Facebook too big to work?
When I say Facebook, I don’t mean exclusively the corporate entity, Facebook Inc. While Facebook has built the system, it now contains vastly more actors contributing to its functioning than Facebook employs or directly controls.
No one has ever seen a system like this because none has ever existed. It’s software and interfaces and tools. It’s a social network. It’s an advertising vehicle. It’s the key media distributor. But, like a city or a nation, it’s also human behaviors, habits, norms. Because much of it is built on machine learning, which transforms user behavior into new software adjustments, users and algorithms drive each other by design.
If everyone stops clicking on something, soon the software will stop showing it to anyone. If Facebook pushes video into feeds, people will watch more video. These feedback loops are what Facebook is as an attention-gathering machine. They ensure that the system is always calibrated for you and you and you. In the lethal struggle between Silicon Valley’s most valuable companies, which are also America’s most valuable companies, this ability to hold human attention as well as any invention since television is Facebook’s competitive advantage.
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