That's fascinating, and yeah it's just the kind of thing I was thinking of—the concrete example is nice. There is indeed something quite perverse about the fusion of philosophy and unfettered laissez-faire capitalism in the information age.
I wonder if it's more of an adaptation or coping mechanism than a foundational principle. I think these people cannot bear to actually digest the cynical view of what they are doing in the world so they grasp for something more esoteric and hold that up as guiding principles.
If they were actually doing something good, they wouldn't have to find a book that explains why what they're doing is good in some indirect way. If you look at Jimmy Wales' guiding philosophy, for example, it is clearly and directly correlated to the work being done at Wikipedia. There's no jumping through hoops, because most people agree that Wikipedia is a good thing.
I agree, that it can be a coping mechanism. You find something that's esoteric enough that you can project your goodwill onto it and use it to justify your weird behaviors.
I also agree that if you're doing good, your work speaks for itself, and does not need to be justified. I think Rockefeller, for example, struggled with this a lot later in life when he tried to pay for the cruelty his career with a later devotion to philanthropy. But I don't think it worked. Gates, Zuckerberg, and Bezos will need to wrestle with this, too, regardless of how much they "donate" to "charity". I don't envy them their positions in life.
The book was "Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man" by McLuhan, Marshall. You can find it pretty regularly on biblio for ~$150.
Marshall McLuhan was the most famous and influential intellectuals of the second half of the 20th century, and the one whose ideas are probably the most obviously relevant to Facebook. He’s not some sort of obscure figure at all. I’m sorry if he wasn’t your cup of tea and it’s totally possible that Facebook execs weren’t understanding and applying his ideas correctly but frankly I would be a lot more worried about the company if the top leadership wasn’t reading McLuhan.
I didn’t say the author was obscure or that his ideas were not relevant, but rather that this particular text was rare.
I was overly dismissive in referring to its contents as tangential (it’s a framework for analyzing media that makes some vague but bold claims about what constituted effective content on varying mediums for media at different points in time).
But he can be “famous” and the material can be relevant and the original point can still stand — they found something sufficiently relevant and mysterious and famous enough to point to as an external appeal to authority to justify the sale ads on the serving of visual opium to children. I don’t think that would have been McLuhan’s cup of tea, eh? But if you do it in his name, maybe it’s easier to swallow.
> I didn’t say the author was obscure or that his ideas were not relevant, but rather that this particular text was rare.
I’m frankly puzzled at your assertion that this is a rare, out-of-print book when it’s the top search result on Amazon for “Marshall McLuhan” and costs $31.22 in paperback: https://a.co/d/dhOl4EJ
Your claim that “you can find it pretty regularly on biblio for ~$150” seems approximately true if you insist on only buying a first edition hardcover, which is fair enough. I don’t know what changed between the first edition and the 1994 edition currently available on Amazon. But if the Meta execs are sticklers for the first edition in particular, that’s an indication that they’re taking the ideas in the book more seriously rather than less.
> I was overly dismissive in referring to its contents as tangential
You also referred to it as “basically completely unfollow-able”. In other words, you weren’t really able to follow or grasp what McLuhan was writing. Maybe it’s not your fault and McLuhan was just writing incoherent nonsense—I can’t say either way since I haven’t read him—but this admission on your part undermines your attempts to assess the relevance of Understanding Media to Meta’s business model.
Having read McLuhan, I'm honestly surprised anybody at Meta would be a fan. His work can easily be read today as a pretty damning indictment of the inherent problems with social media.
I wonder if it's more of an adaptation or coping mechanism than a foundational principle. I think these people cannot bear to actually digest the cynical view of what they are doing in the world so they grasp for something more esoteric and hold that up as guiding principles.
If they were actually doing something good, they wouldn't have to find a book that explains why what they're doing is good in some indirect way. If you look at Jimmy Wales' guiding philosophy, for example, it is clearly and directly correlated to the work being done at Wikipedia. There's no jumping through hoops, because most people agree that Wikipedia is a good thing.
Any idea what the book was?