Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.

I came across these two posts several weeks apart. The ideas they presented seemed to logically follow each other. This is strange only because the first one shown was written in 2013 and the following post in 2009.

Regarding the actual content, it’s still valid, only more so.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

Three Categories of People

People have longed for an all-knowing leader who they can mindlessly follow and abdicate their decision-making, since time began.

Some seek this all-knowing leader in religion; others look to politics, while still others believe that business is a better source.

Their time would be better spent accepting the reality that no such thing exists anywhere in any walk of life.

Then there are the people who aspire to be that all-knowing leader.

To that end they amass thousands of friends and followers, network their way well beyond what’s needed to be a LinkedIn Lion and work ceaselessly to raise their Klout score.

Finally, there are those who know without doubt that all-knowing leaders are in the same category as the tooth fairy, Easter Bunny and Santa Clause.

Which are you?

Follow Yourself; Partner With Others

I have a great idea to make the world a better place.

• Everybody who aspires to the cult of all-knowing leader stops.
• Everybody who longs for an all-knowing leader embraces the reality that no such thing exists.

Replacing these, everybody would

• learn leadership skills;
• apply them constantly to themselves; and
• occasionally in the outside world as circumstances dictated;
• take responsibility for their own actions and decisions; and
• partner with others as equals, whether one was in front or behind at any given time.

Not that I think there’s a chance in hell that this will happen, but it’s a nice thought on a beautiful summer Friday.

Image credit: Warning Sign Generator

During the dark ages of the 1970s, 80s and into the 90s people who refrained from drinking soda, living on fast food and cooked for themselves, instead of relying on the convenience of processed foods, were disparaged.

I know, because I was one of them. We were called “health food nuts.”

That changed with the advent of research into sugar, the value of veggies and a more general understanding that health wasn’t an accident, but a personal responsibility based on your own choices.

In the 1980s the World Wide Web became ubiquitous and existing bulletin board systems, such as AOL, migrated to the web. The dot com boom saw the birth and growth of social media communities that were free — and everybody loves free.

The contemporary internet was built on a bargain: Show us who you really are and the digital world will be free to search or share.

People detailed their interests and obsessions on Facebook and Google, generating a river of data that could be collected and harnessed for advertising. The companies became very rich. Users seemed happy. Privacy was deemed obsolete, like bloodletting and milkmen.

That bargain led to a new kind of nut.

“Privacy nuts;” I’m one of those, too.

As with health food nuts, privacy nuts were pooh-poohed as Luddites, anti-progressive, alarmist party-poopers.

But as they say, that was then and this is now.

Most people, no matter how they access their news, are aware of the stunning breaches in Facebook’s security, especially the current Cambridge Analytica fiasco.

That also seemed to wake people up to what the privacy nuts have been warning about all along.

Zuckerberg, of course, claims he supports the privacy law Congress is considering, but covertly Facebook is lobbying against it, so his statement that he would offer EU controls globally is highly unlikely.

Never forget that for Facebook it’s all about money.

The power of the company’s ad platform comes from the ability it gives politicians, brands, real estate agents, nonprofits and others to precisely target people on its social networks.

Of course, it’s not just Facebook.

And while Congress runs hearings and the public freaks out Zuck, as he is called, still seems to believe that it’s not Facebook’s fault and what happened should be excused because the his vision is for it to be a force for good.

but change is unlikely to happen, since greed still rules.

After two days of questioning by American lawmakers, Facebook’s share price rose more than 5%—mostly on the first day of Zuckerberg’s testimony—boosting the tech company’s market value by more than $24 billion.

Finally, NEWYORKMAG.COM provided commentary from people who are far closer to both Zukerberg and Facebook. The interviews are a real wakeup call (if you still need one).

A Propaganda Engine ‘Unlike Any in History’: Q&A With Early Facebook Investor

A conversation with early Facebook investor Roger McNamee on propaganda, early warning signs, and why outrage is so addictive.

• Former Facebook manager Sandy Parakilas on privacy, addiction, and why Facebook must “dramatically” change its business model.

• Former Facebook designer Soleio Cuervo on Facebook’s commitment to users, what the media gets wrong, and why regulation is unnecessary.

