Zuckerberg Starts to Face the Music

"I always wish we would have gotten there sooner," said Mark Zuckerberg, Meta CEO, when asked at a Los Angeles trial last week about safety tools that Meta has added to Instagram in recent years.  At the trial it was also revealed that in 2015, despite Instagram's minimum-age restriction of 13, it had an estimated 4 million underage users.  That was one of the problems that Zuckerberg presumably wishes they had gotten to sooner than they did. 

 

The trial is the leading edge of a group of cases that consolidate more than 1,600 plaintiffs that accuse Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Snap of "knowingly designing addictive products harmful to young users' mental health," according to a report on NBC News.  At issue is the question of whether Meta knew about harms to young users and whether their public statements contradicted internal knowledge of the problems. 

 

Zuckerberg has been on the radar of parents, school districts, and state attorneys general at least since the 2021 revelations about Meta by whistleblower Frances Haugen that "the company's leadership knows how to make Facebook and Instagram safer, but won't make the necessary changes because they have put their astronomical profits before people." 

 

Over the past five years, research by sociologists and others has shown that while social media can be helpful in the social lives of teenagers, a substantial minority is actively harmed by its use.  In 2023, the U. S. Surgeon General issued an advisory about adverse effects of social media on young people, and the American Psychological Association followed suit in 2024.  And in December of 2025, the country of Australia enacted a ban on the use of social media by children under 16, targeting TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and X with the threat of eight-figure fines if they are found to be violating the ban. 

 

Zuckerberg's public statements about problems with any of Meta's social media follow a pattern.  He presents the appearance of a good technocrat, dedicated first to the shareholders of his company, then to the advertisers who pay for eyeball time, then to the customers-users-products.  He assents to the proposition that the first duty of a commercial firm is to stay in business by making money, and then deals with other issues as they arise.  But when questions are posed to him that lie outside his worldview, he acts like the robot in an old TV series called "Lost in Space," which when presented with a problem it couldn't solve, said merely, "Does not compute."

 

For example, when asked whether people tend to use something more if it's addictive, Zuckerberg said, "I'm not sure what to say to that.  I don't think that applies here."

 

The historically-minded observer of these trials can't help but recall a parallel that does not bode well for Meta:  the revelations in the 1970s of double dealing by tobacco industry representatives, who knew about the health hazards of smoking for decades yet put up a front of innocence until the evidence against them became overwhelming.  It took many years for courageous victims, lawyers, and legislators to overcome the well-funded opposition of the tobacco lobbyists and shills.  But eventually, not only was legislation passed prohibiting tobacco advertisements.  A cultural shift came as well, which put tobacco use under a cloud and banned it from most public and many private spaces.  It is mind-bending to look at old photos of workplaces, TV studios, restaurants, and other locations which are now smoke-free and realize how ubiquitous smoking was in the U. S. as recently as 1970.  But entrenched social habits can change, and the history of tobacco use in this country proves it.

 

There's no such thing as second-hand Instagram, and social-media abuse by teens is not as visible as smoking.  But the results can be just as deadly, as many studies have shown how overuse of social media by teens leads to increases in depression, anxiety, and suicide.  In countries which have not enacted an overall ban such as the one in Australia, many school districts are now requiring students to keep their smartphones out of the classroom.  Parents are rethinking the age at which they will allow their children to use smartphones.  And there is a general sense that the harms of social-media use by people under 16 outweigh whatever benefits may result.

 

The tobacco companies didn't go bankrupt when they lost their ability to advertise in most media, because their products are inherently addictive and largely sell themselves.  The same is true of social media, which have revolutionized the whole field of advertising itself to make it unrecognizable to a 1960s "Mad Men" ad executive.  In a business in which the customer is also the product and the revenue comes almost exclusively from advertising, it's hard to say what sorts of regulation will help remedy some of the grave harms that social media has already caused. 

 

Frances Haugen's whistleblowing activities were inspired not so much by her concerns for teenagers as by her disgust that Facebook gave up an internal effort to curb political misinformation.  A good portion of the current polarized and fractured U. S. political environment is directly attributable to the degraded style of political discourse that social media encourages.  This is a less obvious type of harm than having depressed and suicidal teenagers on your hands, but arguably more corrosive to the public's wellbeing in the long run. 

