Maybe Facebook can’t be fixed.
Did anyone ever think of that? As a whistleblower releases damning information, as Congress holds another hearing into the harm the company does, the implicit assumption is that the social-media giant can be reformed, that with the right combination of algorithmic tweaks and legislative remedies, it can cease being a malevolent force. Even whistleblower Frances Haugen says that her aim in giving a trove of embarrassing internal documents to the Wall Street Journal was not to harm Facebook, but to fix it.
But can that really be done? There is reason to doubt.
In a 1999 interview with the Miami Herald, Steve Lubar, a curator of the Smithsonian Museum of American History, made a trenchant observation. Namely, that we are wired to believe what has never been true, i.e., that talking to one another brings us together.
“There’s this sense,” he said, “that new and better communications technology will bring about world peace. How can we disagree with each other if we all can talk to each other?” That belief, he said, has accompanied every leap in communications tech from radio, to television to the internet. “It goes back to before the Civil War,” said Lubar. “Some people wondered, ‘How can there be a Civil War if the North and the South have telegraph lines?’ ”
The ability to communicate broadly, we believe, unites us across barriers, cements our bonds as humans. Small wonder that’s how many of us once saw Facebook — and indeed, how it markets itself. Smaller wonder that it failed. The expectation was not realistic and never has been.