• Former Zuckerberg speechwriter Kate Losse on how the Facebook founder thinks and what is hardest for him to wrap his mind around.

• Former Facebook product manager Antonio Garcia Martinez on the “sociopathic scene” of Silicon Valley and Mark Zuckerberg’s “disingenuous and strange” reaction to the election.

Image credit: Marco Paköeningrat

Have you ever been to a post-holiday potluck? As the name implies, it’s held within two days of any holiday that involves food, with a capital F, such as Thanksgiving, Christmas and, of course, Easter. Our group has only three rules, the food must be leftovers, conversation must be interesting and phones must be turned off. They are always great parties, with amazing food, and Monday’s was no exception.

The unexpected happened when a few of them came down on me for a recent post terming Mark Zukerberg a hypocrite. They said that it wasn’t Facebook’s or Google’s fault a few bad actors were abusing the sites and causing problems. They went on to say that the companies were doing their best and that I should cut them some slack.

Rather than arguing my personal opinions I said I would provide some third party info that I couldn’t quote off the top of my head and then whoever was interested could get together and argue the subject over a bottle or two of wine.

I did ask them to think about one item that stuck in my mind.

How quickly would they provide the location and routine of their kids to the world at large and the perverts who inhabit it? That’s exactly what GPS-tagged photos do.

I thought the info would be of interest to other readers, so I’m sharing it here.

Facebook actively facilitates scammers.

The Berlin conference was hosted by an online forum called Stack That Money, but a newcomer could be forgiven for wondering if it was somehow sponsored by Facebook Inc. Saleswomen from the company held court onstage, introducing speakers and moderating panel discussions. After the show, Facebook representatives flew to Ibiza on a plane rented by Stack That Money to party with some of the top affiliates.

Granted anonymity, affiliates were happy to detail their tricks. They told me that Facebook had revolutionized scamming. The company built tools with its trove of user data (…) Affiliates hijacked them. Facebook’s targeting algorithm is so powerful, they said, they don’t need to identify suckers themselves—Facebook does it automatically. And they boasted that Russia’s dezinformatsiya agents were using tactics their community had pioneered.

Scraping Android.

Android owners were displeased to discover that Facebook had been scraping their text-message and phone-call metadata, in some cases for years, an operation hidden in the fine print of a user agreement clause until Ars Technica reported. Facebook was quick to defend the practice as entirely aboveboard—small comfort to those who are beginning to realize that, because Facebook is a free service, they and their data are by necessity the products.

I’m not just picking on Facebook, Amazon and Google are right there with it.

Digital eavesdropping

Amazon and Google, the leading sellers of such devices, say the assistants record and process audio only after users trigger them by pushing a button or uttering a phrase like “Hey, Alexa” or “O.K., Google.” But each company has filed patent applications, many of them still under consideration, that outline an array of possibilities for how devices like these could monitor more of what users say and do. That information could then be used to identify a person’s desires or interests, which could be mined for ads and product recommendations. (…) Facebook, in fact, had planned to unveil its new internet-connected home products at a developer conference in May, according to Bloomberg News, which reported that the company had scuttled that idea partly in response to the recent fallout.

Zukerberg’s ego knows no bounds.

Zuckerberg, positioning himself as the benevolent ruler of a state-like entity, counters that everything is going to be fine—because ultimately he controls Facebook.

There are dozens more, but you can use search as well as I.

What can you do?

Thank Firefox for a simple containerized solution to Facebook’s tracking (stalking) you while surfing.

Facebook is (supposedly) making it easier to manage your privacy settings.

There are additional things you can do.

How to delete Facebook, but save your content.

The bad news is that even if you are willing to spend the effort, you can’t really delete yourself from social media.

All this has caused a rupture in techdom.

I could go on almost forever, but if you’re interested you’ll have no trouble finding more.

Image credit: weisunc

From religious leaders to politicians; corporate titans to everyday folks; glitterati to moguls; intelligentsia to idiots; there seems to be no action that elicits societal condemnation, let alone punishment, for anyone except getting caught.

That’s right, getting caught.

If a societal no-no, first vehemently deny it and/or claim you didn’t realize anybody actually minded. If that doesn’t work, apologize profusely using language that changes the focus from what you did and who you hurt to you, i.e., how sad you are for them and how your big sister broke your GI Joe when you were a kid, so it’s not really your fault.

