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NBC Orders White House Comedy '1600 Penn,' 'Animal Practice' to Series


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CISPA: An Alternate Future Where Your Personal Privacy No Longer Exists

May 7th, 2012Top Story

CISPA: An Alternate Future Where Your Personal Privacy No Longer Exists

By Adam Dachis

CISPA: An Alternate Future Where Your Personal Privacy No Longer ExistsLast week the House of Representatives passed the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), a follow-up bill to SOPA that wants to erode your personal privacy. The bill, itself, is palatable enough that Facebook and Microsoft gave it their seal of approval, and it's already got a kick start towards passing into law. So what would life be like if CISPA were part of our reality?

Note: This is a fictional narrative based on what we believe the U.S. might be like if CISPA is passed into law, based on an in-depth discussion with Derek Bambauer, Associate Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School. This story hasn't happened, but we've created it to illustrate one probable future.


I Am Not Who You Think I Am

I am not a child pornographer, but you've probably heard otherwise. Everyone tells the story a little differently. Sometimes my classmates say I chose to drop out of the private college I'd wanted to attend since the day I understood ambition, and others believe my departure was the result of an expulsion. I'm not sure whose choice it was anymore, but ultimately it doesn't matter. You don't actually have to be a bad guy—you just have to be painted like one.

CISPA: An Alternate Future Where Your Personal Privacy No Longer ExistsBack in early March 2013, a 12-year-old girl uploaded a copy of Toy Story to share with a friend she met online who lived overseas. That friend shared the movie with others, and suddenly it was heavily downloaded across the globe. The girl who shared it had no idea, but when the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) caught wind of her actions, they pressured the government for information. Just a year earlier you'd see internet service providers, web apps, social media services, and most corporations act cautiously before turning over private information about their clients—12 years old or otherwise. Then CISPA passed, and safest thing for any corporation was to provide the government with what they asked. Because cyber security was never clearly defined in the law, the possibility of intellectual property theft was a justifiable cause for investigation. The government took the girl's information and provided it to the MPAA. Days later, a lawsuit was in place. At first I didn't believe this because it sounded so ridiculous, but then I remembered that a similar suit was filed against a 12-year-old girl for downloading music in 2003. And then something impossible happened to me.

I Drew the Wrong Card

CISPA: An Alternate Future Where Your Personal Privacy No Longer ExistsI never had aspirations of becoming a writer, but my parents were both hard workers and always insisted that I'd be best served in any profession if I spent my time on writing and math. Being the geek that I am, math came easy but I wasn't so fortunate with words. It's one of the reasons I chose my college. It was known for its communications school, and every major was required to study several dimensions of writing. Incoming Freshmen were required to take two essay-writing courses during their first year. Most students were averse. I was excited.

The course options varied from the dull to the dramatic, so I wasted no time registering for an essay class simply labeled "Controversy." Each month we wrote a short argument about subversive topics selected at random. Every student drew a small card from a brown paper bag. Most of my classmates wanted the card that read "legalize marijuana." I wanted more of a challenge, and I got one. My card read, "reform child pornography law."

At first I was a little concerned. It seemed incredibly wrong to even argue against any laws that served to prosecute child pornographers, illustrators, or anything that sought to sexualize children. But after a little research, I discovered that many of the laws were vague and too broadly applied. They were written in a way that allowed the government to prosecute and convict alleged deviants based on flimsy evidence. It wasn't much different from CISPA, which was signed into law highly due to its broad language.

CISPA: An Alternate Future Where Your Personal Privacy No Longer ExistsAs I continued my research I found more and more instances of laws with vaguely-defined terms that were designed to be tough on crime. No one bothered to oppose them in fear of being painted weak, or as a lover of terrorism and sexual deviancy. As a result, innocent people ended up in jail as collateral damage. The law had chosen to try and assuage our fears by sacrificing our freedoms as payment. But even worse, it didn't seem to be working. When you cast a wide net, you not only catch too many fish but so many that you can't find the fish you're actually looking for. People who broke the law weren't getting caught because the resources previously utilized to catch them were diverted to finding offenders before they actually offended. It's a nice thought to think we can preemptively prevent a crime, but it just doesn't work.

Nonetheless, you can't write an argument against child pornography laws without feeling at least a little gross. Just the act of googling "information about child pornography" is enough to unsettle most stomachs, mine included. I made myself feel better by making off-color jokes about the subject in online chats and emails. I even posted a few of them to Facebook. I'd always been very careful about what I shared online, but we have a tendency to only try to protect ourselves when the threat is obvious. I didn't conceal my subversive sense of humor because I didn't believe that anyone would care. I did request for my search history to be tossed out, but it turned out that choice only applied to my account. My history was still being tracked "anonymously" with my IP address.

CISPA: An Alternate Future Where Your Personal Privacy No Longer ExistsPerhaps none of this would've mattered if my school's servers hadn't been hacked. You wouldn't think there was much to hack, but the college had a system that allowed students to use their identification cards to make purchases at the bookstore, in the cafeteria, and at any other retailer partner around the city. The college charged all of our purchases to a stored credit card number at the end of each month, and the hacker seemed to be after that data. Many private colleges—especially the older institutions—are a bit behind on security so this database was an easy target. They never caught the hacker, but s/he sold the data and it became one of the larger identity theft investigations that year. As a result, the federal government took an interest and started an investigation. While the interviews were tense (for those of us who had them) and watching the FBI roam the campus made everyone uncomfortable, the real problem came when they acquired our private data.

