Antonio Garcia Martinez: 'Targeting' is polite ads-speak for the data...

In the early days, a Georgia college kid named Chris Putnam created a virus that made your Facebook profile resemble MySpace, then the social-media incumbent. It went rampant and started deleting user data as well. Instead of siccing the F.B.I. dogs on Putnam, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz invited him for an interview and offered him a job.

Antonio Garcia Martinez

your job data college

The harsh reality is this: to have influence in the world, you need to be willing and able to reward your friends and punish your enemies.

Antonio Garcia Martinez

you friends reality world

I was at Facebook in 2012, during the previous presidential race. The fact that Facebook could easily throw the election by selectively showing a Get Out the Vote reminder in certain counties of a swing state, for example, was a running joke.

Antonio Garcia Martinez

joke election vote race

Facebook deploys a political advertising sales team, specialized by political party and charged with convincing deep-pocketed politicians that they do have the kind of influence needed to alter the outcome of elections.

Antonio Garcia Martinez

advertising influence political team

Converting Facebook data into money is harder than it sounds, mostly because the vast bulk of your user data is worthless. Turns out your blotto-drunk party pics and flirty co-worker messages have no commercial value whatsoever.

Antonio Garcia Martinez

value your party money

If democracy is to survive Facebook, that company must realize the outsized role it now plays as both the public forum where our strident democratic drama unfolds and as the vehicle for those who aspire to control that drama's course. Facebook, welcome to the big leagues.

Antonio Garcia Martinez

realize control welcome democracy

If you'd come to me in 2012, when the last presidential election was raging and we were cooking up ever more complicated ways to monetize Facebook data, and told me that Russian agents in the Kremlin's employ would be buying Facebook ads to subvert American democracy, I'd have asked where your tin-foil hat was.

Antonio Garcia Martinez

me you democracy cooking

Facebook already has a large political ad sales and operations team that manages ad accounts for large campaigns. Zuckerberg hinted that the company could follow the same 'know your customer' guidelines Wall Street banks routinely employ to combat money laundering, logging each and every candidate and super PAC that advertises on Facebook.

Antonio Garcia Martinez

street political team money

In Cuba, where Wi-Fi is both slow and terrible, you will be an emissary from the future, a hint of the degeneracy to come. You're a full-on mainlining internet junkie with the world's uproar piped into your head 24/7, your emotional landscape terraformed and buffeted by whatever some narcissist just posted on Instagram or some windbag on Twitter.

Antonio Garcia Martinez

you future internet world

In Silicon Valley, where I worked at companies like Facebook and Twitter for the earlier part of this decade, Cuba was generally regarded, when it was regarded at all, as a technological curiosity.

Antonio Garcia Martinez

decade facebook like curiosity

Cubans can be as conversant as any Netflix-and-chill American about popular shows like 'House of Cards' or 'Black Mirror', and they drop allusions to the 'Lannisters' and 'Omar Little' constantly.

Antonio Garcia Martinez

mirror black house cards

Part of any acquisition process is what's loosely called 'due diligence.' Taking both technical and legal forms, it's the snooping around an acquiring company does to make sure it's actually getting what it thinks it is.

Antonio Garcia Martinez

legal diligence company process

You can fake a lot in a startup these days, what with Amazon Web Services and all sorts of off-the-shelf back-end components that let any even minimally competent duffer set up a Web app that does something. Intelligent planning for growth is rare among early startups, but it's the name of the game at a large, rapidly scaling tech company.

Antonio Garcia Martinez

game you fake growth

Mark Zuckerberg is a genius. Not in the Asperger's, autistic way depicted in the very fictional movie 'The Social' Network, the cognitive genius of exceptional ability. That's a modern definition that reduces the original meaning.

Antonio Garcia Martinez

meaning ability genius way

All the early Facebook employees have their story of the moment when they saw the light and realized that Facebook wasn't some measly social network like MySpace but a dream of a different human experience.

Antonio Garcia Martinez

moment experience light dream

When self-delusion and self-flattery enter the mind-set of a product team and the metrics they judge themselves by, like the first plague rat coming onto a ship, the end is practically preordained.

Antonio Garcia Martinez

ship end judge team

If the world really does end, there aren't going to be many places to run.

Antonio Garcia Martinez

places end run world

You don't realise it, but we're in a race between technology and politics, and technologists are winning. They're way ahead.

Antonio Garcia Martinez

you politics technology winning

FBX was my baby that I staked everything on. We shipped it fast, scaled it up, and now the baby talks and can walk to school, but I don't feel I need to babysit it.

Antonio Garcia Martinez

walk feel baby school

If you're a small startup considering selling your company, there's definitely far worse places to work than Facebook.

Antonio Garcia Martinez

your small you work

'Targeting' is polite ads-speak for the data levers that Facebook exposes to advertisers, allowing that predatory lot to dissect the user base - that would be you - like a biology lab frog, drawing and quartering it into various components, and seeing which clicked most on its ads.