YOU HAVE TO
THINK THROUGH WHAT
COULD GO WRONG
INSTEAD OF
ASSUMING EVERYTHING
WILL GO RIGHT.
published a letter to potential investors.
“Facebook was not originally created to be a
company. It was built to accomplish a social
mission—to make the world more open and
connected,” he wrote. “We don’t build ser-
vices to make money; we make money to
build better services.” An open and con-
nected world, he wrote, would make the
economy stronger and businesses better.
Facebook was building a bridge and relent-
lessly increasing its span.
One day in August 1907, several years
into the construction of the bridge over the
Saint Lawrence River, calamity struck in the
space of 15 seconds. Every major section of
the structure’s nearly complete southern
half collapsed. Workers were crushed or
swept into the current. Another group of
men found temporary safety but drowned
under the rising tide. In all, 75 people died,
including 33 Mohawk steelworkers from
the nearby Kahnawake reserve.
By now, you surely see where I’m going
with this. In 2016, Facebook was struck
by calamity too. The core algorithm of the
company’s News Feed was weaponized by
Russian operatives and purveyors of fake
news. A platform designed for connect-
ing people turned out to be a remarkable
accelerant for political divisions. The elec-
tion was a mess, whatever your politics, and
Facebook was partly to blame. The com-
pany’s philosophy—move fast and break
things—was fine when the only thing at
stake was whether your aunt could recon-
nect with her high school ex. That philoso-
phy lost its roguish charm when democracy
itself was up for grabs. Then, in 2018, Face-
book faced the worst crisis of its short
existence when news broke that a shady
political outfit called Cambridge Analytica
had siphoned off data from nearly 100 mil-
lion users of the platform.
For several years now, we’ve been liv-
ing in a time of intense backlash against
the technology industry. It’s not clear when
it started, but if one had to choose a date,
November 8, 2016, isn’t a bad one. Within
six months of the election, Molotov cock-
tails were being chucked at the captains
of Silicon Valley from all directions—and
employees of the biggest tech compa-
nies were among those lighting the wicks.
Antitrust law, disdained for decades, sud-
denly became exciting. Worries that had
been playing as background music in soci-
ety for years—online privacy, the fears of
artificial intelligence taking jobs—began to
crescendo. Ad targeting was redefined as
surveillance capitalism. Self-driving cars
were redefined as death traps. #Delete-
Uber became a meme. The reputation of
an entire industry tanked, just as had hap-
pened eight years earlier to finance. In 2016,
wired ran a photograph of Mark Zucker-
berg on the cover with the line “Could Face-
book Save Your Life?” Fifteen months later,
we ran a photo-illustration of him blood-
ied and bruised. No words were necessary.
There’s no question that the tech industry
had it coming. It had become arrogant. The
nerds had ascended, culturally and socially,
and had become enchanted with their own
virtuous self-image. They spoke like Saint
Francis in public while privately worship-
ping Mammon. In hindsight, Facebook’s mis-
sionary IPO letter reads like a parody. But
the backlash has included some gratuitous
swipes too. Take self-driving cars. They don’t
text while driving; they don’t drink. If we can
get them to work, they’ll save tens of thou-
sands of lives a year. Almost everything we
do has become simpler, easier, and more
efficient in some way because of software.
Even Facebook deserves a certain sympa-
thy as it tries to juggle the conflicting priori-
ties of privacy, transparency, and safety—as
the public demands perfection on all three.
Now let’s return to the Quebec bridge.
After the catastrophe, the site became a place
of pilgrimage and, eventually, renewal. The
Canadian government needed the railway
link, and it took over the design and con-
struction of the bridge. New plans were
drawn up, involving stronger supports anda new kind of truss. The canti-
lever arms on either side went
up and stood strong. By 1916, the
only major task remaining was to
link the two sides with a 5,000-
ton center span. It was maneu-
vered into place via tugboat, and
soon the workers began to lift it
up with huge hangers. But once
more, calamity struck. The hoist-
ing system failed, and the giant
centerpiece plunged into the
river, taking 13 workers with it.
Soon, though, the Canadian
government’s engineers tried a
third time. Many lives had been
lost, but connecting the two sides
of the river remained essential
for the country’s prosperity. So
the builders reconstructed the
collapsed center span and, just