Student email, chat logs, search histories, social media posts, and more were handed over to the feds. Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Mint, Twitter, AOL, and Yahoo were all in compliance. CISPA made it practical for companies to ignore our privacy and offer up our data because they were shielded from any legal action on our part. It was during the many months that the FBI combed through our stupid conversations and useless posts that they found no hacker in the student body. But they found supposed evidence of drug sales and a few media pirates. They also found a common thread in my data: child pornography.

My Reputation Was Collateral Damage

CISPA: An Alternate Future Where Your Personal Privacy No Longer ExistsThe first chat began with the school, who chose to inform me of the allegations before I spoke with the authorities. It didn't take long for the other students to hear about my alleged sexual deviancy. They'd heard about the drug dealers and the downloaders, too, but those crimes assumed a certain "bad ass" quality that did little to ruin a reputation. When people believe you might be a sex offender, it doesn't really matter if you are. The damage has already been done. It's the sort of accusation that follows you for life.

Eventually my name was cleared, but not before the school asked me to take a leave of absence until the investigation was complete. I didn't argue. My roommate requested a transfer that was quickly granted. I received looks and threatening notes. My friends had my back, but I could tell that defending me took a toll on them, too. It was best for everyone if I just left.

I didn't think much of CISPA when it passed into law. It seemed like the sort of thing that would only reach people who put themselves in bad situations. I'd never expected that going to college would fall into that category.

It was a bill that never should have passed in the first place. At the time, President Obama had promised to veto CISPA if it ever reached his desk, but even the best-intentioned politicians make compromises. He did the same thing with the National Defense Authorization Act, after all. Perhaps CISPA passed because the internet had just put up a valiant fight against SOPA and PIPA and didn't have the energy to take on yet another piece of frightening legislation. What worries me the most is the ability humans have to adapt. Many were outraged when CISPA was signed into law, but we felt that way about the Patriot Act, too. We adapted. We started ignoring the stories about victims until news organizations saw no reason to provide them anymore. The CISPA stories still manage to get a little press, but nothing has changed. We now have a government that works hand-in-hand with business.

We let this happen. CISPA may not directly affect everyone, but it leaves the possibility of everything we share online becoming an accusation. When we all live in glass houses, anyone can look guilty. It's easy to think you'll never be targeted, but I made that mistake. Hopefully now you'll know better.

This Is Not Yet Our Reality

Currently, CISPA has only passed the House of Representatives. Before it can reach the desk of the president, it must pass the Senate as well. If you oppose CISPA, contact your state senators and let them know how you feel. The web site SOPA Track now provides information about the position of each senator so you can find out where they stand as well as contact them if you disagree. The vote is coming soon. Now is the time to act.


A very special thanks goes out to Derek Bambauer, Associate Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School, for his assistance with this post. You can find his blog here.

Photos by Uranov (Shutterstock), Dmitriy Shironosov (Shutterstock), sonia.eps (Shutterstock), Nasonov (Shutterstock), and Lyao (Shutterstock). Number of comments

The Trouble With Call of Duty's Scary New War of the Future

May 7th, 2012Top Story

The Trouble With Call of Duty's Scary New War of the Future

By Paolo Pedercini, Molleindustria

The Trouble With Call of Duty's Scary New War of the FutureThe future is black, announces the trailer for Call of Duty: Black Ops II.

The next iteration of the popular first person shooter hardly needs any marketing campaign: immediately after the official announcement, the gaming press diligently started to operate as an extension of Activision's PR department. Small and big media scrambled to produce the most comprehensive list of features, talking polygons and frame rates, revealing plot fragments, speculating on new gameplay additions that may or may not rejuvenate the trite shooting genre.

Given the predicable hype, it is surprising to see among the promotional material a serious, high-production-value "documentary" about 21st century warfare, touching upon cyberterrorism, robotics and counter-insurgency.

The 6-part video—available here in "interactive" form or here in sequential form—prominently features military commentator P.W. Singer and Oliver North, the key figure of the Iran-Contra scandal that nearly brought down the Reagan administration in the mid '80s.

Click to view Allow me a digression. The Iran-Contra affair is one of those rare cases in Cold War history where it's absolutely clear who the bad guys are. Oliver North, at the time working for the National Security Council, was involved in the clandestine sale of weapons to Iran (a rather common practice during the Cold War's proxy conflicts). The proceeds from the sales were then illegally diverted to finance the Contras, a network of CIA-trained guerrilla groups, who opposed the democratically-elected government of Nicaragua. Contras were notorious for their human right abuses such as murder, torture, rape and executions of civilians. They also funded themselves through drug trafficking and it's been alleged that the CIA was supporting, or at least, tolerating these activities. These last allegations were disproved after an investigation led by, well… the CIA.

The story of how Oliver North went from being a convicted felon for these activities, to Republican candidate for the Senate, best-selling author, news commentator for Fox News and eventually testimonial/media-stuntman for Activision, is a kind of twisted version of the American Dream that I'm not going to tell.

Back to the trailer: it's quite unusual to see a major game developer contextualizing a title in relation to current, hotly-debated issues; that is, avoiding the notorious "it's just a game" stance and acknowledging that military-themed games are part of a larger discourse around war. It's also somewhat gutsy to take a clear political position by hiring a figure like North. I personally would love to see more game companies taking their roles as cultural producers this seriously.