 

If a universal age-limit ban like the one passed in Australia were enacted in the U. S., we would still be burdened with the harms caused by adult social media use.  The only thing I can think of that would help in that area would be a cultural shift similar to what happened with smoking after the radical hypocrisy of the tobacco industry was revealed.  Such things cannot be legislated or planned.  But it's at least conceivable that some day, seeing people standing around at a bus stop with their faces glued to their screens—a well-nigh universal sight today—might be as rare as finding today that most people waiting for the bus have lit up cigarettes.    

 

Sources:  I referred to an NBC News report on Zuckerberg's testimony at https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/mark-zuckerberg-testifies-landmark-social-media-addiction-trial-rcna259422 and a Yale Medicine article on the harmfulness to teenagers of social media at https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/social-media-teen-mental-health-a-parents-guide, as well as the Wikipedia article on Frances Haugen.

Averse to the Metaverse

 

The company Meta, formerly known as Facebook, sparked some criticism after it opened its keynote "Horizon Worlds" virtual-reality (VR) platform to France and Spain last week.  According to an article in Slate, new European users were disappointed in the graphics, to say the least.  And judging by the screen shots provided in the article, they have a point.  Adjectives like "bland," "cartoonish," and "slightly weird" come to mind.  In common with many VR systems, only the upper bodies of human avatars appear.  I've never understood the reason for this myself, but one user speculated that it was so that nobody online can have sex. 

 

At any rate, it doesn't sound like the French are going to start holding meetings of the Académie Française in Horizon Worlds any time soon.  But Mark Zuckerberg can live without the Academy's forty members if he can get several million mere mortals to join.

 

Meta has put a huge chunk of its colossal resources into its metaverse venture, some $13 billion, and you can be sure the firm is not doing that for fun.  Its vision is that as Internet bandwidth and access increase, you will be able to don a VR headset and basically live life online:  working, playing, even exercising (I suppose, but this might present problems unless you're doing it on some physical treadmill tied to your VR system).  As for sex, there's plenty of that on the Internet already, so maybe Meta is staying out of that area purely for business reasons. 

 

There is a theory in the history-of-technology field called "technological determinism."  It basically says that technology has its own built-in direction, and once a technology develops into a feasible, marketable form, there's no stopping it.  Its development path and growth are intrinsic to the nature of the technology, and human factors and influences count for nothing.  The term was invented mainly by people who didn't believe in it to criticize those who appeared to support it, but I've never encountered a pure card-carrying technological determinist. 

 

Nevertheless, a lot of stories of how technologies developed tend to make it seem inevitable in retrospect.  I think this betrays a lack of imagination on the part of the storyteller, and some of the best histories of technology I have encountered look at failed technologies that might have succeeded if certain almost random factors had gone the other way. 

 

With "Horizon Worlds" we are witnessing the first baby steps of a new technology which Meta, at least, hopes will inevitably dominate the Internet and become as much a part of our lives as mobile phones—and all they can do—have become today.  And, as any good public corporation will try to do, Meta intends to turn this into cash—lots of cash.

 

The Slate article quotes a University of Virginia professor's dark prophecy that Meta hopes to "monitor, monetize, and manage everything about our lives."  While this is no doubt an exaggeration, it's hard to deny that the picture conjured up by proponents of VR, especially the Meta-style of VR, seems to aspire toward a kind of totalizing, all-inclusive situation in which people would take off their VR headsets only to attend to physical needs, like eating, going to the bathroom, and (maybe) sex.  And sleep, unless we manage to genetic-engineer our way out of that little necessity.

 

In promulgating his Meta vision, Zuckerberg and his colleagues suffer from a problem that they has in common with many tech-savvy leaders who combine awesome technical and business skills with the philosophical understanding of ten-year-old boys.  There are various answers to the question, "What are humans for?"  Different cultures and religions come up with different answers, but the worst response of all to that question is to ignore it altogether. 

 

Any entity whose business operations affect millions or even billions of people, as Facebook/Meta's does, should consider seriously what its model for human flourishing is.  And the bigger the firm is, the more seriously it should consider that question. 

 

Unfortunately, this rarely happens.  Instead, a business like Meta is in practice avoiding two guardrails on opposite sides of a wide road.  One guardrail is profits:  if the firm ceases to make money going forward, something has to be done to avoid the guardrail of losses that kill the firm.  The other guardrail is a combination of law and public criticism.  Even a profitable business can go out of existence if its leaders end up in jail or become social pariahs, as the Weinstein Company did when its head Harvey Weinstein was accused (and eventually convicted) of sexual misdeeds.  As long as a firm avoids hitting these two guardrails, its leaders will consider it a success, and will keep doing whatever they feel is necessary to keep going, regardless of the firm's effects on the souls of its millions of customers.

