[dmitrygr]

Why is it that every little single-purpose-at-best company nowadays acts like they are out to save the world in the most noble way possible?

Mark, please! You're a spam-your-friends-with-fake-news-and-baby-photos service at best. The world will go on long after Facebook ceases to exist. Please stop pretending that you're Mother Teresa here.

[zzalpha]

It's the tech delusion. I don't know a start-up that doesn't have some grandiose vision of themselves as the future saviors of humanity. Uber, Tesla, Facebook, Airbnb, you name it... it's all the same "save the world" rhetoric.

The scary thing is, I think a lot of people on the industry actually believe their own BS...

[nostrademons]

It's much easier to do hard or risky things (and convince others to do hard things) if you believe that doing so will save the world.

Whether it's true or not, it's a useful illusion. People who believe that it's all meaningless tend to sit on message boards and shit on others instead.

[zzalpha]

Instead of what? Buying into the BS?

I'd rather take an honest, measured view of these companies. Many have the potential to change our lives, for both good and ill. Buying into the BS is a great way to short circuit healthy skepticism.

Selling the BS is a fantastic smokescreen.

[nostrademons]

Who are the ones actually building the products that everybody else (and probably you, too) are using, though, and getting rich off it? They're the delusional folks who buy the BS.

This is something I've wrestled with a lot in my personal life: you can have an accurate self-image and never really accomplish anything, or you can have an inflated self-image and achievements that probably don't quite justify it but come a lot closer than the achievements of the people with accurate self-images. Empirically, there doesn't seem to be a middle ground, except for a few rare folks who seemingly have no self-image (they just don't think about it much). That sort of delusional megalomania seems to be a necessary motive force for tackling hard, risky problems. And if you don't have it, then some other delusional megalomaniac will be the one who actually attempts it, and gets resources simply because he's the only one trying.

[pessimizer]

Second-order survivorship bias. The vast majority of delusional megalomaniacs are abject failures (at least when compared to their own ambitions), and the number of them who live in the gutter and eat out of trashcans is at least four orders of magnitude higher than the number who find success.

People who find success often become delusional megalomaniacs after achieving that success, when they see their success as evidence of their own greatness, not before. The idea that it's the megalomania (or a black turtleneck) that makes you successful, or even makes you brave enough to attempt the things that might make you successful, is an illusion.

A defining commonality of delusional megalomaniacs is their destructiveness and their danger to the people around them and themselves. Worse, they tend to attract followers who both amplify the reach of that destructiveness and who create an echo chamber that reflects back and amplifies the megalomania that attracted them, making the situation worse.

> That sort of delusional megalomania seems to be a necessary motive force for tackling hard, risky problems.

There's no evidence of this. Everything difficult was not solved by assholes, and Zuckerberg didn't solve anything difficult.

[dosgonlogs]

I think reality is much much much more complicated (we humans don't even know enough collectively to make such statements with any accuracy), and there certainly is a middle ground. I think people with inflated self worth are more likely to "succeed" because they will run right over others and maybe not even stop to justify the horror they just committed to improve their own lot in life, due to their sense of entitlement complex (which I guess you did allude to a little). Either way, I like your comment, it made me think.

[joslin01]

Great comment. I just want to point out the obvious you can believe you're great & be a nice, humble person.

The self-image comes into play when you're trying to act in a certain accordance with what's in your head. If you think you're bound for great things, you'll look for great things to tackle and you won't be satisfied until you're at whatever version of success you have in your head. If your self-image is happy & settled-down, you'll similarly stress over this. Eventually though, you'll probably get what you wanted because the law of attraction is quite real.

When you talk about accomplishment, it's a relative term though I understand you mean money in this case. Self-image is self-directed, and typically comes from a desire, which naturally comes from a lack. You will see many buy into the trap that money = happiness, and they will thus imagine themselves as some rich, successful tech CEO. After that, self-image has to match up with real-world, so work. The ones who truly believe they are will eventually succeed, and the ones with little willpower will fail. This goes for every facet of life.