It's quite unusual to see a major game developer contextualizing a title in relation to current, hotly-debated issues; that is, avoiding the notorious "it's just a game" stance and acknowledging that military-themed games are part of a larger discourse around war.

As it turns out, it's hard to sell a shooter about black operations without glorifying the real black operations. The "documentary" feels like a polished piece of propaganda that may have come straight out of the Department of Defense.

I'm talking about a rather new kind of propaganda here. The post-9/11 triumphalist rhetoric of America's Army, Kuma War or Full Spectrum Warrior (just to mention other games set in contemporary or near-future scenarios) can only sound awkward after the epic failures of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Hence, the militaristic fable has to assume a different tone—in this case, a dark, apocalyptic—and envision scenarios of inconceivable horror to strike an audience desensitized by a decade of continuous war. As Oliver North puts it in the trailer: "I don't think the average American grasps how violent war is about to become".

The bulk of the narrative is provided by P.W. Singer, a prominent military expert and fortunate choice for this type of contextualization. His book Wired for War is an outstanding account of robotic warfare (and, by the way, the main source and inspiration for my latest game Unmanned). The treatise describes the state of the art of unmanned systems and examines the political, ethical and legal issues emerging from this ongoing technological revolution. It inevitably raises difficult questions: How does our perception of the frontline changes when we can remotely control a UAV from home? How important is the risk of losing human lives when waging a war? Will robots make us more inclined to use violence in resolution of conflicts? Who is responsible when an autonomous machine kills a human? The personnel who deployed it? The commander of the operation? The engineer? The programmer who made the software?

Of course, all these questions are not even hinted at in the Black Ops II "documentary". Singer is simply used to tell us that "the future is here" and that robots may have dangerous bugs, while North spins his Fox News-style terror scenario.

How does our perception of the frontline changes when we can remotely control a UAV from home? How important is the risk of losing human lives when waging a war? Will robots make us more inclined to use violence in resolution of conflicts?

Oliver North's nightmare seems to coincide with the premise of the game: in a imminent future, a supervillain (possibly affiliated with Anonymous) is able to hijack an army of unmanned war machines and attack Los Angeles.

In the game, or in North's vision (at this point it's hard to tell) the future of warfare is with black ops. Clandestine Special Forces can be deployed anywhere, in no time, with the most sophisticated weaponry to confront a diffused, unfathomable enemy.

Don't understand the connection between cyberterrorism and covert operations? Don't worry, that's nothing but a non sequitur that serves the purpose of introducing the main themes of Black Ops II. Nevertheless, this kind of nonsense, especially if repeated ad nauseam in news media and pop culture, contributes to the way we think about conflicts and future threats.

I believe there is a twofold process transforming the way we perceive war. On one hand we have a normalization of images of war: in media, in electronic entertainment, even in viral videos showing robotic Big Dogs or other DARPA-funded marvels. On the other hand, we have a massive deployment of "strategies of separation" such as unmanned aerial vehicles or undercover operations that work together to make the material reality of war as distant as possible from our daily lives. Black Ops II will probably end up contributing to both sides of this equation by trivializing war and celebrating the culture of secrecy at the same time.

You may ask: what's wrong with celebrating black operations anyway?

In the Ramboesque universe of Call of Duty, black ops are presented as an elite force type of operations, carried out in secrecy by modern ninjas. But in reality, what makes certain operations "black" is not that they go undetected by enemy forces—after all, most of military engagements are meant to surprise or deceive the opponent. The peculiarity of black operations is of being untraceable and deniable by the very institutions which finance and conduct them. This secrecy is desirable whenever the operations, if done overtly, would cause popular uproar, diplomatic crisis or legal troubles. It allows the perpetrators to bypass public scrutiny, democratic oversight and the Laws of War, a complex system of liability under which the "proper" military must operate.

Real-world black operations are often indistinguishable from terrorism. The 1985 Beirut car bombing, in which American and British intelligences failed in their attempt to assassinate an Islamic cleric, resulted in the deaths of about 60 civilians, including children leaving school.

Examples of contemporary black operations include the murder of several Iranian nuclear scientists, the virus Stuxnet, the undeclared drone wars in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, and the Extraordinary Rendition Program that involves the kidnapping of suspected terrorists and their illegal detention and torture in a network of secret prisons operated by the CIA.

Real-world black operations are often indistinguishable from terrorism.

The most paradoxical aspect of black operations is that they are mostly invisible to the public opinion here in the West, but not in the countries where these operations take place. Venezuelan people know and remember vividly that the 2002 coup against their democratically-elected government was funded by Washington. For the families and friends of the thousands of victims of drone strikes in Pakistan, those operations are not that secret anymore. The news that U.S. drones are deliberately targeting rescuers and funerals may be of secondary importance here, but abroad, it fuels an ever growing anti-Western sentiment.

In the West, we live with constant cognitive dissonance because these practices clearly conflict with our supposed moral high ground and the official mission of "exporting democracy". We deal with it by quickly forgetting troubling events, by buying into sanitized stories such as the ones presented by video games, or by crafting elaborate echo chambers where the only news stories we are exposed to are ones that relate with our hobbies and interests.