 

Aesthetics are more than just a thing that has to meet minimum standards in order for people to use a platform like "Horizon Worlds."  Aesthetics is another word for beauty.  In the past, advances in technology have led to the creation of beautiful things that make the world a better place.  Advances in building technology led to artistic creations such as Chartres in France and Burgos in Spain.  Cathedrals were designed for the ordinary human, just like "Horizon Worlds" is.  But those who built the cathedrals of the Middle Ages were guided by a very specific vision of human purpose:  to encounter, and eventually to love, the Divine.  Their creations gained thereby a timelessness that motivates even a secular culture such as that of France's today to reconstruct Notre Dame after its disastrous fire, at a cost of millions of dollars.

 

The metaverse can be a place of truth, beauty, and goodness.  But those values can be achieved only if those designing it make these values intentional goals.  On the other hand, if their guides are only the two guardrails of profit and avoiding jail or pariah status, they are likely to forge an erratic path that may lead millions of people to places they wish they hadn't gone to.

 

Sources:  The article "Why the Metaverse Has to Look So Stupid" by Nitish Pahwa appeared on Slate's website on Aug. 19, 2022 at https://slate.com/technology/2022/08/mark-zuckerberg-metaverse-horizon-worlds-facebook-looks-crappy-explained.html. 

Will Facebook Kill Holly?

 

I have to be careful about how I write today's column.  I do not want to betray any trusts.  But on the other hand, a topic that up to now has been an abstraction for me has become personal.  A statistic has turned into someone I know by only two degrees of separation.  To protect anonymity, I have changed names and some details of what I will write here.  But I assure you that what I am going to write is based on facts as personally told to me yesterday by someone I will call Holly, who is a twelve-year-old girl.

 

Facebook, which has now renamed itself Meta, has been in the news a lot lately, and in this column as well, because of revelations by a whistleblower named Frances Haugen.  Haugen is a former Facebook employee who has made thousands of pages of internal company documents public, and has testified to Congress that Facebook's own research showed how harmful Instagram and other Facebook services are to teenagers (girls especially) at the same time that Facebook's CEO (and owner of 55% of Facebook's voting stock) Mark Zuckerberg was saying that his firm did not have such data.  The blowback from articles in the Wall Street Journal and other outlets detailing the hypocritical actions of Zuckerberg and his company have been so severe that the firm dropped plans it had announced to develop a new service for preteens called Instagram Kids. 

 

A recent article on the Mind Matters website described these problems and quoted results of a 2017 survey by the UK's Royal Society for Public Health and the Young Health Movement that showed, among other damning evidence, that the average age at which a child creates an Instagram account is 10, even though the software says you must be at least 13 to join.  Among users aged 14 to 24, all but one of the social-media platforms surveyed showed a negative score for well-being. 

 

With all this as a background, let me introduce Holly.  My wife and I have known her slightly for at least a couple of years, and when she was ten she invited us to see her elementary school's production of Peter Pan, which for an older couple with no children was quite a treat.  Although she has since moved to a nearby town, she has the opportunity to visit us now and then, and yesterday was one of those visits.

 

Holly is one of those girls who will rattle on about whatever she's doing if you just stand there and look interested, so my wife and I invited her in and we listened to what she had to say about what she'd been doing since we saw her almost a year ago.  She talked about horses, a vacation trip her family took back East, and then school.  She attends school in a medium-size town that has a reputation for old-fashioned conservative family values, and if something bad is happening there, it's probably happening everywhere else too. 

 

She had her smartphone with her, of course, and as she took it out she said her parents have put some controls on it to limit her social-media use.  While I cannot recall her exact words, the following is substantially what she said next, when we asked her how things have gone at school with COVID-19. 

 

"Oh, it's been bad.  One of my friends committed suicide over the summer.  They were bullying her and it just got so bad she couldn't take it anymore.  That's why I don't mind my folks doing what they did to my phone."

 

After Holly left and I had a chance to think about the enormity of what she told me, it began to sink in that here was a twelve-year-old girl having to deal with the suicide of a personal friend of hers, caused at least in part by the baleful influence of social media. 

