Towards the Facebook party?
"Building Global Community" are the words chosen by Mark Zuckerberg to outline the mission of Facebook in the world. Three words that are anathema to Trump, committed as he is to destroying the global community and its consequences.
Why has Mark Zuckerberg just now felt the need to take stock of Facebook's mission, its state of implementation and the prospects of the largest social media in the world? And why did he do it with a 6000-word document/manifesto, even as visionary as "The hacker's way" was, the letter to investors at the time of Facebook's listing? The answer to these questions is easy: he did it because of the situation that arose with the election of Trump and with the anti-globalization program that the new president has promised to implement since the first 100 days. This program clashes with the very nature of Facebook, whose raison d'être is globalization.
The hacker's way opened with these words: “Facebook was not created to become a limited company. It was created for a social mission: to make the world more open and connected". Five years later, faced with very strong headwinds, young Mark comes to a conclusion that could have significant personal and political implications. In fact, he writes: "Building a global community is a bigger project than an organization or a business". Then what is it? It is a political project. It's the Facebook project, completely unlike anything that's come before. Facebook doesn't care about nations, government, elections, parliament; Facebook cares about people and the relationships people can produce at all levels. It is on these interactions that it builds its business.
In fact, by outlining Facebook's tasks to build an inclusive community, the young Mark seems to outline more the tasks of a political entity than a technological company or a business. Mark writes: “Facebook is not only technology and information, but it is a community that is evolving from the task of connecting friends and families to the task of becoming a source of information and a place for public conversation”. Describing the work that awaits Facebook, Mark talks about the priority task of building small meaningful communities that he calls "meaningful groups" capable of self-governance, of solving the problems that define that community, effectively intervening in the lives of the people who are part of it. These small communities relating to each other can give rise to larger communities up to scale to the global community. This vision of Facebook echoes the libertarian idea of supranational groups, self-managed outside the jurisdiction of states. Until now they had imagined themselves as floating cities in international waters or space colonies, now with Facebook it is cyberspace that has become the appointed place for these utopias.
In the final part of the document, the young Mark goes so far as to declare that Facebook can provide an example of community governance, a working model of a "collective decision-making" body to obtain which Facebook is ready to build a voting system global that gives its components more weight and control in the life of the community.
A challenge to Trump?
It was known that Mark felt more than a technologist a social reformer and a messiah of the new interconnected world. But to challenge one's irritable president on such a politically sensitive level as globalization is truly something surprising, as the media outlets have not failed to point out, who have gone so far as to write that the young Mark is preparing to challenge Trump in four years . Are you looking for a new job?
None of this is happening, but Mark wanted to detach himself from the big group of Silicon Valley technologists who, while abhorring Trump, are walking on eggshells. To such an extent that the New York Times, Trump's most bitter opponent among the big media, has invited them to take sides and throw their considerable weight on the scales. It won't happen anytime soon because the leaders of the new economy care more than the world and America about their business, which could suffer a serious setback if the president launches his own army of snapping activists at them. Obama launched Silicon Valley into orbit, Trump can bring it back to earth. Politics is taking its revenge on technology and is fully reaffirming its primacy which seemed to have evaporated after the unprecedented weight of technological innovation and its apostles in people's lives.
Zuckerberg has decided to take sides so clearly, because Trump's vision can truly be a deadly threat to Facebook. Facebook is the maximum expression of globalization and open societies that collaborate with commerce, the circulation of people, capital, ideas and the cultural industry. If Trump starts closing borders, placing tariffs on goods and services not produced in the USA, launches a foreign policy in which American material and strategic interests become irreverent towards any different issue, then there will be retaliation and America and its multinationals will begin to feel what the principle of reciprocity means.
Facebook, an easy scapegoat
Facebook can really become America First's scapegoat. Outside the United States, in Europe, in Africa in Asia, Facebook does not create jobs, does not contribute to the national product, does not pay the taxes it should pay, through Facebook voters can be influenced with hoaxes and hostile countries can meddle in national affairs. Furthermore, we gradually realized that Facebook contributes little to elevating the public conversation, rather it tends to stupid and brutalize it beyond any possible decency.
For politicians and governments Facebook is a nuisance and they tolerate it because people love it and people go to the polls. The largest social network, like all other social networks, operates in an indefinite institutional and legal framework, it appropriates citizens' data to create dossiers that attract advertising investors who thus deny resources to national operators to give them to Mark and its algorithms. The Germans, for example, are angry with Facebook. In fact, they are taking him to court and it will not be easy for him to emerge unscathed. The European Commission has a great desire for a fight. For many countries Facebook does not create any wealth.