It's entirely possible that Black Ops II may end up telling a fascinating story, the story of a country that achieved such a complete military supremacy that the only thing it fears is its own arsenal. It could also attempt new forms of gameplay to describe the complexities of asymmetrical warfare and the vaporous world of cyberterrorism, but I suspect we'll end up with a refinement of the same shooter, this time with robotic enemies as targets.

This coming November, you may be one of the millions who will purchase Call of Duty: Black Ops II. Before you start fantasizing about a Los Angeles under drone attack and the undercover soldiers who will save us all, you may want to think about the horrifying history of undercover operations and the actuality of drone wars today.

The future may indeed be black, but the present isn't bright either.

P.S. If you want to see a real documentary about the robotics revolution in warfare I recommend Remote Control War produced by the CBC. There are many good films about United States' foreign policy in Latin America. A recent one is John Pilger's The War on Democracy, available on Netflix. This topic is also central to the seminal educational/strategy game Hidden Agenda by Jim Gasperini.

Paolo Pedercini is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Art. As Molleindustria, he develops games addressing issues of social and environmental justice (McDonald's videogame, Oiligarchy, Phone Story), religion (Faith Fighter), labor and alienation (Every Day the Same Dream, Unmanned).
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The 6 Best Pages of Henry Blodget's 6-Page Article About Zuckerberg (UPDATE: Real Time Arguments From Nick Denton)

May 7th, 2012Top Story

The 6 Best Pages of Henry Blodget's 6-Page Article About Zuckerberg (UPDATE: Real Time Arguments From Nick Denton)

By Maureen O'Connor

The 6 Best Pages of Henry Blodget's 6-Page Article About Zuckerberg (UPDATE: Real Time Arguments From Nick Denton)Last night at 9:42PM EST, Business Insider CEO and internet aggregation revolutionary Henry Blodget aggregated his own article, thereby shorting out the time-space continuum and causing the grave of Walter Benjamin to go ice cold.

The original six-page article is called "ZUCK! How the Brat Tycoon Became a Brilliant CEO." It bears Blodget's byline and appears in New York. The aggregated article is called "'ZUCK! How the Brat Tycoon Became a Brilliant CEO'." It also bears Blodget's byline, and appears in Business Insider.

On the first page of "ZUCK! How the Brat Tycoon Became a Brilliant CEO," Blodget writes in a first-page-y manner, like so:

If all goes as planned, Facebook will finally pull the trigger later this month on its long-salivated-over IPO. The deal could value the company in the neighborhood of $100 billion, making founder and CEO Mark Elliot Zuckerberg's own unusually large stake worth $25 billion. It is a huge sum, even in context. Zuckerberg's impending fortune is more money than Wal-Mart's 10,000-plus stores made last year. It's more than Wall Street paid in bonuses to New Yorkers last year. And it has been amassed in only eight years by a 27-year-old who not long ago passed out business cards reading "I'm CEO, bitch."

The Zuckerberg most people know is the one depicted by The Social Network: nerdy, insecure, and shady—in no way a mature adult who's earned such massive wealth. His awkward public appearances over the years have not improved that impression. Zuckerberg may have written the origin—al code for Facebook, the common view of him goes, but the company's success since then—the service is now used by nearly one-eighth of the world's population—has come more despite him than because of him. He was just in the right place at the right time.

But this view sells Zuckerberg massively short. Getting a company to grow as fast as Facebook has is extraordinarily difficult, even when users do a lot of the work. It's even more challenging when you go in having never raised so much as a dollar from investors or managed a single employee, and you're fighting to stay ahead of some of the richest, most aggressive, and most talented companies in the world.

"Mark has done two things in his twenties," a colleague of Zuckerberg says. "He has built a global company, and he has grown up." The second one made the first possible. When early mistakes risked an employee mutiny, Zuckerberg knuckled down and learned how to lead. He made himself the pupil of some of the best bosses in business but had the maturity never to let outsiders sway his overall vision. He got adept at hiring the right people, and, more important, firing senior employees whom the company had outgrown. Appalled at the way he was portrayed in The Social Network, Zuckerberg initially wanted nothing to do with the movie—then, deciding not to let it define him, he rented out theaters in a Mountain View cineplex and bused the entire company over to see it.

"Was he lucky?" another early colleague of Zuckerberg says. "Of course. We're all ridiculously lucky. But you also make your own luck. The world has overlooked how great Mark is as a CEO." He was, yes, in the right place at the right time—but he also has leadership qualities that really set him apart.

As Facebook embarks on its IPO "road show," the question of just how good Zuckerberg is will trail it: His control of the company is such that a bet on the company's stock is a bet on him. Investors will be wagering on an entrepreneur who's committed himself to getting better and better as a leader. But they'll also be betting on one whose commitment to his long-term vision is so deep that he just might drive Wall Street crazy.

When Zuckerberg created "Thefacebook," there were already similar services on other college campuses. Columbia had one. Stanford had one. Yale had one. At Harvard, Zuckerberg's schoolmates the Winklevoss brothers had, famously, been trying to get one off the ground for months. Meanwhile, out in the real world, Friendster had amassed more than 2 million users. There was MySpace. There was AOL, which had established the "friend" concept almost a decade earlier with its instant-messaging system's Buddy Lists.

Today, all those other social networks are effectively toast, while Facebook is closing in on 1 billion users. Why? Because Facebook has executed better. And that starts with Zuckerberg's formidable instincts.