That's why it's good to ponder "who am I?" because it's actually a step after "what do I want?" If you can see it, you can be it. Some will call it megalomania and others will call it dedication. Without knowing the person intimately, it's hard to understand which it is, but I'm an optimist and lean on the side of most successful people got there through a lot of hard work -- where their self-image was tested again & again.

The truth is nobody can tell you that you are or aren't successful. Ultimately, it's a personal decision and comes down to if your ideal version of yourself is staring back at you in the mirror.

[projektir]

I'm very split on this.

I very much agree with the first sentence.

But I don't know if I agree with the second. People who believe that something is meaningless, or hard to do, are at least not doing any damage, while saviors of the world have done plenty of damage. We humans seem to have an inherent bias for powerful persons, in that we tend to like them even if they're a terrible influence.

[gaius]

It's much easier to do hard or risky things (and convince others to do hard things) if you believe that doing so will save the world

I think you mean "easier to get convince others to work 80-hour weeks for illusory stock options".

[GuiA]

Hey, some people sit on messages boards and shit on others AND manage to build successful businesses that let them live the lives they want. I'd rather choose them as models than the douchebags drinking kombucha in their Tesla.

(i <3 u 'idlewords)

[onetimefake]

Linus Trovalds come to minD :)

[idlewords]

I <3 you too!

[siavosh]

I think there's truth in what you're saying, it's just a bit dubious when that illusion is also used to generate billions in personal wealth. It raises the cynic in some observers.

[pessimizer]

Why leave out the option that some things are meaningless and some things are not? Why divide the world into conquering self-deluded bullshit artists and lazy cynical moaners?

[azernik]

At least Tesla's one thing is inherently important because of the climate change implications.

[oldsj]

Yea I have to say Elon's actions seem to really be for the overall benefit of society unlike most other tech / business leaders

[bamboozled]

I like to remain skeptical about Elon's vision, he seems like a great guy, but he is still a business man, maybe he isn't able to see that for himself.

Just remember we're not just getting free lithium, aluminum and copper from another dimension to build all those cars, and when we're done with the cars, they're not just going to biodegrade back into forrests and coral reefs. Mining those minerals can have a pretty serious environmental impact.

There is some cognitive dissonance going here, we see a solution to climate change, but we don't want to observe the other side of the coin.

[Arizhel]

Oh come on. You do realize "recycling" exists, right? Cars don't just go into a landfill when they reach the end of their useful life. They're salvaged for parts, and once all the useful parts are removed the rest is used for scrap metal. Lead-acid batteries have been recycled for decades now, with extremely high efficiency. Lithium is much more valuable than anything in a lead-acid battery, so of course it's going to be recycled as well.

Yes, mining has an environmental impact, but 1 ton of aluminum used in a car does not necessarily mean 1 ton of aluminum was mined for it.

[bamboozled]

Try not to forget it often takes energy to recycle things, and what do we do with a huge surplus of Lithium when its no longer required, we don't exactly have free energy either.

But hey, let's not get that get in the way of a great response, right?

[projektir]

I think Elon means well somewhere down the line, but he seems to be completely blind to ethical/social effects as opposed to the purely technological ones.

I.e., his solution to employment issues caused by automation is to merge with machines as opposed to addressing it on a social, political, economic, etc., level.

More and more I find this approach detrimental to society and likely to amplify all existing problems.

[gukov]

But compared to Mark Elon is much more pro-current president, so he gets much less respect.

[jhvh1134]

I worked for a company that was basically a hosting service for online advertisements. They too thought they were saving the world somehow.

[cortesoft]

Parodied perfectly by Silicon Valley in their bit about the Disrupt conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-GVd_HLlps

[lazaroclapp]

Each of those companies has the potential to significantly impact the world. Whether that change is for better or worse depends on your values. But given that they will likely have a big impact on society, I'd rather have them thinking through the ethical implications of what they do even superficially and grandiosely than not at all. A hypocritically preachy Facebook corporation is much better than an absolutely cynical one.

