[Diederich]

Thanks for your considerate response. If you don't mind, I'd love to have you expand on it a bit further.

Specifically, how do you feel about other government positions, besides the military and intelligence?

Reading your response, I'm getting the sense that this line of conversation is more about senior people with recent employment, which is sensible.

My main point is that big organizations....all of them....do a lot of different things and have a lot of different impacts. And many big organizations have extremely large impacts.

Some of those will be good, and some of them will be bad. But one way or another, both the 'good' and 'bad' impacts will both be very large.

Case in point: the US Government is an enormous and old organization. Nobody can rationally deny that it has done an enormous amount of both good and bad, and it's a matter of opinion and discussion as to which pile is larger.

Another example: IBM is a tech company that's old and has had a huge impact for a long time, both good and bad.

Before I get to Facebook, I'll note that it's widely held that all creatures, and humans especially, tend remember and weigh the bad quite a bit more than the good.

Facebook has created an enormous amount of impact over a pretty short period of time, nobody disagrees with that.

I strongly suspect this won't be a popular opinion, but I believe that Facebook has created, on the whole, more good impact than bad.

Before the reader reacts too negatively to that statement, please know that I personally consider technology/communication technology/especially social media technology to be among the top two or three most likely existential threats to human civilization.

I personally believe that Facebook was the first to take the inevitable next steps toward the now obviously dangerous territory we find ourselves in.

So, that's a tiny portion of my personal context.

I admit that your opinions made me somewhat uncomfortable, though I do understand where you're coming from.

I also admire your (somewhat risky!) transparency here.

[jentist_retol]

Posts that were doing well have been getting downvoted pretty heavily in the last hour. I'm curious to know why that is, but they don't seem to comment.

Ah well, that's the nature of an open forum such as this.