All of this can be tolerated by politics if globalization is the way of organizing world political and economic relations and if the leading nation feeds and pushes this model. The moment she denies it, why must the sufferers have to support her? Facebook may indeed be the first head hit by the Trump boomerang. So goodbye billionaire quotations, goodbye profits and dividends. The supernation Facebook could shatter like Nebuchadnezzar's Babylon shattered. From day to night.
But there will be none of this
For those who have the will and the patience to go to the origins of Mark Zuckerberg's and Facebook's vision, it can be truly enlightening to read the letter sent to investors at the time of the social media listing in 2012. We offer it to you in its entirety, below, in the translation from English by Stefano Cipriani. Enjoy the reading. This text has inspired many apprentice leaders, including in our country. But so far it hasn't brought much luck.
The Hacker way (The hacker-thought) – Letter to investors by Mark Zuckerberg
Facebook was not created to become a public company. It was created for a social mission: to make the world more open and connected.
We think it's important that anyone who invests in Facebook understands our mission, how we make decisions, and how we think about what we do. I will try to explain all this in this letter.
At Facebook, we're inspired by technologies that have revolutionized the way people use and consume information. We often talk about inventions such as printing and television, tools that have created more efficient communication and have led society to transform itself in a very interesting way. They gave voice to many people. They encouraged progress. They changed the way society was organized. They have brought us all together in some way.
Today, our society has reached another turning point. We live in a world where most people have access to the Internet or mobile phones. They are necessary tools to start sharing what we think, our mood, what we do with whoever we want. Facebook wants to build a service that empowers people to share their experiences and once again help transform many of our businesses and institutions.
Today there is a great need and there is a great opportunity to connect all people in the world, giving each of them a voice to transform society for the future. Technology and infrastructure need to be developed like never before and we believe this is the most important issue to focus on.
We hope to strengthen the way people relate to each other.
Even if our mission seems “big,” it starts small – with the relationship between two people.
Interpersonal relationships are a fundamental unit of our society. They are the way we discover new ideas, understand our world, and where our long-term happiness comes from.
At Facebook, we've created tools that help people connect with other people with whom they share what they want, and by doing all of this we've extended people's ability to build and maintain relationships.
People share more – even just with their friends or family – creating a more open culture and generating a better understanding of life and perspectives for others. We believe that this creates a lot of stronger interpersonal relationships and that it helps people to expose themselves to a different and greater number of perspectives.
By helping people form these connections, we hope to recreate the way they spread and consume information. We think that the world's information infrastructure should resemble the social graph – a bottom-up or peer-to-peer network – rather than the monolithic top-down structure that has existed to date. We also believe that giving people control over what they share is a core tenet of this refoundation.
We've already helped more than 800 million people trace over 100 billion connections, and our goal is to accelerate this process.
We hope to improve the way people connect to businesses and the economy.
We think a more open and connected world will help create a stronger economy with companies creating the best products and services.
The more people share, the more they have access to other people's opinions they trust about the products and services they use. This makes it easier to discover the best products and improve the quality and efficiency of life.
The result of making it easier to find better products is that companies will be rewarded by consumers for making better products – personalized and designed around people. We've also found that these “social by design” products tend to be more popular than traditional ones, and we look forward to seeing many more products move in this direction.
Our development platform has already enabled hundreds of thousands of companies to build high-quality, more social products. We have seen disruptive new approaches in sectors such as games, music and news and we expect to see similar impacts in many other sectors built around a new production concept that is “social by design”.
In addition to creating better products, a more open world pushes companies to develop a more direct and authentic engagement with consumers. More than 4 million businesses have a Facebook page that they use to chat with their customers. And we expect this trend to grow further.
We hope to change the way people relate to governments and institutions.
We believe that creating tools to help people share could lead to a more honest and transparent dialogue with governments, which could transfer more power to people, more accountability to officials, and better solutions to some of the biggest problems of our time.
By empowering people to share, we're starting to see that people are making their voices heard in a different way than was historically possible. These voices will grow in number and volume. They cannot be ignored. Over time, we expect governments to become more responsive to issues and concerns raised directly by the people rather than through intermediaries controlled by a select few.
Through this process, we believe that emerging leaders in various countries will be pro-Internet and fight for the rights of their people, including the right to share what they want and to access all information.
Finally, as the economy moves towards higher quality and personalized products, we also expect to see new socially designed services emerge that address the world's big problems like job creation, education and health care. We look forward to doing all we can to help this progress.
Our Mission and our Business
As I said above, Facebook wasn't originally founded to be a company. First and foremost we have always cared about our social mission, the services we create and the people who use them. This is a different approach than a public company, so I want to explain why I think it can work.
