You’ve probably heard the news about Twitter—I’m sorry, the recently rebranded ‘X’—and everything Elon Musk is doing with the social media giant to, it seems, drive the company right into the ground. (For fun? For profit? In a fit of megalomaniacal spite? Who knows, but as someone without a Twitter account and zero stake in the game, it sure is fun to watch.)
Which got me thinking about the movie The Social Network and the toxic histories (to match the largely toxic climates) of so many social media companies.
On the one hand, it’s horrifying, considering how much of our information these companies have and the control they can exert on our lived reality (see: fake news, as just one example). On the other hand, it’s definitely entertaining to dive deep into the dramas surrounding all these companies.
In the spirit of that, here are some stories of toxic tech companies, the wild egos behind them, and what affect they have on our society, our minds, and our future.
Hatching Twitter: a True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal by Nick Bilton
In 2005, Odeo was a struggling podcasting start-up founded by free-range hacker Noah Glass and staffed by a motley crew of anarchists. Less than two years later, its days were numbered and half the staff had been let go. But out of Odeo’s ashes, the remaining employees worked on a little side venture…that by 2013 had become an $11.5 billion business.
That much is widely known. But the full story of Twitter’s hatching has never been told before. It’s a drama of betrayed friendships and high-stakes power struggles, as the founders went from everyday engineers to wealthy celebrities featured on magazine covers, The Oprah Winfrey Show, The Daily Show, and Time‘s list of the world’s most influential people.
The Founders by Jimmy Soni
“If you have used the internet at all in the last twenty years, you’ve touched a product, service, or website connected to the creators of PayPal,” writes Soni (The Mind at Play), former managing editor at the Huffington Post, in this punchy origin story full of wheeling, dealing, and political machinations. Things began in 1999 with X.com, a company founded by Elon Musk that allowed people to email money back and forth. In 2000, X merged with Confinity, Peter Thiel’s software company; rebranded as PayPal; and sold its employees on a grand vision: be part of something big and world-changing.
Things were dicey in the early years, as the company’s leaders feared a shutdown from eBay, and responded by sending a “scathing, eleven-page, single-spaced note to eBay headquarters” accusing the company of monopolistic control over online marketplaces. Soni tells the story with novelistic verve as he tracks Paypal’s growing pains, including regulation challenges, dealing with hackers, and fears of user fraud, as well as the clash of cultures following eBay’s 2002 acquisition (one colorful anecdote involves disgruntled employees publicly mutilating stuffed mongooses that were distributed by eBay leadership).
An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination by Sheera Frenkel
Once one of Silicon Valley’s greatest success stories, Facebook has been under constant fire for the past five years, roiled by controversies and crises. It turns out that while the tech giant was connecting the world, they were also mishandling users’ data, spreading fake news, and amplifying dangerous, polarizing hate speech.
The company, many said, had simply lost its way. But the truth is far more complex. Leadership decisions enabled, and then attempted to deflect attention from, the crises. Time after time, Facebook’s engineers were instructed to create tools that encouraged people to spend as much time on the platform as possible, even as those same tools boosted inflammatory rhetoric, conspiracy theories, and partisan filter bubbles. And while consumers and lawmakers focused their outrage on privacy breaches and misinformation, Facebook solidified its role as the world’s most voracious data-mining machine, posting record profits, and shoring up its dominance via aggressive lobbying efforts.
Don’t Be Evil by Rana Foroohar
A penetrating indictment of how today’s largest tech companies are hijacking our data, our livelihoods, our social fabric, and our minds—from an acclaimed Financial Times columnist and CNN analyst. Rana Foroohar tells the story of how Big Tech lost its soul—and ate our lunch.
Through her skilled reporting and unparalleled access—won through nearly thirty years covering business and technology—she shows the true extent to which behemoths like Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon are monetizing both our data and our attention, without us seeing a penny of those exorbitant profits. Finally, Foroohar lays out a plan for how we can resist, by creating a framework that fosters innovation while also protecting us from the dark side of digital technology.
No Filter by Sarah Frier
In 2010, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger released a photo-sharing app called Instagram, with one simple but irresistible feature: it would make anything you captured look more beautiful. The cofounders cultivated a community of photographers and artisans around the app, and it quickly went mainstream. In less than two years, it caught Facebook’s attention: Mark Zuckerberg bought the company for a historic $1 billion when Instagram had only thirteen employees.
That might have been the end of a classic success story. But the cofounders stayed on, trying to maintain Instagram’s beauty, brand, and cachet, considering their app a separate company within the social networking giant. They urged their employees to make changes only when necessary, resisting Facebook’s grow-at-all-costs philosophy in favor of a strategy that highlighted creativity and celebrity. Just as Instagram was about to reach a billion users, Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg—once supportive of the founders’ autonomy—began to feel threatened by Instagram’s success…
We Are The Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet’s Culture Laboratory by Christine Lagorio-Chafkin
Reddit hails itself as “the front page of the Internet.” It’s the third most-visited website in the United States—and yet, millions of Americans have no idea what it is. We Are the Nerds is an engrossing look deep inside this captivating, maddening enterprise, whose army of obsessed users have been credited with everything from solving cold case crimes and spurring tens of millions of dollars in charitable donations to seeding alt-right fury and landing Donald Trump in the White House.
We Are the Nerds is a gripping start-up narrative: the story of how Reddit’s founders, Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, rose up from their suburban childhoods to become millionaires and create an icon of the digital age—before seeing the site engulfed in controversies and nearly losing control of it for good.
I hope these books are not only entertaining, but thought-provoking, and while the reality behind these social media giants may be monstrous, I don’t want this to be a fear-mongering post. I’m not claiming that social media is inherently evil…just that they’re dangerous. And like anything dangerous, they should be approached with caution and understanding.
And what better way to understand a thing than to read about how it came to be?