is perfect for amplifying 
and spreading disinformation at lightning speed to global audiences. 
Facebook is an agent of government propaganda, targeted harassment, 
terrorist recruitment, emotional manipulation, and genocide—a 
world-historic weapon that lives not underground, but in a 
Disneyland-inspired campus in Menlo Park, California.

The giants of the social web—Facebook and its subsidiary Instagram; 
Google and its subsidiary YouTube; and, to a lesser extent, Twitter—have 
achieved success by being dogmatically value-neutral in their pursuit of 
what I’ll call /megascale/. Somewhere along the way, Facebook decided 
that it needed not just a very large user base, but a tremendous one, 
unprecedented in size. That decision set Facebook on a path to escape 
velocity, to a tipping point where it can harm society just by existing.

Limitations to the Doomsday Machine comparison are obvious: Facebook 
cannot in an instant reduce a city to ruins the way a nuclear bomb can. 
And whereas the Doomsday Machine was conceived of as a world-ending 
device so as to forestall the end of the world, Facebook started because 
a semi-inebriated Harvard undergrad was bored one night. But the stakes 
are still life-and-death. Megascale is nearly the existential threat 
that megadeath is. No single machine should be able to control the fate 
of the world’s population—and that’s what both the Doomsday Machine and 
Facebook are built to do.

The cycle of harm perpetuated by Facebook’s scale-at-any-cost business 
model is plain to see. Scale and engagement are valuable to Facebook 
because they’re valuable to advertisers. These incentives lead to design 
choices such as reaction buttons that encourage users to engage easily 
and often, which in turn encourage users to share ideas that will 
provoke a strong response. Every time you click a reaction button on 
Facebook, an algorithm records it, and sharpens its portrait of who you 
are. The hyper-targeting of users, made possible by reams of their 
personal data, creates the perfect environment for manipulation—by 
advertisers, by political campaigns, by emissaries of disinformation, 
and of course by Facebook itself, which ultimately controls what you see 
and what you don’t see on the site. Facebook has enlisted a corps of 
approximately 15,000 moderators, people paid to watch unspeakable things 
<https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebook-content-moderator-interviews-trauma-working-conditions-arizona>—murder, 
gang rape, and other depictions of graphic violence that wind up on the 
platform. Even as Facebook has insisted that it is a value-neutral 
vessel for the material its users choose to publish, moderation is a 
lever the company has tried to pull again and again. But there aren’t 
enough moderators speaking enough languages, working enough hours, to 
stop the biblical flood of shit that Facebook unleashes on the world, 
because 10 times out of 10, the algorithm is faster and more powerful 
than a person. At megascale, this algorithmically warped personalized 
informational environment is extraordinarily difficult to moderate in a 
meaningful way, and extraordinarily dangerous as a result.

These dangers are not theoretical, and they’re exacerbated by megascale, 
which makes the platform a tantalizing place to experiment on people. 
Facebook has conducted social-contagion experiments 
<https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/everything-we-know-about-facebooks-secret-mood-manipulation-experiment/373648/> 
on its users without telling them. Facebook has acted as a force for 
digital colonialism 
<https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/02/facebook-and-the-new-colonialism/462393/>, 
attempting to become the de facto (and only) experience of the internet 
for people all over the world. Facebook has bragged 
<https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/11/how-facebook-could-skew-an-election/382334/> 
about its ability to influence the outcome of elections. Unlawful 
militant groups use Facebook to organize 
<https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/facebook-moderators-call-arms-not-enforced-kenosha>. 
Government officials use Facebook to mislead 
<https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/facebook-ignore-political-manipulation-whistleblower-memo> 
their own citizens, and to tamper with elections. Military officials 
have exploited 
<https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebook-genocide.html> 
Facebook’s complacency to carry out genocide. Facebook inadvertently 
auto-generated 
<https://apnews.com/article/f97c24dab4f34bd0b48b36f2988952a4> jaunty 
recruitment videos for the Islamic State featuring anti-Semitic messages 
and burning American flags.

