A Personal Take on the Facebocalypse
Something in Silicon Valley changed when the focus went from chips to clicks.
A lot of pixels have been flying around analyzing the what-does-this-all-mean? of Facebook/Meta’s most recent earnings report and the record-breaking $267 billion market-value decapitation that ensued.
For those who perhaps have already checked out of reality to live in the metaverse, Facebook has taken a house-of-brands approach and changed its name to Meta, echoing a similar move Google/Alphabet took more than six years ago. Along the way, Mark Zuckerberg — Meta founder, CEO, and quasi-sentient Gap ad — began making grand pronouncements about pursuing a vague, still-coalescing idea called the metaverse in ways indistinguishable from parodies of his ilk. By the next earnings report, Facebook’s market value set a new record by plummeting by nearly the GDP of Portugal.
I can’t really add to everything that’s been written up to this point except to tell a personal story about my relationship to Silicon Valley and what the Facebocalypse means to me in that context.
In the professional sense, I started my PR career in Silicon Valley as an account coordinator in The Weber Group’s Palo Alto office. (It’s now part of Weber Shandwick, if perhaps vestigially, and held by the marketing services megaplex IPG.) This period was at the leading edge of the dot-com boom, when the formula sell {babyclothes,toothbrushes,souls} on the Internet
was practically a root-user command to a money-printing machine.
And I really didn’t get it. This much was painfully obvious when I was staffed to some of these accounts.
Fortunately, I had some managers who observed this right away and were patient enough to help me figure out how to make a feature out of what everyone else — indeed the entire Valley, it seemed — apparently saw as a bug.
One such account director left me a message while on the road. “BB,” she started, deploying a nickname she gave me for reasons I’d really rather not get into right now. “I just got out of a meeting at SRI. You need to be on this account. Talk to me on Monday.”
SRI International was formerly known as the Stanford Research Institute. Long story short, you interact with something that came out of this truly magical place daily — the computer mouse, the static-discharging needles on the wingtips of planes, advanced robotics, Siri, and so much more. At the time, SRI was around 50 years old. Nestled in more than seventy acres within Menlo Park — and pause to imagine that for a second while reading this in 2022 — the nonprofit Institute still managed more Ph.D.s per-unit-area than probably anywhere else.
Not long after that — and probably because of it — I was put on a team that pitched and won the Hitachi Semiconductor America business. At the time, this unit of the gigantic Japanese conglomerate produced all manner of microprocessors and memory chips. Arguably, HSA more clearly saw the imminent design requirements for mobile computing sooner than any other company aside from maybe ARM Holdings. I worked on-site two days a week, nervously parking my car in a lot notorious for concentrating the peninsula winds and popping out windshields.
I then moved on to another agency, Phase Two Tragedies Strategies. Eventually took SRI along with me. Helped pitch and win the Matrix Semiconductor business, which had pioneered three-dimensional chip design using conventional manufacturing gear and materials.
“Let’s see who can get more coverage for our clients this week,” emailed one consumer-focused account director to everyone in the firm.
“Dot-coms make headlines,” I wrote back. “Science makes history.”
This is probably why I today have very few friends from this period.
In all cases, and at that early point in my career, I had a pretty remarkable amount of autonomy when it came to working on these accounts. I learned a ton. And I did make some lifelong contacts and friends. I also collected stories that I still enjoy recounting.
But I also felt like I was part of the last generation to participate in a Silicon Valley — an ur-Valley of sorts — that lived in parallel to another, emerging Silicon Valley that was trying on for size some fashion-fusion of Hollywood and Madison Avenue. One Silicon Valley was very focused on building as close to the metal as it possibly could, even decades after Don Hoefler coined the region’s nickname. Would the “average consumer” understand what they were up to? Probably not, but that wasn’t the point. After all, the average consumer doesn’t understand plumbing or architecture but benefits from both daily. This Silicon Valley was keenly aware of its legacy and history. It read Fire in the Valley and Soul of a New Machine. It venerated the mythology of the garage. It could sniff you out if you tried to bluff your way through discussion of some of its most storied figures. All of this perhaps explains my early attraction to blockchain technology — fundamental changes in how we think of money, trust, consensus, and shared digital truth have an equally strong appeal, strong enough to make the parallel douchebaggery much easier to ignore.
The other Silicon Valley that emerged during the dot-com era was no doubt equally dedicated to its craft and produced many wonderful things, but also seemed to be satisfied with so little — “[insert commodity or process here] but on the Internet.” It clawed and bit for a feature in publications like The Industry Standard and it paid firms like Neihaus Ryan Wong to get there.
Fast forward to nearly a decade ago as the social media era continued its acceleration. Former Facebook employee Jeff Hammerbacher channelled Allen Ginsburg’s “Howl” in Bloomberg Businessweek:
After a couple years at Facebook, Hammerbacher grew restless. He figured that much of the groundbreaking computer science had been done. Something else gnawed at him. Hammerbacher looked around Silicon Valley at companies like his own, Google (GOOG), and Twitter, and saw his peers wasting their talents. “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” he says. “That sucks.”
Ten years later, more than two decades after the dot-com boom, we see that Silicon Valley reached the limits of where its 21st-century focus on aping other industries can take it. The popular imagination used to regard Silicon Valley as a place that existed above glitz, sizzle, lobbying, and regulatory capture, looking down on all of those awful aspects of other industries with some amount of disdain. Now Silicon Valley embraces all of it. Think all of the most undesirable characteristics of Detroit and New York City as sifted through Los Angeles and DC — with Facebook leading the way.
Thus here we are. For several years Facebook has been Wile E. Coyote, hurriedly running off the cliff and staying parallel to its edge as his momentum carried it several yards out over the chasm. Last week, it finally looked down. It took a $267 billion gulp. Whether Facebook and its notional peer set succumb to gravity or stay aloft depends on the lessons learned.
Recommendations
ESSAYS: “So I have some, uh, personal news,” “On getting high in Alabama,” and “I am having a sad about leaving San Francisco,” Cathy Reisenwitz (2022) — I was introduced to the work of Cathy Reisenwitz — “a polyamorous sex-positive anti-racist pro-market libertarian social justice warrior sex worker” — by way of historian Thaddeus Russell’s excellent Unregistered podcast. These three essays, presented here as a kind of triptych, talk about an impending move from her beloved San Francisco back home to Alabama. As a proud East Bay native, and given my generally low opinion of Baghdad-by-the-Bay, I contend she’s better off.
TECH: “Building in DeFi Sucks, Pt. II,” Andre Cronje (2021) — When it comes to personal reflection and introspection, this is the Yearn founder at his cranky best. I know even the most passionate of us in this space can read this and relate. Many can CTRL-H “developer” for almost any role in crypto and the meaning would not change very much. We all take it in stride, sure, but Andre was among the very first to say these uncomfortable truths out loud.
CULTURE: “Why the Experts are Losing,” Unherd (2022) — This article brings up a very good point: that people have grown to care less about experts have to say since they collectively operate as a somewhat diffuse bloc. With regard to the ongoing l’affaire Rogan: “It’s a bizarre situation: a call to censorship justified by the incapability of non-experts to handle a subject like vaccine research is then inundated with people who by the same metric should themselves be disqualified from having an opinion. But, ultimately, that’s the point — this was not a list of 270 of experts in the field, but rather a list of 270 of people from the expert class.”
Parting Shot
I feel a lot better about my Wordle addiction now that I know it can save lives. While you’re at it, check out Quark: Wordle but with high-school-level physics terms.