All great consumer-technology products share two attributes, which is that they are cool and easy to use. From the beginning, Zuckerberg knew how to make products that were cool and easy to use. He didn't "overbuild" Facebook, packing it so full of features that people couldn't figure out how to use it. He made "uptime" a huge early priority, only rolling out Facebook to new schools when he was certain that the company's servers and software could handle the traffic load. These steps sound like no-brainers, but they trip up a lot of technology start-ups. Stanford's predecessor to Facebook, for example, was so complicated that it never really caught on. Friendster grew so fast that its infrastructure got swamped: People wanted to log on, but they couldn't. A year later, when Friendster finally fixed the problem, its U.S. users were gone.

The second page of Blodget's article varies widely from the first, in that it is the second page, and thus secondary, in terms of pagination.

Many promising tech companies place too much emphasis too soon on the business rather than the product. They worry too much about "making money." This sounds nuts—aren't companies supposed to make money?—and it sounds especially nuts in the wake of the dot-com bust. But that crash was a product of investors' and analysts' overexuberance (sorry!), not evidence of a fundamental flaw in the tech industry's start-up ecosystem. In a market where ­speed is critical, venture-capital funding allows young companies to move faster than they could if they had to rely only on revenues to fund product development. Entrepreneurs who understand that tend to stick around to make plenty of money later.

MySpace was the last company that had a real shot at stopping Facebook. By 2005, it had more than 5 million users; Facebook hadn't yet reached 1 million. For a while after News Corp. bought MySpace in 2005 for nearly $600 million, it kept growing, and Rupert Murdoch was lauded as the only "old media" mogul who wasn't a new-media moron. But Murdoch had acquired a flawed service: Rather than forcing its users to interact under their real names—as Facebook did, to the benefit of its social function and its attractiveness as a marketing tool—it allowed them to adopt whatever identity they wanted. Worse, News Corp. was too focused on the business side. MySpace cluttered its pages with ads and underinvested in product development, ­becoming an ad-choked cesspool.

Zuckerberg, notoriously frugal in his own spending, actively disdained Facebook's early business efforts, insisting that ads on the service meet his exacting specifications. Advertising might have been helping to fund Facebook's growth, but advertising wasn't cool. And Zuckerberg wasn't about to let ads ruin Facebook.

Most entrepreneurs are creative and impatient, an often fatal combination—trying to do too many things, they spread their tiny companies too thin. This is one trap Zuckerberg almost fell into. After moving his small Facebook team to Palo Alto in the summer of 2004, he turned much of his attention to building a file-share product called Wirehog. Facebook was going gangbusters, but Zuckerberg wasn't sure it would last; this was his hedge.

Wirehog evolved into one of Facebook's first apps, but it never amounted to much. At the end of that summer, Facebook raised its first real outside capital, and Zuckerberg's focus returned. Focus became so central to Facebook's ethos that in the company's old office, the word was stenciled over a urinal in the bathroom.

As part of Facebook's IPO filing, Zuckerberg, following a tradition established by Jeff Bezos at Amazon and continued by the founders of Google and other iconic tech companies, wrote a letter to potential shareholders. The document lays out his management philosophy and priorities (and relays a warning to a certain kind of stock buyer—which we'll come back to later). The Facebook way, Zuckerberg writes, is to "move fast and break things." It's the last crucial part of his natural feel for the tech business, and it's been critical to his company's success.

When Zuckerberg launched "Thefacebook," it blindsided the Winklevosses, with whom Zuckerberg had been working to develop a similar product. The legal settlement Facebook later paid to clean up the resulting mess cost the company millions of dollars, but if Zuckerberg had delayed the launch of his social network—whether to negotiate with the Winklevosses or to perfect the site itself­—Facebook might have missed its window. "Move fast and break things" has continued to drive the company's evolution. Instead of extensively focus-grouping new features, Facebook just rolls them out. Then it listens to users' screams and makes modifications as appropriate. This technique has produced a lot of duds. It has led, on many occasions, to Zuckerberg having to apologize to his users. It has also produced some of the features that, in the minds of users, today are Facebook—such as News Feed. What the critics miss when they blast Facebook for "mistakes" is that the process is deliberate. And it works.

Zuckerberg all but stopped writing code for Facebook in the summer of 2005. At the time, the company had several million users and about 25 employees. It also had plenty of money, having just raised more than $12 million from Accel Partners, at nearly a $100 million valuation. From then on, Zuckerberg became a full-time leader. And in the beginning, he was horrible at it.

Tech-company founders are often young and socially awkward, with "bad hair" (as one Silicon Valley veteran observes), strange work habits, and scant management experience. This makes money people nervous. So for the past couple of decades, the standard playbook has been to have the founder remain CEO until the company reaches a size that outstrips the founder's limited ability to run the business, then bring in a "professional CEO"—an experienced executive—to take over. After the professional CEO arrives, the founder usually becomes a neutered figurehead. (If the founder meddles with the course the new CEO sets, it can lead to the founder getting pushed out entirely.) Companies like eBay and Cisco were built this way, as were hundreds of smaller firms that then sold out to bigger operations, yielding handsome scores for their venture capitalists.

On the third page, Blodget— well— this might be a good moment to admit that I haven't actually read the article, yet. Just copied and pasted.