Read: Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t understand journalism 
<https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/05/mark-zuckerberg-doesnt-understand-journalism/559424/>

Even after U.S. intelligence agencies identified Facebook 
<https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf> as a main 
battleground for information warfare and foreign interference in the 
2016 election, the company has failed to stop the spread of extremism, 
hate speech, propaganda, disinformation, and conspiracy theories on its 
site. Neo-Nazis stayed active on Facebook 
<https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/christopherm51/neo-nazi-group-facebook> 
by taking out ads even after they were formally banned. And it wasn’t 
until October of this year, for instance, that Facebook announced it 
would remove groups, pages, and Instragram accounts devoted to QAnon, as 
well as any posts denying the Holocaust. (Previously Zuckerberg had 
defended Facebook’s decision not to remove disinformation about the 
Holocaust, saying of Holocaust deniers, “I don’t think that they’re 
/intentionally/ getting it wrong.” He later clarified 
<https://www.vox.com/2018/7/18/17588116/mark-zuckerberg-clarifies-holocaust-denial-offensive> 
that he didn’t mean to defend Holocaust deniers.) Even so, Facebook 
routinely sends emails to users recommending the newest QAnon groups. 
White supremacists and deplatformed MAGA trolls may flock to smaller 
social platforms such as Gab and Parler, but these platforms offer 
little aside from a narrative of martyrdom without megascale.

In the days after the 2020 presidential election, Zuckerberg authorized 
a tweak to the Facebook algorithm so that high-accuracy news sources 
such as NPR would receive preferential visibility in people’s feeds, and 
hyper-partisan pages such as /Breitbart News/’s and Occupy Democrats’ 
would be buried, according to /The New York Times/ 
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/24/technology/facebook-election-misinformation.html>, 
offering proof that Facebook could, if it wanted to, turn a dial to 
reduce disinformation—and offering a reminder that Facebook has the 
power to flip a switch and change what billions of people see online.

The decision to touch the dial was highly unusual for Facebook. Think 
about it this way: The Doomsday Machine’s sensors detected something 
harmful in the environment and chose not to let its algorithms 
automatically blow it up across the web as usual. This time a human 
intervened to mitigate harm. The only problem is that reducing the 
prevalence of content that Facebook calls “bad for the world” also 
reduces people’s engagement with the site. In its experiments with human 
intervention, the /Times/ reported, Facebook calibrated the dial so that 
/just enough/ harmful content stayed in users’ news feeds to keep them 
coming back for more.

Facebook’s stated mission—to make the world more open and connected—has 
always seemed, to me, phony at best, and imperialist at worst. After 
all, today’s empires are born on the web. Facebook is a borderless 
nation-state, with a population of users nearly as big as China and 
India combined, and it is governed largely by secret algorithms. Hillary 
Clinton told me 
<https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/01/hillary-clinton-mark-zuckerberg-is-trumpian-and-authoritarian/605485/> 
earlier this year that talking to Zuckerberg feels like negotiating with 
the authoritarian head of a foreign state. “This is a global company 
that has huge influence in ways that we’re only beginning to 
understand,” she said.

I recalled Clinton’s warning a few weeks ago, when Zuckerberg defended 
the decision not to suspend Steve Bannon from Facebook after he argued, 
in essence, for the beheading of two senior U.S. officials, the 
infectious-disease doctor Anthony Fauci and FBI Director Christopher 
Wray. The episode got me thinking about a question that’s unanswerable 
but that I keep asking people anyway: How much real-world violence would 
never have happened if Facebook didn’t exist? One of the people I’ve 
asked is Joshua Geltzer, a former White House counterterrorism official 
who is now teaching at Georgetown Law. In counterterrorism circles, he 
told me, people are fond of pointing out how good the United States has 
been at keeping terrorists out since 9/11. That’s wrong, he said. In 
fact, “terrorists are entering every single day, every single hour, 
every single minute” through Facebook.

The website that’s perhaps best known for encouraging mass violence is 
the image board 4chan—which was followed by 8chan, which then became 
8kun. These boards are infamous for being the sites where multiple 
mass-shooting suspects have shared manifestos before homicide sprees. 
The few people who are willing to defend these sites unconditionally do 
so from a position of free-speech absolutism. That argument is worthy of 
consideration. But there’s something architectural about the site that 
merits attention, too: There are no algorithms on 8kun, only a community 
of users who post what they want. People use 8kun to publish abhorrent 
ideas, but at least the community isn’t pretending to be something it’s 
not. The biggest social platforms claim to be similarly neutral and 
pro–free speech when in fact no two people see the same feed. 
Algorithmically tweaked environments feed on user data and manipulate 
user experience, and not ultimately for the purpose of serving the user. 
Evidence of real-world violence can be easily traced back to both 
Facebook and 8kun. But 8kun doesn’t manipulate its users or the 
informational environment they’re in. Both sites are harmful. But 
Facebook might actually be worse for humanity.