I started writing the first version of Facebook because it was something I wanted to exist. Since then, most of the ideas and code put into Facebook have been created by great people we've brought on to our team.
Most of these great people mostly think about creating and being part of a great thing, but they also want to make money. Through the process of building a team – and also building a community of developers, advertisers and investors – I have developed a deep appreciation for building a strong company with a strong economic engine and strong growth, which can be the best way to bring many people together to solve important problems.
Simply put: we don't create services to make money; we make money by creating better services.
And we think this is a good way to create something. These days I think more and more people want to use the services of companies that believe in something other than just maximizing profits.
By focusing on our mission and creating great services, we believe we are going to create the greatest possible value for our shareholders and long-term partners – and this will allow us to retain and attract the best people and create more great services . We don't wake up in the morning with the primary goal of making money, but we realize that the best way to achieve our mission is to create a strong and valuable company.
This is how we think about our takeover bid. We are going to market for our employees and for our investors. We made a commitment when we gave them our shares to grow in value and make them liquid, and this tender offer is fulfilling our commitment. By becoming a public company we are making a similar commitment to our new investors and will work just as hard to fulfill it.
The thought-hacker
To build a strong company, we've worked hard to make Facebook the best place for great people to make a big impact on the world and learn from other great people. We have cultivated a unique approach to culture and management, an approach we call “Hacker-thinking”.
The word "hacker" has an unfairly negative connotation, being presented in the media as "one who hacks computers". In reality, hacking is all about creating something quickly or testing the boundaries of what you are capable of doing. Like most things, it can have good or bad uses, but the vast majority of hackers I've met tend to be idealists who want to make a positive impact on the world.
Hacker-thinking is an approach to creation that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that things can always be improved, and that nothing is ever finished. They just have to solve the problem – often in front of people who think it's impossible or are content with the status quo.
Hackers try to build the best services over the long haul, releasing quickly and learning from small iterations rather than trying to get it all right in one go. To support this method, we have created a test environment that is capable of testing thousands of different versions of Facebook at any given time. On our wall we have written “Done is better than perfect”, to always keep in mind the concept of quick release.
Hacking is also an inherently pragmatic and active discipline. Instead of arguing for days about how a new idea is possible or the best way to create something, hackers build a prototype and see what works. There is a mantra that goes around a lot in the Facebook offices: “A code is better than many speeches”.
The hacker culture is also extremely open and meritocratic. Hackers believe that the best idea and implementation always wins – and not the person who is good at lobbying the idea or the person who manages the most people.
To encourage this approach, we do a “Hackathon” every few months, where everyone prototypes new ideas they have in mind. In the end, the whole team comes together and looks at everything that has been created. Many of our most successful products have come out of these Hackathons, such as the Timeline, chat, video, our mobile development framework, and some of our most important infrastructure such as the HipHop Compiler.
To make sure all of our engineers share this approach, we require newcomers – and even managers who primarily don't write code – to go through a program called Bootcamp where they can learn our ground rules, tools, and approach. There are a lot of people in this industry who manage engineers and don't want to write code, but the pragmatic people we're looking for must be willing and able to transition from Bootcamp.
The examples given above were for engineers, but we've distilled these principles into five core values for how we run Facebook:
1. Focus on impact
If we want to make the biggest impact possible, the best way to do it is to make sure that we always stay focused on solving the most important problems. Sounds simple to say, but we think most companies do it wrong and waste a lot of time. We expect everyone at Facebook to be good at finding the biggest problems to work on.
2. Move fast
Moving fast allows us to create more things and learn faster. However, as soon as most businesses start to grow, they slow down too much because they are more afraid of making mistakes than they are of missing out on opportunities by moving too slowly. We have a motto: "Move and smash". The idea is that if you don't "break" something, it's probably because you're not progressing fast enough.
3. Be brave
Creating great things means taking risks. This can be scary and holds back most companies from doing the big things they should. However, in a world that is changing so fast, you are guaranteed to fail if you don't take a risk. We have another motto: “The riskiest thing is not to take risks”. We push everyone to make bold decisions, even if that means making mistakes sometimes.
4. Be open
We believe that a more open world is a better world, because people with more information can make better decisions and have a greater impact. This also applies to our business management. We work hard to make sure everyone at Facebook has access to as much information as possible about every aspect of the company, so they can make the best decisions and have the greatest impact.
5. Create social value
Again, Facebook exists to make the world more open and connected, not just to be a company. We expect everyone at Facebook to be focused every day on how to create real value for the world in everything they do.
Thank you for taking the time to read this letter. We believe we have an opportunity to make a major impact on the world and build a society that can last. I can't wait to build something great together.