Another approach is to buy their silence, but if that doesn’t work, you can claim that the devil led you astray, you were weak, but you’ve preyed a lot, God forgave you and so should those you mislead/hurt.

Enterprise and Internet companies emote about how important user privacy is and how hard they try to protect it every time they’re hacked or their hands are caught in the cookie jar.

Worse, repercussions of serious criminal actions, especially murder, are relativity easy to avoid as long as you’re white and well-healed — or in law enforcement.

It used to be that people talked of someone having a “strong moral compass.” I suppose many still do, but that’s not worth much when “true north” is portable, shifting with the trends on social media and shoved around by rigid ideologies.

Image credit: Tim Cigelske

Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.

A year after I wrote this Alphabet was created as the holding company for Google and its siblings and “Don’t be evil” was scrapped in favor for “Do the right thing.” Supposedly nothing changed, but it did open the door to a wider definition. In the years since, doing the right thing for stockholders seemed focused on maximizing their returns in every way possible. This included mining personal data, with or without permission, and selling it to advertisers.

Until now, money seems to have acted much like Holy water, eliminating the taint of evil from the acts of Google and its ilk. Europe has been fighting, passing laws and working to hold these companies responsible. Now, Americans are waking up to just how much damage Google, Facebook, etc., have done/are doing and saying ‘enough is enough’.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

Did you know that the sixth point of Google’s 10-point corporate philosophy is “You can make money without doing evil?”

But ‘evil’ is a fluid term when it comes to making money.

And if Google is into anything it is into making money.

Take Google Plus. Google isn’t trying to displace Facebook and doesn’t even care if you use it.

That’s not really the point.

Google Plus may not be much of a competitor to Facebook as a social network, but it is central to Google’s future — a lens that allows the company to peer more broadly into people’s digital life, and to gather an ever-richer trove of the personal information that advertisers covet.

Plus is now so important to Google that the company requires people to sign up to use some Google services, like commenting on YouTube.

Some people have no problem being tracked and their personal information being shared to the enrichment of the sharing parties.

To millions of others, stalking in the name of better ad targeting smacks of evil.

Of course, when world domination is your long-term goal you need to keep those definitions fluid.

I’ve been ranting for years about the negative effects of social media and how it lends itself to insecurity, FOMA, jealously, etc., how it enables trolls, kills empathy and, worse, its unmitigated, conscious focus on addicting its users in exactly the same way heroin addicts.

Of course, I’m not the only one; psychiatrists and psychologists, educators, parents, and a host of pundits have weighed in.

Everyone knows that actions speak louder than words, so it is telling that the biggest names in tech kept tech away from their kids and far away from the schools they attend.

This in spite of giving millions in cash and product to enable schools to embrace tech.

Since it’s proven that screens kill empathy, not to mention engagement, their actions will give their own kids a major advantage in adulthood, since empathy and critical thinking will be at a premium.

If the hypocrisy doesn’t encourage you to seriously limit screen time, no matter the howls of outrage, perhaps the new voices condemning the addiction and warning of the dangers will carry far more weight.

Why?

Because they are the people who helped create the problems, starting with Tristan Harris, a former in-house ethicist at Google.

“The largest supercomputers in the world are inside of two companies — Google and Facebook — and where are we pointing them?” Mr. Harris said. “We’re pointing them at people’s brains, at children.”

The new Center for Humane Technology includes an unprecedented alliance of former employees of some of today’s biggest tech companies. Apart from Mr. Harris, the center includes Sandy Parakilas, a former Facebook operations manager; Lynn Fox, a former Apple and Google communications executive; Dave Morin, a former Facebook executive; Justin Rosenstein, who created Facebook’s Like button and is a co-founder of Asana; Roger McNamee, an early investor in Facebook; and Renée DiResta, a technologist who studies bots, and Chamath Palihapitiya, a venture capitalist who was an early employee at Facebook, said in November that the social network was “ripping apart the social fabric of how society works.”

Read the article and then decide whose side you are on — the hypocrites or the social angels.

Image credit: NotionsCapital.com

A month ago KG shared an article about how Facebook rummages through your life in pursuit of profit using and algorithm called People You May Know. The results are beyond creepy (emphasis mine).