Read: How Facebook works for Trump 
<https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/04/how-facebooks-ad-technology-helps-trump-win/606403/>

“What a dreadful set of choices when you frame it that way,” Geltzer 
told me when I put this question to him in another conversation. “The 
idea of a free-for-all sounds really bad until you see what the 
purportedly moderated and curated set of platforms is yielding … It may 
not be blood onscreen, but it can really do a lot of damage.”

In previous eras, U.S. officials could at least study, say, Nazi 
propaganda during World War II, and fully grasp what the Nazis wanted 
people to believe. Today, “it’s not a filter bubble; it’s a filter 
shroud,” Geltzer said. “I don’t even know what others with personalized 
experiences are seeing.” Another expert in this realm, Mary McCord, the 
legal director at the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and 
Protection at Georgetown Law, told me that she thinks 8kun may be more 
blatant in terms of promoting violence but that Facebook is “in some 
ways way worse” because of its reach. “There’s no barrier to entry with 
Facebook,” she said. “In every situation of extremist violence we’ve 
looked into, we’ve found Facebook postings. And that reaches /tons/ of 
people. The broad reach is what brings people into the fold and 
normalizes extremism and makes it mainstream.” In other words, it’s the 
megascale that makes Facebook so dangerous.

Looking back, it can seem like Zuckerberg’s path to world domination was 
inevitable. There’s the computerized version of Risk he coded in ninth 
grade; his long-standing interest in the Roman empire; his obsession 
with information flow and human psychology. There’s the story of his 
first bona fide internet scandal, when he hacked into Harvard’s 
directory and lifted photos of students without their permission to make 
the hot-or-not-style website FaceMash. (“Child’s play” was how 
Zuckerberg later described 
<https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2003/11/4/hot-or-not-website-briefly-judges/> 
the ease with which he broke into Harvard’s system.) There’s the 
disconnect between his lip service to privacy and the way Facebook 
actually works. (Here’s Zuckerberg in a private chat with a friend years 
ago, on the mountain of data he’d obtained from Facebook’s early users: 
“I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses … People just submitted 
it. I don’t know why. They ‘trust me.’ Dumb fucks.”) At various points 
over the years, he’s listed the following interests in his Facebook 
profile: Eliminating Desire, Minimalism, Making Things, Breaking Things, 
Revolutions, Openness, Exponential Growth, Social Dynamics, Domination.

Facebook’s megascale gives Zuckerberg an unprecedented degree of 
influence over the global population. If he isn’t the most powerful 
person on the planet, he’s very near the top. “It’s insane to have that 
much speechifying, silencing, and permitting power, not to mention being 
the ultimate holder of algorithms that determine the virality of 
anything on the internet,” Geltzer told me. “The thing he oversees has 
such an effect on cognition and people’s beliefs, which can change what 
they do with their nuclear weapons or their dollars.”

Facebook’s new oversight board 
<https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/09/facebook-outsources-tough-decisions-speech/598249/>, 
formed in response to backlash against the platform and tasked with 
making decisions concerning moderation and free expression, is an 
extension of that power. “The first 10 decisions they make will have 
more effect on speech in the country and the world than the next 10 
decisions rendered by the U.S. Supreme Court,” Geltzer said. “That’s 
power. That’s real power.”

In 2005, the year I joined Facebook, the site still billed itself as an 
online directory to “Look up people at your school. See how people know 
each other. Find people in your classes and groups.” That summer, in 
Palo Alto, Zuckerberg gave an interview 
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--APdD6vejI> to a young filmmaker, who 
later posted the clip to YouTube. In it, you can see Zuckerberg still 
figuring out what Facebook is destined to be. The conversation is a 
reminder of the improbability of Zuckerberg’s youth when he launched 
Facebook. (It starts with him asking, “Should I put the beer down?” He’s 
holding a red Solo cup.) Yet, at 21 years old, Zuckerberg articulated 
something about his company that has held true, to dangerous effect: 
Facebook is not a single place on the web, but rather, “a lot of 
different individual communities.”

