On Thursday, November 12th, I will be speaking at an event at the Cato Institute with my dear friend Katie Harbath about her new book “Disrupting Politics: A Front Row Seat to the Collision of Technology and Democracy.” The event is at 11am if you want to come by in-person you can register here or watch online below.
I may have hired Katie at Facebook1 and worked with her for years but I am most blessed to call her my friend and I am infinitely proud of her for writing this book. I read somewhere once that you should only write a book if you have a story that you need to tell even if no one ever reads it, because it needs to be outside of your head and exist in the world for your sanity/satisfaction and possibly posterity. Katie has written a true labor of love with this book.
So first off, let’s make sure everyone reads this book, so stop now and buy a copy of “Disrupting Politics: A Front Row Seat to the Collision of Technology and Democracy” and while you’re at it subscribe to Katie’s excellent substack “Anchor Change.”
Katie tells three intertwined stories in her book “Disrupting Politics.” The first story is her personal journey from Wisconsin to DC and her rise through Republican politics, Facebook, and beyond. The second story is a brief history of how the internet generally, and then social networks specifically, disrupted politics in America and the world, written partially from her front row seat and partially as a participant in those events. The third story is about Facebook, the circumstances the company faced, and choices they made, first written from the inside and then, painfully for Katie, increasingly from the outside. This book is Katie telling these three stories, trying to give context to all of them, and grappling with the events she was part of and the world they helped to create. As Katie writes in the introduction, “It’s hard to explain the responsibility of knowing your work is part of history, especially when history doesn’t have a tidy conclusion.”2
“Disrupting Politics” is a book in the traditions of the great political reads like “The Boys on the Bus” to books from the modern staffer like Lis Smith’s “Any Given Tuesday.” It is also a rare window into what a tech company rocketship can be like and I think it pairs and contrasts well with the first part of the book from our former colleague Sarah Wynn-Williams “Careless People” about trying to get hired at Facebook and creating your own job (and whose treatment at the hands of my former employer only affirms her careless people description).
But Katie’s is a book that is harder to place in the past canons as previous disruptions of politics happened primarily within the halls of government, campaign rallies, or the newsroom of the traditional media. The beginning of the 21st century gave rise to corporations that, unlike traditional media of the past, aimed not to generate and broadcast their own content but function as platforms for hosting and distributing user-generated content (UGC). While the algorithmic and content moderation decisions of these platforms ended up being more directionally influencing than most of them wanted (not X the everything app under Elon), the power of concentrating billions of users in one place online placed what became some of the largest corporations in the world and a broader swath of corporate employees in a firestorm most of them had never particularly planned for or had interest in.
This book is also the tale of what it is like to ride a rocketship at a moment of key apex, of hitting the hockey stick growth, of what happens with the idealism of our hopes meets the reality of billions human beings who are all too happy to push any rule that exists (one of those human beings being the former and current President of the United States who I believe makes his debut on Page 72 and dominates the story for the next 100 pages).
Like most of us who came of age as the internet rose, Katie and I were both pioneers in using, explaining, and evangelizing these new tools. Our boundless optimism about the potential of the internet (what I used to shorthand as 90/10 or maybe 80/20 optimism to pessimism or good things to bad things) has been correctly sobered up by reality and arguably has focused too far on the negative. As Katie writes, “The internet had a positive impact on politics too. We spent so much of the beginning of the online era with rose-colored glasses on, and since 2016, we’ve been mostly focused on the bad. We must find our way back to equilibrium.”3
Katie’s book explores many of these positive and negative (and sometimes both) uses of technology that we built at Facebook. Chapter sub-headings like “Soft Power and Political Pilgrimages,”4 “The Facebook Election,”5 and “Election Day Reminders”6 were reminders of the things we built and helped foster. And (after I left) they begin to read like the coming storm that would consume Katie, Facebook, and America going from “Trump Crosses the Line,”7 to “Trump Cracks the Code,”8 and “The Russia Realization.”9
Even as the lessons here that Katie writes about are both interesting and important, they increasingly feel a little bit like the past. I think we have increasingly left the age of the social network behind, of a place where everyone contributed various kinds of UGC (photos, text posts, wall posts) and that interaction has retreated to closed communities (grouptexts, discords, snapchat) and all of the platforms are just short-form video distributions now. The premise of the social network was one that had a much higher creator to consumption ratio than short-form video allows and as such we’ve taken those social networks’ moats and turned them into algorithmic broadcast networks. Political, media, and tech elites don’t necessarily understand this because Twitter remains the one place where short-form text, which is easy content to create and consume, still matters but it has I think caused everyone to ignore the fact that everything else is just about tiktoks/reels/shorts. In a very good interview by Kyle Tharp with the Talarico campaign’s creative director and speechwriter, Antonio Esparza, who said “Facebook is where it’s at” but as a forever short-form video platform, “We would post the same repeat viral videos over the course of the whole campaign there. It’s kind of like watching your favorite movie or TV show [...] And so we would repost old content, and more so compared to TikTok and Instagram, we would have way old Facebook Reels that were still getting pickup months and months later.” I think Matt Yglesias correctly put it when he said, “the internet is a small miracle that in practice we mostly use to watch short-form video.”
One of the enduring themes of Katie’s book is about impossible trade-offs. Katie writes, “Impossible trade-offs loomed at every turn. Everyone had an opinion; few had solutions.”10 Katie and I often disagree about “impossible trade-offs.” She thinks it’s a way of illustrating that you can never make anyone happy; I tend to think it’s often used as an excuse for making a bad decision.
But what strikes me more from that quote is “Everyone had an opinion; few had solutions.”11 As I have reflected on my time at Facebook, I have reflected on what our critics said (or yelled) at me in the moment. At the time, our critics often expressed themselves in clumsily or in ways that were just technically wrong, inaccurate descriptions of problems or asking for technically impossible solutions. This made them all too easy to dismiss and we often did. But what I have come to realize is that while many of those critics might have been technically inaccurate, they were often directionally right with their concerns, whether it be about freedom of speech or the danger of a new country coming online through Facebook first. It can be hard to heed criticism when it seems disqualifying but I think what I wished younger me could have done was to better sift through those inaccuracies to find any accurate concern and take it to heart.
I am often asked what we should learn from the social media age as we face the dawn of the AI/RSI/AGI/ASI age. At a moment where the leading AI labs are seemingly chasing a machine god that they fear could kill us alll; when frontier AI expertise is limited and too clustered around those building it; and when concerns or criticisms of AI are too often hand-waved away as not being technically literate; I hope that’s a lesson those on the frontier of AI can maybe hear and take to heart. That some of the possibly technically inaccurate critiques of frontier AI may have a very accurate core concern that humanity may not be able to afford to ignore. I think that is the most enduring lesson I would take away from the Facebook era in the AI era.
I end by repeating what I posted on LinkedIn the day “Disrupting Politics” was released. I am endlessly proud of her for writing a book and I have never been more vindicated than in my original assessment when I recruited her to Facebook, “Strong Hire.” And happy birthday!
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This is so sweet and poignant. Thank you. Our friendship is one of the best things to come out of my time at Facebook and you make a good point about not letting technical inaccuracies be the thing that dismisses valid concerns.