In recent years, however, a new approach has taken hold. Championed by V.C. firm Andreessen Horowitz, this contrarian philosophy observes that many of the most flourishing and sustainable technology companies have been built by founder CEOs, not outsiders. Microsoft, for example, was for two decades built and run by Bill Gates, another Harvard dropout who knew nothing about management when he started. Bezos had been an investment banker before he launched Amazon in his garage. Oracle is still run by its co-founder, Larry Ellison. And Google's CEO is, once again, co-founder Larry Page.

Many companies that have dumped their founders and gone the professional CEO route, meanwhile, have eventually lost their way: Yahoo, for example, has imploded, and Microsoft has struggled since Gates handed off the company to current CEO Steve Ballmer. And then, of course, there's Apple, which in 1983 recruited the head of Pepsi, John Sculley, to take over, believing that young product visionary Steve Jobs wasn't cut out to steer the company. You know how that turned out.

In industries in which products don't change much—paint, bricks, chemicals—professional CEOs thrive. Companies in these industries don't rise and fall on innovation—they depend on optimization. (Think Coke, which has been selling the same core product for 126 years.) The tech industry works differently. "The nature of technology," Marc Andreessen, the Netscape co-founder who is one of Andreesen Horowitz's chief partners, said at a conference recently, "is that the product is always changing. It's just so rare that you'll have the same product in five years." Apple's recent renaissance began in 2001, with the launch of the iPod. A decade later, the iPod is obsolete, and a staggering two-thirds of Apple's revenue now comes from products it has invented since 2007.

"If you put a sales guy in charge of the company," Andreessen continued, "they'll optimize for the next quarter. Finance guys will optimize the financials." The company's founder will optimize the products—and will often have the vision necessary to drive the company's future innovation. As for the nuts-and-bolts skills necessary to lead a company, those can be learned.

The first thing a leader needs to learn to do is communicate—tell his team where they're going and why. This is especially true when dozens of employees are being hired monthly, each with his own ideas about how to do things and what's best for the company. After Zuckerberg stopped coding at Facebook, though, he didn't communicate—he disappeared. He did so because he hadn't yet learned another critical leadership skill: the art of saying "no."

Having missed out on buying MySpace, Viacom was desperate to buy Facebook. Because Viacom was interested, so was Time Warner. So were Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. Zuckerberg had told his employees he didn't want to sell. But he didn't tell that to Facebook's suitors, at least not directly enough. In one classic example reported by David Kirkpatrick in The Facebook Effect, Viacom's lead negotiator, MTV president Michael Wolf, told Zuckerberg that he would be in San Francisco in mid-­December and offered him a ride back to New York for the holidays. Zuckerberg accepted the favor. Then, because Wolf actually hadn't been planning to be in San Francisco and Viacom's planes were booked, he chartered a jet and flew out to the West Coast to pick up his quarry.

While Zuckerberg was getting schmoozed, morale at Facebook deteriorated. Employees began grumbling about the need for a professional CEO. Things got so bad, Kirkpatrick reports, that one of Zuckerberg's senior executives confronted him at 2:30 in the morning in a diner—the only face time she could get. If Zuckerberg wanted to run the company, the executive told him, he needed "CEO lessons."

One quirk of Mark Zuckerberg that frustrates colleagues is that he often doesn't appear to be listening to them. But he is. A week after the diner intervention, Zuckerberg held his first "all hands" meeting. He held more one-on-one meetings with members of his senior team and scheduled an executive retreat. He got better at explaining priorities.

These efforts helped, but they weren't enough to stop tech pundits from howling that Facebook needed to put a grown-up in charge. So Zuckerberg sought more counsel, cultivating a who's who of advisers, including Jobs, Andreessen (now a Facebook board member), Don Graham of the Washington Post, LinkedIn's Reid Hoffman, Accel Partner's Jim Breyer, and Peter Thiel, an iconoclastic investor and entrepreneur who was Facebook's first professional funder. "He's a sponge," one Valley veteran says. "He's always asking questions. 'What do you think about this? What do you know about that? Who's good at that?' "

Two years ago, at the All Things D technology conference, Zuckerberg participated in a live interview. He walked onstage in his typical attire: blue jeans, T-shirt, and hoodie. But it was hot under the lights. As his interrogators, Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher of The Wall Street Journal, jumped right in with the touchiest line of questions—about Facebook's incursions on its users' privacy—he began to sweat. That night, all anyone could talk about was how anxious and nervous Zuckerberg had looked.

Now that I've broken the fourth wall and admitted that I am aggregating as thoughtlessly as possible, this blog post has become a "process piece." Aggregation: What Does It Mean in This New Media Economy of Ours, When the Means of Reproduction Is Three Key Strokes and a Click? BTW, here's the fourth page:

But if his delivery was a mess, Zuckerberg's answers to the privacy questions were actually reasonable. Facebook was committed to giving its users full control over their privacy settings. A few minutes later, with Zuckerberg now wiping the sweat from his face with his hoodie sleeve, Swisher asked him, maternally, whether he might like to take it off. (He did.) Toward the end of the conversation, she asked him about the role of the CEO. His answer to this question showed he approaches his job just the right way.

"I've always focused on a couple of things," Zuckerberg said. "One is having a clear direction for the company and what we build. And the other is just trying to build the best team possible toward that … I think as a company, if you can get those two things right—having a clear direction on what you are trying to do and bringing in great people who can execute on the stuff—then you can do pretty well." For Facebook, that last part has proven an understatement.