[zzalpha]

A hypocritically preachy Facebook corporation is much better than an absolutely cynical one.

If you ask me, for a lot of these tech companies, this is a false dichotomy: they're outwardly preachy and inwardly cynical. How better to justify bad behaviour than to dress it up in grandiosity?

[lazaroclapp]

Most of the ones I have been on the inside of (I am not currently inside of any of those) are fairly preachy internally and do discuss the ethics of what they are doing. Sure, that discussion is more "realist" than what their PR pushes out, but it is still not even close to absolute cynicism. They don't always pick the ethical choice when push comes to shove if there is a lot of money on doing the wrong thing, but it depends somewhat on the level of wrong (for the record, I am talking about perfectly legal actions here, just with possible ethical externalities). In as much as they justify things, they justify them to themselves too. You can argue that they are more cynical as you go closer to the center, but I have no evidence for it either way, and the ones actually designing and implementing the features are not in that center. I'd rather deal with someone who has to rationalize their unethical actions and thus at least consider the downsides than someone who just doesn't care. In my experience, S.V. companies are more often full of the former than the later.

[lend000]

One of those is not the like others (Facebook). Facebook is the only one that wasn't a huge next step in the progression of an established industry. It was an incremental improvement in a fledgling social network industry, and it's questionable how much value it actually adds to (or detracts from) society. Compare this to Google which is indeed a force of good (not just their main product, but the numerous free technologies they have given to society like Chrome, Golang, QUIC, Tensorflow, etc.) and Uber/Airbnb, which have made people 'freer' in the sense that it is much cheaper to travel and get out now, and then Tesla of course is ushering in an eco-friendly transportation revolution.

The grandiose self-vision is annoying PR, but at least some of the companies have a fair amount to back it up with. Facebook is just the next iteration of Microsoft in my opinion -- they took a huge early lead with a superior product in a new industry, but now they're kind of evil and they will ride their market share for many decades.

[rhizome]

It was an incremental improvement in a fledgling social network industry

And even then, it was only because Friendster was crippled by scaling problems and MySpace was snowed under with self-promotion that Facebook even had a path out of the university populations to which they initially restricted themselves.

[gaius]

I think one thing that FB got right was disallowing any customisation of your own profile. That made MySpace completely unusable.

[rhizome]

Very good point. MySpace had zero consistency of experience.

[devwastaken]

>Please stop pretending that you're Mother Teresa here.

The funny part is that Mother Teresa wasn't a good person, but made a lot of money from her image of nicety. I think its the same way with these individuals who are trying to act 'noble'. The most noble thing you could do is bring consumer trust back and invest into people.

I would argue that a lot of problems that companies have, like when Tim Cook was going around giving presentations on why encryption is important, is solved by bringing consumer trust back by working in the best interest for everyone, and not just for money.

[simplehuman]

Mother Teresa wasn't a good person? That's news. Why?

[__s]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Mother_Teresa

[dreen]

Not OP, don't think she was, but her image is very controversial due to her questionable ethics. There is plenty of material about this on the internet.

[dopamean]

I read somethings years ago about how she didn't allow the hospitals that she oversaw use pain medication for some religious reason. There were also claims that she personally profited off of her likeness. I can't recall if any of those claims were credible however.

[arctangent]

I think the gist of it was that "suffering brings one closer to God"...

[judah]

She worked for over 4 decades (!) with orphans, poor, the sick and dying.

Four. Freaking. Decades.

It's not right to say, "Mother Teresa was not a good person because [minor thing I disagree about]."

Her views do not cancel 45 years of service. I wish more people would be "bad" like Mother Teresa. There would be fewer depressed, fewer lonely, fewer suicidal, fewer addicts, fewer outcasts.

The atheist Hitchens wrote several hit pieces on the religious Teresa due to her views on abortion, suffering, women's rights, and more. But the world is not made better by spilling rivers of ink about perceived imperfections in the laborers helping society's outcasts. The world is made better by the good things people do for others.

I'd rather live in a world with 1 imperfect laboring Mother Teresa than 1000 babbling do-nothings.