 

I don't know anything about this incident other than what Holly told me.  Scientists would call this "anecdotal evidence" and dismiss it as useless for analytical purposes.  But it brings home the diabolical influence of social media on children in a way that no amount of statistics or studies have done for me.  Somewhere there are parents of the sixth-grader who committed suicide who will never see their daughter reach adulthood, get married, or have children of her own.  And during the girl's lifetime, because she was one of the twenty-two million users of Instagram or whatever social media platform contributed to her death, she enriched Mark Zuckerberg personally by some amount of dollars he could charge for ads on her phone.  I hope he enjoys them now, because he won't get a chance to enjoy them where he's going.

 

Holly, at the tender age of twelve, already seems to have a realistic sense of how dangerous social media can be.  And, Lord willing, this sense will preserve her from the hazards of using Facebook products when one is a teenage girl.  But she has all of her teenage years to negotiate ahead of her, and she is not out of the social-media woods yet.

 

We live in an age that is hostile to children and teenagers in many ways.  If a child manages to survive the first nine months of its existence in the womb without being aborted, as about 600,000 children are each year in the U. S., she or he becomes a kind of hobby that our economy tolerates but does not encourage—a "lifestyle choice" that burdens the otherwise ideal worker with expenses and obligations that distract him or her from being totally devoted to the job and to consumption of products and services such as Facebook.  Upon entering school, an institution that was formerly safeguarded from commercial exploitation back in the 1960s when I experienced it, the child becomes the target of 24/7 ads from streaming services, the various entertainment platforms such as video games, and eventually from smartphones.  Arrayed against each individual child is the Big Tech oligopoly of world-class expertise that extracts the last drop of attention with manipulative artificial-intelligence-enhanced algorithms that do things no ordinary human being can understand, algorithms that can intensify social interactions into a tornado of abuse that makes death at one's own hand look like the only alternative. 

 

We prayed with Holly before she left, for protection from the many dangers that life as a girl in America presents today.  God is more powerful that Mark Zuckerberg.  But Mark Zuckerberg doesn't seem to think so.

 

Sources:  I thank Denyse O'Leary for drawing my attention to the article "Facebook's . . . Er, Meta's Instagram Problem" by Heather Zeiger, which appeared at https://mindmatters.ai/2021/12/facebookser-metas-instagram-problem/. 

Facebook's Dilemma

 

This week's New Yorker carried an article by Andrew Marantz whose main thrust was that Facebook is not doing a good job of moderating its content.  The result is that all sorts of people and groups that, in the view of many experts the reporter interviewed, should not be able to use the electronic megaphone of Facebook, are allowed to do so.  The list of such offenders is long:  the white-nationalist group Britain First; Jair Bolsonaro, "an autocratic Brazilian politician"; and of course, the President of the United States, Donald Trump. 

 

Facebook has an estimated 15,000 content moderators working around the world, constantly monitoring what its users post and taking down material that violates what the company calls its Implementation Standards.  Some decisions are easy:  you aren't allowed to post a picture of a baby smoking a cigarette, for example.  But others are harder, especially when the people doing the posting are prominent figures who are likely to generate lots of eye-time and thus advertising revenue for the company. 

 

The key to the dilemma that Facebook faces was expressed by former content moderator Chris Gray, who wrote a long memo to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg shortly after leaving the company.  He accused Facebook of not being committed to content moderation and said, "There is no leadership, no clear moral compass."

 

Technology has allowed Facebook to achieve what in principle looks like a very good thing:  in the words of its stated mission, "bring the world closer together."  Unfortunately, when you get closer to some people, you wish you hadn't.  And while Zuckerberg is an unquestioned genius when it comes to extracting billions from a basically simple idea, he and his firm sometimes seem to have an oddly immature notion of human nature.

 

Author Marantz thinks that Facebook has never had a principled concern about the problem of dangerous content.  Instead, what motivates Facebook to take down posts is not the content itself, but bad publicity about the content.  And indeed, this hypothesis seems to fit the data pretty well.  Although the wacko-extremist group billing itself QAnon has been in the news for months, Facebook allowed its presence up until only last week, when public pressure on the company mounted to an apparently intolerable level. 

 

Facebook is a global company operating in a bewildering number of cultures, languages, and legal environments.  It may be instructive to imagine a pair of extreme alternatives that Facebook might choose to take instead of its present muddle of Implementation Standards, which makes nobody happy, including the people it bans. 