One of Steve Jobs's famous recruiting techniques was to take potential hires on long walks around Palo Alto while sharing his vision for Apple. A Zuckerberg confidant says he's adopted this tactic and done his idol one better. Near Facebook's old headquarters in Palo Alto is a trail winding up into the mountains. Zuckerberg led recruits up this trail, the source says, and learned to time his pitch so the full "aha" would hit right as the hike culminates in a breathtaking view.

The team Zuckerberg has built at Facebook, one insider argues, is "pound for pound one of the two strongest management teams in the industry," with the other being Apple's. "That did not happen by accident. Mark worked his way through it, position by position."

"Basically, there are two ways to build an organization," a former Facebook employee explains. "You can be really, really good at hiring, or you can be really, really good at firing." Zuckerberg has been really good at firing. "We made some hires that weren't the right ones. And we were pretty good at correcting that quickly. Mark deserves the credit for identifying and following through with that." In other cases, key personnel who were good fits simply got outgrown by the company. It can be even harder to jettison those kinds of employees, whose contributions have earned them the loyalty of business partners and colleagues. But here too Zuckerberg did not flinch.

Sean Parker, for example, joined Facebook in the summer of 2004 as the company's first president. He kept Facebook on track when Zuckerberg's attention wandered to Wirehog and helped raise the company's first rounds of outside capital. Most crucially, he did something that will allow Zuckerberg to maintain almost complete control over Facebook for as long as he wants to control it.

Parker, who'd been ousted from both Napster and a later startup, a digital Rolodex service called Plaxo, became obsessed with making sure Zuckerberg didn't suffer the same fate. In conjunction with raising $500,000 from Thiel, Parker helped restructure Facebook's voting stock. Zuckerberg today holds 57 percent of those shares, which means that no one, including Facebook's board members, can legally force him to do anything. This level of control in the hands of one shareholder is extraordinary, and it's already raising hackles on Wall Street. But it was crucial to getting Zuckerberg comfortable with taking Facebook public, because it means he won't be compelled to take shortcuts to appease impatient shareholders.

For all Parker brought to Facebook, though, his party-boy ways were deemed too great a liability for him to have a future at the company. Within a year of Parker's joining the company, he was forced out.

Parker's departure made room for Owen van Natta, a former Amazon executive hired as head of business development and then promoted to chief operating officer. The 36-year-old Van Natta was Facebook's first real adult supervision. There were 26 employees when he joined, only two of whom were over 30 years old. During his tenure the staff grew to hundreds, and he had helped hire a lot of them.

Van Natta also got Facebook's business engine running, assembling its first sales and finance teams and negotiating an investment from Microsoft in 2007 that valued the company at $15 billion. Revenue increased from less than $1 million to more than $150 million. At heart, though, Van Natta was a start-up guy. He thrived on the loosely organized chaos of a young company growing at hyperspeed. His greatest strength was deal-making, not management. In early 2008, in the wake of the disastrous launch of an advertising product called Beacon, Facebook's senior team determined that the company needed a different kind of executive running the business. So Zuckerberg let Van Natta go.

For page five, let's elevate the conversation: Would you prefer to read a Henry Blodget article for New York Magazine at NYMag.com, BusinessInsider.com, or Gawker.com? Discuss.

"The criticism [of CEOs like Zuckerberg] is that they're overly Machiavellian and don't care about people," says a former Facebook executive fired by Zuckerberg. "But this is really what is required to build a long-term sustainable business." The executive added that while many people canned by Zuckerberg over the years feel screwed over, he couldn't think of any instance in which Zuckerberg was actually unfair. "He is not a bad guy," the executive says. "Maybe he's not a good guy, but he's not a bad guy."

Removing Van Natta made it possible for Zuckerberg to hire Sheryl Sandberg, one of the most important moves he has ever made. (A longtime Facebook exec calls the subsequent partnership between Zuckerberg and Sandberg "a blessing from the gods.") Zuckerberg spent more than 50 hours wooing her away from Google, where she had built and run the online-sales organization. According to a New Yorker article by Ken Auletta, after meeting at a Christmas party in 2007, they had several sit-downs over the next couple of months—first at a café in Atherton, near Sandberg's house; then, because that was too public, in Sandberg's kitchen (at the time Zuckerberg was living in a tiny apartment with barely any furniture). When the tech elite flew to Davos for the World Economic Forum that January, Zuckerberg rode with Sandberg and the gang on Google One—the 767 owned by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The two spent the flight huddled conspiratorially—a fact that did not go unnoticed within Google. In addition to her being phenomenally good at the job Facebook needed doing—building and managing a global corporation—Zuckerberg found another attribute appealing: She was okay being No. 2. Most of the executives Facebook considered for the COO slot admitted that they would eventually like to be in charge. Facebook already had its CEO, so this was a nonstarter.

For some Zuckerberg skeptics, it's the quality and stability of the management team he has built that's made them believers. To attract and retain people like Sandberg, who don't need to work and can work anywhere, he has had to first be a good boss—talented people don't like working for assholes—and, second, to let go of aspects of his company that another founder might have clung to. One former Facebook executive believes that the management blunders Zuckerberg made in Facebook's early years are part of what has made his partnership with Sandberg work so well. The former exec likens this experience to the mistakes he made in relationships before he got married: "All that learning and fucking up in the past is what makes me a great husband."