• A woman whose father left her family when she was six years old—and saw his then-mistress suggested to her as a Facebook friend 40 years later.

• An attorney who wrote: “I deleted Facebook after it recommended as PYMK a man who was defense counsel on one of my cases. We had only communicated through my work email, which is not connected to my Facebook, which convinced me Facebook was scanning my work email.”

Still creepier, but great for profit, are Facebook’s shadow profiles.

… built from the inboxes and smartphones of other Facebook users. Contact information you’ve never given the network gets associated with your account, making it easier for Facebook to more completely map your social connections. (…) Because shadow-profile connections happen inside Facebook’s algorithmic black box, people can’t see how deep the data-mining of their lives truly is, until an uncanny recommendation pops up.

Then there is Android, which collects information even when you tell it not to.

Many people realize that smartphones track their locations. But what if you actively turn off location services, haven’t used any apps, and haven’t even inserted a carrier SIM card?

Even if you take all of those precautions, phones running Android software gather data about your location and send it back to Google when they’re connected to the internet…”

“Don’t be evil” Google also records conversations around their products; that’s not counting the bug in the new Home Mini that secretly recorded everything said near it.

And Amazon’s Echo is no different.

Chamath Palihapitiya, Founder and CEO Social Capital, who worked at Facebook for seven years and became vice president for user growth, is the most recent social media veteran to publicly apologize, “I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works.”

Social media addiction is not an accident; it’s intentional, design driven, and it’s sole purpose is to generate revenue.

“The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works,” he said, referring to online interactions driven by “hearts, likes, thumbs-up.” “No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth. And it’s not an American problem — this is not about Russians ads. This is a global problem.”

Palihapitiya’s isn’t the only one feeling guilty.

Palihapitiya’s remarks follow similar statements of contrition from others who helped build Facebook into the powerful corporation it is today. In November, early investor Sean Parker said he has become a “conscientious objector” to social media, and that Facebook and others had succeeded by “exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.” A former product manager at the company, Antonio Garcia-Martinez, has said Facebook lies about its ability to influence individuals based on the data it collects on them, and wrote a book, Chaos Monkeys, about his work at the firm.

The forces at work behind social media are also money-driven.

In his talk, Palihapitiya criticized not only Facebook, but Silicon Valley’s entire system of venture capital funding. He said that investors pump money into “shitty, useless, idiotic companies,” rather than addressing real problems like climate change and disease. Palihapitiya currently runs his own VC firm, Social Capital, which focuses on funding companies in sectors like healthcare and education.

I doubt any of this is going to change your social media consumption.

But never forget that these companies are not your friend. Their primary purpose is not to make you or anyone else happy.

Their purpose is to make money.

Period.

Anything else that happens is plain old serendipity.

(Watch the entire interview.)
Flickr image credit: Duck Lover

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.

Not all techies are “brilliant assholes” or even aspiring to that label.

Further, there plenty of brilliant nice folks and plodding assholes to be found amid the majority of people that populate techdom.

Unfortunately, that loud, vocal, arrogant, in-your-face minority often becomes the standard by which all participants are judged — think Gen X (slackers) and Millennials (entitled).

Worse, their MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) tends to rub off on others and permeate the group culture, as it did on Wall Street, to the point where those who don’t fit the mold are ashamed to admit their involvement.

“MBA jerks used to go and work for Wall Street, now wealthy white geeks go to Stanford and then waltz into a VC or tech firm.”

Patrick Connelly, founder of health-tech startup Corevity, also sees the Wall Street parallels.

“The focus of Silicon Valley used to be innovation with the wonderful bonus of money on the side of that, but those two things seem to have switched – just as the pencil-pushing mentality of finance in the 70s became the champagne lifestyle in the 2000s, People have come to have too much swagger and not enough insights.”

Like Wall Street banks in 2008, Big Tech is in no hurry to take responsibility for its actions, as shown in the recent congressional hearings — no CEOs or executives showed, instead they sent their company lawyers.

Big Tech sold the world and its employees on the idea that, unlike Wall Street and other dominant corporate entities, tech was focused on changing the world for the better and would do no evil.