[astrodust]

The criticism is not that she didn't work with the sick and the dying for decades, it's that she maximized their suffering and sickness to glorify herself and to aid in fund-raising.

She raised billions of dollars and very little of it ended up helping the people she was supposed to be caring for.

> I wish more people would be "bad" like Mother Teresa.

Don't worry, there are people like Benny Hinn, like Peter Popov, like Creflow Dollar who are out there taking mountains of money from people in the name of faith to spend on their gold-plated jets.

Mother Theresa did more damage to the world than you can possibly imagine. If instead of celebrating misery she worked to mitigate, instead of being staunchly opposed to birth control she had encouraged family planning, if instead of using the sick and dying as a fund-raising tool instead of helping them get back on their own feet to lift themselves up the world would be a better place.

Mother Theresa clearly didn't give a shit about women's rights.

> The world is made better by the good things people do for others.

Especially if those good things help others pay it forward. She kept her flock just sick and miserable enough they didn't escape. She's like someone with Munchausen syndrome by proxy in a monstrous scale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munchausen_syndrome_by_proxy

[judah]

> "She kept her flock just sick and miserable enough they didn't escape"

Where's the evidence for that? I read Hitchens' utterly biased hit piece on her, I didn't see real evidence, just accusations and editorializing.

> "She raised billions of dollars and very little of it ended up helping the people she was supposed to be caring for."

Be specific. She raised billions, but very little helped the people? Give us numbers, and show us original sources. Hitchens' hit pieces didn't contain these. (As I recall, even Hitchens acknowledged that Mother Teresa didn't live luxuriously herself.)

>> There are plenty of others like Benny Hinn...

Hinn, Popov and others shysters aren't caring for the sick, feeding the hungry. Red herring.

[devwastaken]

>The atheist Hitchens wrote several hit pieces on the religious Teresa due to her views on abortion, suffering, women's rights, and more.

Actually, the piece he wrote was about how she would deny medicine to those who needed it, and reused needles between patients, along with putting down 'modern' equipment and anything non-religious. All while she received millions in funding she did not invest into her 'homes'. The 'houses' poor people went to where she said she would take care of them, were actually houses of death for them, even if it was treatable.

45 years of service means nothing, if your 45 years of service includes purposefully making people suffer and denying them of care they need, while making money for yourself and trying to look like a saint.

Also related:

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-37241762

[kinghajj]

https://www.google.com/search?q=the+missionary+position+hitc...

[taejavu]

The late Christopher Hitchens wrote a book and spoke extensively on that topic. Here's a video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65JxnUW7Wk4

[oh_sigh]

Here's a start: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_wor...

[GuiA]

I thoroughly enjoyed Geek Heresy by Kentaro Toyama, which is precisely about taking that trope apart. The book goes over a number of case studies about technocrats thinking their purely technological solutions would "make the world a better place", and how they failed. It also goes over examples where no/low tech approaches succeeded. It's a quick, recommended read.

https://www.amazon.com/Geek-Heresy-Rescuing-Social-Technolog...

[temp246810]

Holy crap, I didn't even know I felt this way, but seeing it spelled out in front me I totally, 100% agree here.

Google, FB, etc. are a bit pretentious. You are world saving because you can afford it - you run companies with huge margins that rake in billions of dollars per QUARTER.

Let's keep it in perspective - you do it because you can, you're not successful because you do it.

[judah]

It's because people want to feel like they have a purpose.

It's the same reason you see Hollywood actors being outspoken political activists. Because if they stay out of politics, they're "only" insignificant entertainers.

It's the same reason you see comedians and TV shows getting political. Saturday Night Live (SNL) is just a show for laughs. But if it takes a political stance, suddenly the writers/producers/actors can feel good about making a positive change. (Whether it's actually positive is beside the point; it only matters they think it's positive.)

And so, Facebook is doing something to enact positive change. (For various definitions of positive.)

Facebook is only different in that it has enough money and influence to actually change things in the world. Whereas comedians, actors, TV shows can only offer political opinions and try to influence people, Facebook can actually change things thanks to its financial status and its staggeringly user base.