The Zuckerberg-Sandberg duo has been so successful—annual revenues have increased from $150 million to nearly $4 billion since she came aboard—that it has now become a new model for tech company-building. Instead of replacing the quirky founder with a professional CEO, companies now try to "go get a Sheryl."

When talking about Zuckerberg's most valuable personality trait, a colleague jokingly invokes the famous Stanford marshmallow tests, in which researchers found a correlation between a young child's ability to delay gratification—devour one treat right away, or wait and be rewarded with two—with high achievement later in life. If Zuckerberg had been one of the Stanford scientists' subjects, the colleague jokes, Facebook would never have been created: He'd still be sitting in a room somewhere, not eating marshmallows.

Most Wall Street investors would perform miserably on the marshmallow test. Over the past couple of decades, as the money-management business has gotten ever more competitive, they have elevated the narrowly defined concept called "shareholder value" to an absurdly exalted status. Shareholder value, in the minds of most investors, is synonymous with "today's stock price." If today's stock price is higher than yesterday's stock price, a company's management is said to have "created" share­holder value. If today's stock price is lower, management "destroyed" it. It doesn't matter that the decisions and priorities that boost stocks in the short term—such as inflating this year's earnings by firing people or cutting product-development spending—are often at odds with decisions and priorities that create greater value over the long haul.

Nor does this obsessive focus on stock prices recognize that companies are a lot more than ticker symbols. They create jobs that employ people. They create products that help people. They devote resources to ensure that they'll keep creating this value for decades, despite the fact that these investments reduce their near-term profits. In other words, these companies create societal value. As Warren Buffett and a handful of other investors have often observed, this balanced approach allows such companies to create huge value for some shareholders: the ones who stay put for the long term.

Yowza! Now check out the powerful, page-six-y manner in which Blodget closes his six-page article. Here's the sixth page, in all its page six glory, sixing and paging all over the place:

It often takes decades to build the sort of companies that the best executives and entrepreneurs hope to create. It can take so long that by the time this value is finally created, many short-term investors will have long since jettisoned their positions. In the last couple of decades, no company has better illustrated this than Amazon. After Amazon went public in 1997, Bezos ignored skeptics who claimed that the ­company "couldn't make money," and then, when Amazon finally proved these nay­sayers wrong, he ignored those who complained that Amazon should make more money. All the while, he kept on investing. Five years ago, for example, when Bezos decided that the world was ready for e-books, he poured resources into the Kindle at the expense of Amazon's bottom line.

Bezos's philosophy has created enormous value for Amazon's customers. It has created more than 65,000 jobs. And it has also created mind-boggling value for Amazon's long-term shareholders: At a recent price of $225, the stock is trading at about 130 times its IPO price. But that growth did not follow a straight-upward line. When the tech bubble burst, Amazon's stock tanked. While the company continued to invest in the future at the expense of the present, the stock crawled along sideways for years. Impatient shareholders took losses, then missed out on the windfall when Amazon's share price started to climb in 2007.

The letter that Zuckerberg included in Facebook's IPO prospectus is even more direct about his priorities than Bezos's was. Zuckerberg wrote this letter himself, a ­Facebook source says, and it begins with the following sentence: "Facebook was not originally created to be a company."

Rather, Zuckerberg explains, Facebook "was built to accomplish a social mission—to make the world more open and connected." Then Zuckerberg reveals why he's telling us this: "We think it's important that everyone who invests in Facebook understands what this mission means to us, how we make decisions and why we do the things we do." Later, he spells out it out again. "We don't build services to make money; we make money to build better services."

For short-term investors, the letter amounts to three-alarm klaxon: "Don't buy this stock!" Because not only is Zuckerberg declaring that he considers Facebook's social mission a higher priority than Facebook's business and financial mission—a view many on Wall Street would consider treasonous—he also has complete control over the company. All shareholders will be able to do if they disagree with his decisions is complain. And Zuckerberg has long since demonstrated that he's willing to withstand bitching while he executes his plan.

In early April, Zuckerberg did something that started his critics grumbling anew about his stewardship of Facebook. With the then-rumored IPO date only a month or so away, he decided to buy a little mobile photo-sharing company called Instagram that had no revenue and only thirteen employees. He spent $1 billion of Facebook's stock and cash to acquire it—without asking anyone else's permission or advice.

The billion-dollar price tag, many pundits concluded, was clear evidence that the tech bubble was back—an assessment that called into question Facebook's valuation at a critical moment. A corporate governance expert told The Wall Street Journal that Zuckerberg's Instagram move was exactly the sort of situation from which boards were supposed to protect minority shareholders.

But experienced tech executives concluded that the deal was shrewd. For the equivalent of around one percent of Facebook's value, Zuckerberg had bought one of the hottest companies in the white-hot mobile sector, an area where Facebook was weak. He had stolen Instagram out from under an emerging rival, Twitter, and he had eliminated a potential competitor to Facebook's vital photo-sharing function—both of which will protect the company's bottom line as the industry evolves. He had done the deal in a weekend, because he still believes in moving fast.

It's true that in the process, he threatened to delay Facebook's IPO as the company scrambled to update its SEC paperwork. But to Zuckerberg, a minor IPO delay would have been of little consequence. As CEO, he has more important things to think about.

What the hell just happened here? To find out, click some other article. Watch this space. Twitter. Share. Buzz. Obama. Double penetration. Skrillex.

Update: Please join in on the fun of this comment thread, featuring Nick Denton.

[NYMag, Business Insider]

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