 

One alternative is to proclaim itself a common carrier, open to absolutely any content whatsoever, and attempt to hide behind the shelter of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996.  That act gives fairly broad protection to social-media companies from being held liable for what users post.  If you had a complaint about what you saw on Facebook under this regime, Facebook would tell you to go sue the person who posted it. 

 

The problem with this approach is that, unlike a true common carrier like the old Ma Bell, which couldn't be sued for what people happened to say over the telephone network, Facebook makes more money from postings that attract more attention, whether or not the attention is directed at something helpful or harmful.  So no matter how hard they tried to say it wasn't their problem, the world would know that by allowing neo-Nazis, pornographers, QAnon clones, terrorists, and whatever other horrors would come flocking onto an unmoderated Facebook, the company would be profiting thereby.  It is impossible to keep one's publicity skirts clean in such a circumstance.

 

The other extreme Facebook could try is to drop the pretense of being a common carrier altogether, and start acting like an old-fashioned newspaper, or probably more like thousands of newspapers.  A twentieth-century newspaper had character:  you knew pretty much the general kinds of stuff you would see in it, what point of view it took on a variety of questions, and what range of material you would be likely to see both in the editorial and the advertising sections.  If you didn't like the character one paper presented, you could always buy its competing paper, as up to the 1960s at least, most major metropolitan areas in the U. S. supported at least two dailies. 

 

The closest thing the old-fashioned newspaper had to what is now Facebook was the letters-to-the-editor section.  Nobody had a "right" to have their letter published.  You sent your letter in, and if the editors decided it was worth publishing, they ran it.  But it was carefully selected for content and mass appeal.  And not just anything got in.

 

Wait a minute, you say.  Where in the world would Facebook get the dozens of thousands of editors they'd need to pass on absolutely everything that gets published?  Well, I can't answer all your questions, but I will present one exhibit as an example:  Wikipedia.  Here is a high-quality dynamically updated encyclopedia with almost no infrastructure, subsisting on the work of thousands of volunteers.  No, it doesn't make money, but that's not the point.  My point is only that instead of paying a few thousand contract workers to subject themselves to the psychological tortures of the damned in culling out what Zuckerberg doesn't want to show up, go at it from the other end. 

 

Start by saying that nobody gets to post on Facebook unless one of our editors has passed judgment on it.  When the nutcases and terrorists of the world see their chances of posting dwindling to zero reliably, they'll find some other Internet-based way to cause trouble, never fear.  But Zuckerberg will be able to sleep at night knowing that instead of paying thousands of people to pull weeds all the time, he's started with a nice sterile garden and can plant only the flowers and vegetables he wants to.  And he'd still be able to make money.

 

The basic problem Facebook faces is that they are trying to be moral with close to zero consensus on what moral is.  At least if the company was divided up into lots of little domains, each with its clearly stated and enforced standards, you would know more or less what to expect when you logged into it, or rather, them. 

 

Sources:  The article "Explicit Content" by Andrew Marantz appeared on pp. 20-27 of the Oct. 19, 2020 issue of The New Yorker.

Happy Friendship Day—Not

Facebook is the quintessential dot-com success story:  young guy invents software in his dorm room that ends up creating an entire industry and making him a storied billionaire, besides becoming a significant part of the social lives of over a billion people worldwide.  Ethically speaking, on the face of it Facebook looks like a no-brainer:  it's all about connecting people, right, so what can go wrong with that?  Well, plenty, as shown by stories of flaming mobs and online bullying leading in some cases to suicide.  But besides these more spectacular crimes and misdemeanors caused by the general cussedness of humankind, there are things that the software developers do themselves which can go awry.  And here's where it gets personal—very personal.

Back in January, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg called for people to celebrate Feb. 4, the twelfth anniversary of Facebook's founding, as "Friendship Day."  Now Mr. Zuckerberg is free to call for anybody to celebrate anything, and I have no problem with that.  The trouble came, at least in our case, when some anonymous software engineers at Facebook had a bright idea inspired by the call and, as software engineers often do, put it into action without telling the users what they were up to in advance. 

It was simply this:  "Hey, why don't we take some pictures that people have posted in the last year or two and send the pictures to them along with a greeting like 'Happy Friendship Day'?  What could be wrong with that?"  As it turns out, plenty.

Zuckerberg himself is only 31, and it's likely that the average age of the technical staff at Facebook is somewhere around that number.  If you are a well-paid employee of a giant software successful software company, death does not occupy a large part of your personal horizon.  You know it's out there somewhere, and you read about it online with the other bad news, but it's not likely to have affected you personally to a great extent, except perhaps for some old relatives whose funerals you may have attended out of a sense of duty. 

