Controlling Personalities 101: 'Revenge of the Analog' on Facebook

Toronto journalist David Sax authored in 2016 "Revenge of the Analog." Sax, while a youthful tech investor himself when his book went to press, was not convinced by that day's conventional wisdom paper was going away or vinyl records were stodgy relics of sound.

The reader travels well-researched passages from London-based Cereal magazine editors to sources in New York and other western hot spots. After energetic chapters "Revenge of Film" "Revenge of Retail", Sax visits Silicon Valley to interview programmers and designers who "gushed about the unrivaled superiority of whiteboards, Post-it notes, and paper to take ideas from the mind into a tangible place."

His varied impressions after visiting offices of companies including Twitter, Adobe, Google, Dropbox and Pinterest hew to theme. The author's focus pulls slightly off subject after visiting Facebook. First Sax covers Facebook's delayed embrace of analog:

In late 2010, when Katigbak worked at Facebook, he and another designer on the marketing team named Ben Barry set up some of their printing equipment in the corner of a Facebook warehouse. Jokingly, they called it the Analog Research Laboratory. At a company where the culture was notoriously tech-centric, it was initially just a personal outlet for hands-on expression. "Others at the company said 'We are a digital company and we communicate via digital means,' Ben and I just got a bit antsy and wanted to make stuff," Katigbak said. "Part of this was our frustration over an obsession with data and metrics. Early on it was an attempt to humanize the brand for an internal audience, and to humanize the user."

They began making signs for the workplace with slogans about Facebook's hacker-derived work culture: "If It Works, It's Obsolete," "Is This a Technology Company?" "Move Fast and Break Shit," and every possible variation on the word hack and its use in a phrase. Employees began noticing these signs hanging on cubicle walls and in hallways, and requested their own. Eventually, word got around to Mark Zuckerberg, who asked that the two produce hand-printed signs for Facebook's annual app developer conference. When that proved immensely popular, the Analog Research Laboratory was brought into Facebook's corporate structure, with its own dedicated space (next to a woodshop,) budget, and full-time staff.

The Analog Research Laboratory is situated right near the main visitors' entrance at Facebook's sprawling, million-square-foot Palo Alto campus. The whole place, which is a closed village of different buildings and connected outdoor plazas, has a bright yet tightly controlled, Truman Show vibe to it, and the posters and signs the Analog Research Laboratory produces certainly reinforce this. You can't walk five feet at Facebook without bumping into a sign extolling the virtues of hacking or the sense of community employees are supposed to share. Many outside Facebook have called the Analog Research Laboratory the company's propaganda factory, and it certainly feels as if a poster of Mark Zuckerberg swimming across the Yangtze River, of Sheryl Sandberg smashing a Twitter bird under her outstretched fist, could emerge from its printing press at any moment. But at a company so large, charged with managing a social network whose very definition is amorphous, sometimes a little propaganda is needed to keep the cadres motivated and on track.

Next Sax authors a section on "inactive" social networks of the past, in contrast to Facebook:

The great advantage of social networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest is the ease of joining them. But as anyone with an inactive MySpace, Second Life, or Friendster account will tell you, the ease of digital adoption is a double-edged sword. Consumer loyalty to these services is shallow, at best. Online, the main way to keep users engaged is to dominate the space: be the biggest social network, have the best features, and become so enmeshed in people's lives that leaving will be a pain. This is why such companies as Facebook purchase upcoming social networks, such as Instagram and WhatsApp: to head off a potential suitor before they steal the throne. But the scattered shells of thousands of failed online communities -- some fledgling startups and others once-global leaers, such as AOL -- show just how difficult a digital community is to keep together.

Analog provides a potential solution to this. If social networks and online communities are able to transcend their virtual existence ...

Every person has a different temperament, and some basic temperament traits are visible all the way from birth. Each CEO is distinct. So are companies. Another Silicon Valley investor says, each corporation has its own DNA that can be hard to deviate from even after leadership succession. What Sax indirectly acknowledges is it may have taken a temperament like Zuckerberg's to get his company to the position it stands in.

Successful people like to have command of their environment. Command is different from control. Over-reliance on surveillance can be addicting; power imbalance and information imbalance inherently offer temptation to abuse. These are opaque barriers we have to keep ourselves and others from crossing. Sax said after visiting Facebook that for a social network to succeed, it has to "become so enmeshed in people's lives that leaving will be a pain." Enmeshment is a psychological term to describe parents so attached they can't shift a child's growing independence at developmental milestons such as adolescence, and when the adult child marries.

It'll be interesting to watch this willful leader command users of his tween-aged company, one where he structured his stock to maintain tighter control than his CEO peers'.


Controlling Personalities 101: On Character & An 'Unsubmitted Will' ->
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Further Reading:

Wired magazine news roundup on alleged overreach of Facebook's VPN product "Onavo is more pervasive than standard VPNs, and attempts to be on all the time instead of just when you want a little extra protection."   wired.com

Facebook sent a doctor on a secret mission to ask hospitals to share patient data:   cnbc.com

Silicon Valley investor Om Malik describes corporate DNA in Change is Good, But It's Also Really Hard:   om.com

"Revenge of the Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter" by David Saxe   goodreads.com

"Prevention, Detection & Response" could be a framework to quickly and clearly implement an Honest Ads Act across all digital platforms.   www.offlinereport.net






This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.