Today that includes QAnon and other extremist groups. Back then, it 
meant mostly juvenile expressions of identity in groups such as “I Went 
to a Public School … Bitch” and, at Harvard, referencing the 
neoclassical main library, “The We Need to Have Sex in Widener Before We 
Graduate Interest Group.” In that 2005 interview, Zuckerberg is asked 
about the future of Facebook, and his response feels, in retrospect, 
like a tragedy: “I mean, there doesn’t necessarily have to be more. 
Like, a lot of people are focused on taking over the world, or doing the 
biggest thing, getting the most users. I think, like, part of making a 
difference and doing something cool is focusing intensely … I mean, I 
really just want to see everyone focus on college and create a really 
cool college-directory product that just, like, is very relevant for 
students and has a lot of information that people care about when 
they’re in college.”

Read: What we wrote about Facebook 12 years ago 
<https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/02/first-time-atlantic-wrote-about-facebook/581902/>

The funny thing is: This localized approach is part of what made 
megascale possible. Early constraints around membership—the requirement 
at first that users attended Harvard, and then that they attended any 
Ivy League school, and then that they had an email address ending in 
.edu—offered a sense of cohesiveness and community. It made people feel 
more comfortable sharing more of themselves. And more sharing among 
clearly defined demographics was good for business. In 2004, Zuckerberg 
said Facebook ran advertisements only to cover server costs. But over 
the next two years Facebook completely upended and redefined the entire 
advertising industry. The pre-social web destroyed classified ads, but 
the one-two punch of Facebook and Google decimated local news and most 
of the magazine industry—publications fought in earnest for digital 
pennies, which had replaced print dollars, and social giants scooped 
them all up anyway. No news organization can compete with the megascale 
of the social web. It’s just too massive.

The on-again, off-again Facebook executive Chris Cox once talked about 
the “magic number” for start-ups, and how after a company surpasses 150 
employees, things go sideways. “I’ve talked to so many start-up CEOs 
that after they pass this number, weird stuff starts to happen,” he said 
<https://qz.com/846530/something-weird-happens-to-companies-when-they-hit-150-people/> 
at a conference in 2016. This idea comes from the anthropologist Robin 
Dunbar, who argued that 148 is the maximum number of stable social 
connections a person can maintain. If we were to apply that same logic 
to the stability of a social platform, what number would we find?

“I think the sweet spot is 20 to 20,000 people,” the writer and internet 
scholar Ethan Zuckerman, who has spent much of his adult life thinking 
about how to build a better web 
<https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/advertising-is-the-internets-original-sin/376041/>, 
told me. “It’s hard to have any degree of real connectivity after that.”

In other words, if the Dunbar number for running a company or 
maintaining a cohesive social life is 150 people; the magic number for a 
functional social platform is maybe 20,000 people. Facebook now has /2.7 
billion/ 
<https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/#:~:text=With%20over%202.7%20billion%20monthly,network%20ever%20to%20do%20so.> 
monthly users/. /

On the precipice of Facebook’s exponential growth, in 2007, Zuckerberg 
said something in an interview with the /Los Angeles Times/ that now 
takes on a much darker meaning: “The things that are most powerful 
aren’t the things that people would have done otherwise if they didn’t 
do them on Facebook. Instead, it’s the things that would never have 
happened otherwise.”

Of the many things humans are consistently terrible at doing, seeing the 
future is somewhere near the top of the list. This flaw became a 
preoccupation among Megadeath Intellectuals such as Herman Kahn and his 
fellow economists, mathematicians, and former military officers at the 
Rand Corporation in the 1960s.

Kahn and his colleagues helped invent modern futurism, which was born of 
the existential dread that the bomb ushered in, and hardened by the 
understanding that most innovation is horizontal in nature—a copy of 
what already exists, rather than wholly new. Real invention is 
extraordinarily rare, and far more disruptive.