It turns out that in the last two years, my wife, who is 59, has lost five relatives of various degrees of closeness, ranging from a cousin she hadn't seen in years to her last remaining aunt, her sister, and her father.  And in the last few years she had taken pictures of these people, and posted many of the pictures on Facebook at appropriate times.  You can tell where this is going.  Imagine how she felt when a couple of weeks ago, she logged on to Facebook one day and saw under the headline, "Happy Friendship Day" a photo of her father in the hospital during his final illness.  He died almost exactly a year ago.

For the better part of a day, it was like walking on eggs around here.  She rarely gets truly angry, but if Zuckerberg had happened to stop by our house that day, he might have come close to a personal encounter with mortality that he would never forget.

A short time later, she spent several hours systematically taking down every single photo she had ever posted on Facebook that included anyone who has since died.  It was a lot of pictures, but she was determined that the machine was never going to catch her by surprise that way again.

Sometimes I amuse myself by imagining how I would explain various modern technologies to someone transported through time to the present from, say, fifty or a hundred years ago.  Although Facebook shares some features in common with things that existed in 1966—photo albums, high school annuals, and the postal system, to name three—you could not express what it does simply by referring to those things.  And the main feature that would be missing from that description is the way Facebook manipulates the rules, and what happens to your Facebook stuff when they play games with it like Happy Friendship Day. 

Unless you happened to be living in the 1960s with a busybody aunt who lacked any sensitivity to your feelings, I can't imagine someone back then receiving a customized photo album labeled "Happy Friendship Day" that contained pictures of some of the most intimate and painful times in your entire life.  But that is exactly what Facebook did to my wife.  At least if a nosy aunt did such a tacky thing, she'd be standing right there where you could chew her out for it.  As it is, though, the faceless System of Facebook is all she can blame, and her only defense against further manipulations of this kind is to withdraw any possibly pain-evoking images from the System so it can't fool with them. 

Once my wife explained to me what had happened, in the heat of the moment I thought that whatever numskull came up with that idea ought to be tied to a chair and made to watch 200 hours of cat videos.  I now think that is excessive.  But certainly, some live person or persons originated the idea of recycling pictures for Happy Friendship Day, and as Zuckerberg himself has expressed enthusiasm for artificial-intelligence solutions even to programming problems, it's virtually certain that some algorithm the programmers wrote made the selection of which photos to include.  Despite the best programmers Zuckerberg's money can buy, that algorithm did not have feelings, and it was therefore insensitive to the psychic pain that such actions could cause. 

We are in a strange time in which former organizational divisions of all sorts are falling down, and people who were trained to do one kind of work—software engineering, say—find themselves doing very different kinds of work—for example, manipulating on a massive scale items that have deep and powerful personal meanings for literally a billion people or more.  There is an old saying, "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread."  It would have required the discretion and intelligence of many angels to select only those pictures which would have been appropriate to accompany a message such as "Happy Friendship Day" for each one of Facebook's users.  Unfortunately, software is a poor substitute for angelic insight, and the result was in many cases foolish, or worse than foolish. 

For reasons of time and disinclination, I have no Facebook page, other than possibly a dormant one my wife started for me in connection with a book publication.  If anything happens on Facebook that she thinks I need to know about, she'll tell me.  It has had its good moments for her, and we have reconnected through it with people around the globe whom we had lost touch with.  But in the case of Happy Friendship Day, Zuckerberg blew it, at least where my wife is concerned.  And it's going to be a long time before she posts personal pictures on that site again.

Sources:  I referred to an item carried by the Indo-Asian News Service (and no doubt many other outlets) on Mark Zuckerberg's announcement urging people to celebrate Facebook's twelfth anniversary as Friendship Day.  The article appeared at http://www.ndtv.com/offbeat/celebrate-facebooks-anniversary-as-friendship-day-mark-zuckerberg-1265232.

Doing Good Versus Making Good: Engineers and Charitable Works

A reader recently called my attention to some of the inventions sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, an organization that funds things like new vaccines and other technologies that can save lives.  I will confess that I wasn't that interested in condoms made with graphene and toilets that turn solid waste into electricity, but one item did catch my eye:  Bill Gates is a founder of something called the Giving Pledge.  And it got me to thinking about the question of how to do good with an engineering career, if such is your intention.