But, like most concepts, evil has a fluid meaning (like murder) and money is a change agent — nothing that drives revenue is evil. That includes Russian ads, hate, bigotry, and trolling.

Industry leaders espoused values that anyone could embrace: sharing, connection, community, openness, expression. The language they spoke was the language of a universal humanism….

These concepts might have sounded vague, but they produced concrete political outcomes. They convinced politicians to privatise public goods – starting with the internet itself. In the 1990s, a network created largely by government researchers and public money was delivered into private hands and protected from regulation. Built on this enclosed ground, a company like Facebook could turn formerly non-economic activities – chatting with a friend, or showing her a picture of your kid or crush – into a source of seemingly endless profit. Not by chance, the values that these companies touted as intrinsic goods – openness, connectivity, deregulation – were also the operating principles that made their owners rich.

That said, not everybody has drunk the kool-aid. There’s a small, but growing, cadre of techies working to change things from the inside out.

While tech has outsourced many roles, software development is, and probably always will be, handled internally.

Even if (when) AI reaches the point of being able to automate some coding, it will take far longer for it to take on the roles of creation, architecture or design.

And that will concentrate even more power in the hands of the engineers able to handle that work.

One can only hope they use it more wisely than their bosses.

Image credit: HikingArtist

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.

This is a short post, because it links to a longer one by Henry Mintzberg that should be required reading for every entrepreneur.

Three years ago I questioned the profits entrepreneurs derived from building incompatible systems for the electronic medical records (EMR) systems mandated by the Affordable Care Act.

The money in play is substantial; privately held Epic is one of the largest suppliers and its founder, Judith R. Faulkner, is supposed to be worth around $2.3 billion.

When you’re making that kind of money who worries about lives ruined or lost because of EMR incompatibility?

Last summer Ryan wrote a thoughtful post comparing ‘enough’, on a personal level, to an empty hole that needs filling and ending with this comment.

Perhaps there is never enough.

Perhaps all that matters is what you are filling up that hole with.

Mintzberg is the latest to write on the subject, but with far more knowledge and authority than most, and his focus on staying private, instead of IPOing truly changes the conversation: Enough of MORE: Better is better

We would do well by shifting our economies from MORE toward better. While MORE is about quantities, better is about qualities. They lift us up instead of dragging us down. We can invest our efforts and our resources in durable products, healthier foods, personalized services, properly-funded education. Rather than reducing employment, a shift to better can enhance it, with higher paying jobs in healthier enterprises. When we work better, we feel better, and so we do better and live better. Our societies become better…and sustainably democratic.

Any of these moves requires moving profit out of the top slot, which won’t be easy.

I looked up the example Mintzberg provided at the end of his post and it is proof of how difficult it will be to change the money focus.

…many shareholders expressed concern on Wednesday that the Germanwings tragedy risked distracting management from its turnaround efforts.

The “distraction” involved 149 intentional murders and one suicide.

More recently, money trumped responsibility (pun intended) for Facebook, Google and Twitter during the presidential election.

Hard research from Harvard provides proof that money isn’t the focus of successful startups..

If what really interests you is building a company that actually does make a difference and helps change the world, while providing you and yours a happy life along with the money, then read Mintzberg and seriously consider his advice.

Image credit: HikingArtist

Or not…

Although yesterday’s post about influencers focused on founders, influencers are everywhere.

Influencers effect the entire global population, because they populate social media, new media, old media, and your entire offline world.

Some influencers are real people who are paid real money to endorse a brand, movement, or some other effort, lending credence as well as a halo effect.

Others are faux.

The symbols that identify “real” influencers and provide immediate legitimacy are sold in a black market that is an open secret among those who earn their living as influencers — and they are willing to pay.

For example, Instangram’s little blue check sells for anywhere from $1500 to $7000

More importantly, it’s a status symbol. The blue emblem can help people gain legitimacy in the business of influencer marketing and bestows some credibility within Instagram’s community of 700 million monthly active users. It cannot be requested online or purchased, according to Instagram’s policies. It is Instagram’s velvet rope.

In addition to verification, there are black markets for attractiveness, Likes, followers, and anything else that boosts profiles and Klout scores.

We live in a world where everything is for sale, so when it comes to influencers, caveat emptor is the watchword to live by.

Image credit: USFWS Mountain-Prairie