[robotkdick]

I might be inclined to believe it if it weren't only so many words.

Where are the actions to back up the argument? Internet.org? India would like to kick internet.org in the nutsack. Giving money to charity? Where are the results from that investment?

Without any evidence, Mark Zuckerberg is just another king of spin. Aren't there enough cockroaches in the world already? Not saying Mark is one, but I'd like to see someone else point to the good FB is doing in the world and hear nothing at all from its CEO.

[judah]

Facebook on the whole hasn't done much to improve the world. (It's greatest accomplishment in my mind is keeping geographically-separated family in contact with one another.)

While this manifesto was a little over-the-top, and probably amplifies globalism as a cure-all, he does appear sincere in his desire to do good. Time will tell.

[mnm1]

"Save the world" type narratives are a huge part of American culture and have been for quite awhile. It has especially ramped up in the last decade and a half or so since 9/11, usually coupled with yet another post-apocalyptic plot. Look at TV, movies, and popular culture. The theme even appears where it doesn't make any sense whatsoever. I assume it must be really popular. Is it any surprise that businesses use this theme to drum up business, regardless of whether it makes sense or not? And let's face it, it doesn't make sense for any of them. No business has ever saved the world and no business ever will. The idea is beyond ludicrous but I assume it's fun for simple minds.

[misiti3780]

He is clearly delusion and a huge megalomaniac. Facebook in it's current form will not exist in 10 years. If they do, they will be similar to what AOL is today.

[paulpauper]

being long Facebook stock since the IPO, I take the opposite side of that bet . Facebook will be a bigger company even if it's slightly different. It's so huge and ubiquitous. It's not anything that can simply be a 'fad'. It's like a new medium of consciousness or fundamental integration with the world. The internet 10 years from now probably will not be too much different (the browser will continue to take over the desktop).

[perseusprime11]

Also, isn't this the same guy who very recently tried to evict people from his estate in Hawaii? He also literally built a wall around his home after buying off neighbors homes for a premium. Is he taking down that wall?

[pault]

It's because he is launching a political career. As simple as that.

[mahyarm]

These are some of the most profitable and largest companies in the world. It's like laughing at google, 'just a web search engine company', for expanding into maps, self driving cars, a mobile operating system that dominates the world and so on. This is how you expand from 'just' a 'spam your friends' service to something that is a lot more. It's called having goals.

[phailhaus]

Almost half of the US gets their news from links posted on Facebook. Let's not pretend that it doesn't have a real, tangible impact on the world just because all you see are baby pictures.

[rhizome]

They'd get half there news from somewhere else if FB wasn't around, FB is milking it.

[___start]

yes, notice how Elon Musk, someone who IMO has added magnitudes more value to humanity than Zuck, doesn't parade around acting like an almighty preacher

[pgodzin]

Is it fair to call Facebook a single-purpose-at-best company? They are the top social networking company in the world. Within social media is encompassed global communication, local communities, news and information sharing, etc.

Sure, there are a ton of negative externalities of that such as fake news spam. But it also puts them in a unique position to tailor their site to encourage the behaviors and enforce the values they want. I think the focus on local communities is an important example. Obviously local communities can create groups now, but there is a lot that can be done to encourage those kinds of communities and groups and discover existing ones.

[losteverything]

<Please stop pretending that you're Mother Teresa here.

"The joy of reading" is coming under great fire.

In fact I am beginning to realize that I no longer enjoy reading from a phone. Never before in my reading experience did I get so worked up until now

Your comment not just includes fake news or junk reading but simply anything written in an opinion fashion.

This manifesto is an example of why reading has gone sour.

[ionised]

> Please stop pretending that you're Mother Teresa here.

Humorously, Teresa caused a lot of pain and suffering all the while self-righteously convincing herself and others that she was doing god's work.

More similarities than one may think.

[gruglife]

Totally agree and glad other people feel the same way

[hkmurakami]

Because it's a great PR angle.