The Sandberg Legacy

Editor's Note

Hello from London!

I had a handful of replies to my newsletter last week mostly in agreement that dialling down socials has helped in dealing with both anxiety and providing more clarity. If you can't completely drop your social media habit and haven't done a monthly detox, you should try it.

The news of the week was that Sheryl Sandberg would be stepping down from Meta, the company that brought us Facebook. I have mixed emotions because she championed women, "leaning in" - and I remember vividly her poignant post when her husband passed away. However, her legacy will be as the architect of social toxicity, of creating Zuckerberg's beast. We will look back and wonder how destructive Facebook would have been without Sandberg. As a front for all that went on during her tenure, she was very effective. Without her direction, commercialism or leadership, Facebook might still just be a simple timeline. It is now one of the integral elements of mass global data of knowing what we are, who we are - and indeed, in turn, driving us for that next dopamine hit.

In my recommended piece below, How Harmful is Social Media, is this quote:

“What changed in the 2010s?” Haidt asks, reminding his audience that a former Twitter developer had once compared the Retweet button to the provision of a four-year-old with a loaded weapon. “A mean tweet doesn’t kill anyone; it is an attempt to shame or punish someone publicly while broadcasting one’s own virtue, brilliance, or tribal loyalties. It’s more a dart than a bullet, causing pain but no fatalities. Even so, from 2009 to 2012, Facebook and Twitter passed out roughly a billion dart guns globally. We’ve been shooting one another ever since.” While the right has thrived on conspiracy-mongering and misinformation, the left has turned punitive: “When everyone was issued a dart gun in the early 2010s, many left-leaning institutions began shooting themselves in the brain. And, unfortunately, those were the brains that inform, instruct, and entertain most of the country.” Haidt’s prevailing metaphor of thoroughgoing fragmentation is the story of the Tower of Babel: the rise of social media has “unwittingly dissolved the mortar of trust, belief in institutions, and shared stories that had held a large and diverse secular democracy together.”

Sandberg's legacy will be that she made many people rich, but that she was one of the architects of the destruction of our society.

Stay Curious,

Onward! - Rahim

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