First, the Giving Pledge.  It's not for everybody; you have to be a billionaire to join.  But once you qualify, membership is simple:  you simply pledge to give away half your wealth, either in your lifetime or in your will.  Some members you may have heard of who made their money in techie ways include Craig McCaw (cellphones), Larry Ellison (co-founder of Oracle Computers), Steve Case (America OnLine), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), and Elon Musk (you name it, he's tried it, but most lately Tesla Motors).  The Giving Pledge simply codifies in a somewhat more palatable form what famed nineteenth-century American steel industrialist Andrew Carnegie said he would try to do:  give away all his wealth before he died.  Putting it off till post mortem is more attractive to some, but all of these folks deserve credit for publicly devoting half their wealth to charity, whether they will be here to enjoy the results or not.

That is certainly one way to try to make the world a better place with an engineering career:  first get filthy rich and then give some of your money away.  For those with the talent and good fortune to do such a thing, this is certainly one path.  But another approach is simply to create and grow a profit-making engineering-based enterprise in the first place, as long as you choose the right one. 

Founding a chain of meth labs, for instance, is both technical and highly profitable, but nobody would suggest that it helps the world's net well-being, even if you turn around and make the Giving Pledge with your ill-gotten gains.  No, the engineering enterprise you profit from must be beneficial, at least on balance.  In my experience, certain types of engineering work tend to be more benign than others.  Take communications technologies, for example: cellphones (mobile phones, as they are known through most of the world) are a case in point.  Helping people talk to other people they want to talk with is a good thing the vast majority of the time.  Yes, it can lead to abusive telephone solicitation, but for people who have never before had access to a cellphone, the occasional advertising call they may get is worth the value of being able to get in touch with the rest of the world.  This explains why cell networks spread so fast even in relatively poor countries:  the infrastructure is much cheaper than the old landline phones, and the technology is easy to use and inexpensive to the user.  And simply by growing their business model and trying to make a profit, cellphone companies have brought the blessings of telecommunications to millions who otherwise would remain in isolation.

What if, like myself, you have the entrepreneurial abilities of a snail and couldn't make a lemonade stand turn a profit, but would still like to benefit the world somehow in an engineering capacity?  There are many non-profit organizations that can use engineers as both volunteers and paid employees to do good works of various kinds.  Some of them have religious affiliations, while others are simply dedicated to serving populations that otherwise could not afford technical solutions to problems that for-profit organizations could provide.  Two such organizations I have had some dealings with personally are Engineers Without Borders and JAARS.  Engineers Without Borders, which has many chapters worldwide, engages students and other engineering specialists to do development work in areas such as water supplies and sanitation, solar power to rural areas, and communications in remote regions.  JAARS (an acronym which originally derived from "Jungle Aviation and Radio Service") is a service branch of Wycliffe Bible Translators, and recruits computer geeks, telecomm specialists, aviation pilots, mechanics, and others with technical skills to support teams of Bible translators around the world, who often deal with obscure isolated tribes that need basic technical services as well.

So there are at least three distinct paths to doing good by doing engineering:  become a techie billionaire and give away your wealth, start or contribute to an engineering enterprise or industry that is more benign than malign, and find an engineering organization explicitly dedicated to doing good rather than just making money.  I find that this list leaves out what I do, namely, educating future engineers.  To find out whether this is a good work, you'd have to ask my students.  In general, though, conveying knowledge is a benefit to humanity, and so I find I can sleep most nights and look myself in the mirror in the morning, as long as I don't mind looking at a sleepy old man.

While there are exceptions, I think most engineering careers do more good than harm.  The exceptions are what we usually think about when engineering ethics comes to mind:  the explosions, accidents, and other disasters that can happen when people try to do something good with technology, and slip up.  But such problems should not blind us to the fact that even if you don't become a billionaire and make the Giving Pledge, or join a nonprofit engineering organization, your work in engineering can make the world a better place.  But don't just assume it does:  pay enough attention to find out whether it does, and if it doesn't, maybe you should do something about it.

Sources:  The website http://www.mphonline.org/gates-foundation/ has information on inventions sponsored by the Gates Foundation and on the Giving Pledge.  The Giving Pledge website is http://givingpledge.org/, and has a list of all public pledgers.  The USA umbrella organization of Engineers Without Borders is at http://www.ewb-usa.org, and the JAARS website is https://www.jaars.org.