Information might be free …
However, gaining knowledge in the age of denial of future attacks became more expensive.
I rewatched The Social Network last week. I've meant to do it since I listened to Zadie Smith's essay on it in her "Feel Free" book. I wanted to watch it because I didn't like the movie when it came out. I don't remember why because, on the face of it, it should have been an instant favorite. I am a massive fan of David Fincher (although I imagine it helps not to have worked with him) and an even bigger fan of Aaron Sorkin's dialogues (although his reputation as an awful person to work with even supersedes Fincher). I thought about it for a while, but I do not remember why I didn't think it was a worthwhile movie back then. But I do trust Zadie Smith, and although she didn't necessarily endorse it wholeheartedly, she made some interesting points, and I wanted to follow.
And it was worth it. It's a good movie. Dense, has good pacing, and Jesse Eisenberg delivers Sorkin's writing like it was intended to be. It has also aged incredibly well for a 14-year-old movie. Yes, you heard it right, it's 14 years old, and if anything, it has only become so much more relatable. Just to give you some context: The movie came out in 2010. Facebook, ehm Zuckerberg, acquired Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp four years after the movie's release. In a way, the movie was released when Zuckerberg's transformative star was still rising. Maybe I didn't like the film because I still … believed?
Somewhere down the line, my own position has changed. Reading helps, but reading without empathy and the ability to take a position is like conflating information with knowledge. Stuart Brand said that "information wants to be free" in 1984 at a Hackers conference (yes, they did have hackers 40 years ago). Little did he foresee that the more accessible information, the harder it would become to create agency, knowledge & consensus. This is the nature of Denial of Future Attacks.
I don't know when things have changed for me and how exactly, but I'm thankful to the people who showed me a bigger slice of the picture early on and allowed me to manifest my position. In 2013, I wrote an essay about Berlin's startup scene. My opening line was:
I have became a technology industry skeptic.
I'm not inclined to link to the whole thing because there's only so much self-referential mojo that I can muster in my newsletter, but you can find it if you are so inclined. I also don't like the writing anymore, but really, who does like his own writing from eleven years ago? The point that I find valuable is that I didn't criticize technology itself but the motivations of an industry. It's easy to pick one person (okay but fuck you Marc Andreessen). Still, we are all actors in a system, and as much as it would be easy to pretend that I'm not part of it, having run my own company meant, very much so, that I made financially required decisions but ethically … wonky. There's no point in pretending otherwise. Still, there's a difference between running your own business and running a venture-backed business, and my essay back then focused on the question: What creates more value over time? The billion-dollar valuations for tech companies back then don't say much about the long-term value they provide – or don't – in the long run for customers and society. But these days, the definition of value is elusive. Such is the ideological spectrum of our society.
This brings us back to The Social Network because it's so poignantly – and really, a two-hour movie these days is poignant – that it is about money and ego. It drills down to the question of intent: why do we do anything? The Social Network, albeit not a documentary, shaves away all the PR nonsense and comes down to the point right in the first scene: Zuckberg's girlfriend points out how his behavior makes her feel, and his only reaction to it is to double down, on it. Towards the end of the movie, another woman (I'm guessing that's not an accident) makes the same point again. Which, of course, is the parable of the story: who in this industry is willing to learn, adapt and change course? The answer is: not many.
This brings me to the last point and my trigger for writing this newsletter. A whole breed of substack newsletter authors is catching up to most people's experience: the tainted relationship with the technology industry. But instead of focusing on the people making the tech, they still focus on their own and everyone else's relationship with the tech itself. Which is a way to have a conversation without having the conversation. Or, to put it differently, it explores the disappointment with the current state but not the reason why we are disappointed. I'm not here to say that many of us told you so, but I am here to say that plenty of people – and I don't mean myself – have been writing & talking about "this" for a very long time. Maybe the best thing would be just to point to them and be … quiet. Publishing these days isn't sharing knowledge; it's just distributing information for (almost) free.