The logician and philosopher Olaf Helmer-Hirschberg, who overlapped with 
Kahn at Rand and would later co-found the Institute for the Future, 
arrived in California after having fled the Nazis, an experience that 
gave his desire to peer into the future a particular kind of urgency. He 
argued that the acceleration of technological change had established the 
need for a new epistemological approach to fields such as engineering, 
medicine, the social sciences, and so on. “No longer does it take 
generations for a new pattern of living conditions to evolve,” he wrote 
<https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/papers/2008/P3558.pdf>, “but 
we are going through several major adjustments in our lives, and our 
children will have to adopt continual adaptation as a way of life.” In 
1965, he wrote a book called /Social Technology/ that aimed to create a 
scientific methodology for predicting the future.

Read: The silence of the never Facebookers 
<https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/06/facebook-silicon-valley-trump-silence/612877/>

In those same years, Kahn was dreaming up his own hypothetical machine 
to provide a philosophical framework for the new threats humanity faced. 
He called it the Doomsday Machine, and also the Doomsday-in-a-Hurry 
Machine, and also the Homicide Pact Machine. Stanley Kubrick famously 
borrowed the concept for the 1964 film /Dr. Strangelove/, the cinematic 
apotheosis of the fatalism that came with living on hair-trigger alert 
for nuclear annihilation.

Today’s fatalism about the brokenness of the internet feels similar. 
We’re still in the infancy of this century’s triple digital revolution 
of the internet, smartphones, and the social web, and we find ourselves 
in a dangerous and unstable informational environment, powerless to 
resist forces of manipulation and exploitation that we know are exerted 
on us but remain mostly invisible. The Doomsday Machine offers a lesson: 
We should not accept this current arrangement. No single machine should 
be able to control so many people.

If the age of reason was, in part, a reaction to the existence of the 
printing press 
<https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/01/before-zuckerberg-gutenberg/603034/>, 
and 1960s futurism was a reaction to the atomic bomb, we need a new 
philosophical and moral framework for living with the social web—a new 
Enlightenment for the information age, and one that will carry us back 
to shared reality and empiricism.

Andrew Bosworth, one of Facebook’s longtime executives, has compared 
Facebook to sugar—in that it is “delicious” but best enjoyed in 
moderation. In a memo originally posted to Facebook’s internal network 
last year, he argued for a philosophy of personal responsibility. “My 
grandfather took such a stance towards bacon and I admired him for it,” 
Bosworth wrote. “And social media is likely much less fatal than bacon.” 
But viewing Facebook merely as a vehicle for individual consumption 
ignores the fact of what it is—a network. Facebook is also a business, 
and a place where people spend time with one another. Put it this way: 
If you owned a store and someone walked in and started shouting Nazi 
propaganda or recruiting terrorists near the cash register, would you, 
as the shop owner, tell all of the other customers you couldn’t possibly 
intervene?

Anyone who is serious about mitigating the damage done to humankind by 
the social web should, of course, consider quitting Facebook and 
Instagram and Twitter and any other algorithmically distorted 
informational environments that manipulate people. But we need to adopt 
a broader view of what it will take to fix the brokenness of the social 
web. That will require challenging the logic of today’s platforms—and 
first and foremost challenging the very concept of megascale as a way 
that humans gather. If megascale is what gives Facebook its power, and 
what makes it dangerous, collective action against the web as it is 
today is necessary for change. The web’s existing logic tells us that 
social platforms are free in exchange for a feast of user data; that 
major networks are necessarily global and centralized; that moderators 
make the rules. None of that need be the case. We need people who 
dismantle these notions by building alternatives. And we need enough 
people to care about these other alternatives to break the spell of 
venture capital and mass attention that fuels megascale and creates 
fatalism about the web as it is now.

I still believe the internet is good for humanity, but that’s despite 
the social web, not because of it. We must also find ways to repair the 
aspects of our society and culture that the social web has badly 
damaged. This will require intellectual independence, respectful debate, 
and the same rebellious streak that helped establish Enlightenment 
values centuries ago.

We may not be able to predict the future, but we do know how it is made: 
through flashes of rare and genuine invention, sustained by people’s 
time and attention. Right now, too many people are allowing algorithms 
and tech giants to manipulate them, and reality is slipping from our 
grasp as a result. This century’s Doomsday Machine is here, and humming 
along.

It does not have to be this way.


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