Growth: What is it Good For?
By Keith Teare • Issue #277 • View online
The Facebook whistleblower accused the company of putting growth and profit before everything. So, is growth bad? Is it incompatible with human good? Or is it the essence of progress?
Contents
- Innovation and Growth
- Hot Air
- Regulation Fallout
- Venture Trends
- Innovation for Employees & Creators
- Africa Rises
- Startup of the Week
- Tweet of the Week
Editorial
It’s obvious, right? This week we should focus on Facebook? Well, yes and no. We certainly should focus on the issues raised by the whistleblower Frances Haugen and her testimony to Congress. But that testimony is about a lot more than Facebook. It goes to the heart of ideas that have formed our views of civilization since the enlightenment. Is growth good? Does it serve humanity? Is it compatible with our deepest needs?
At the heart of the testimony was a concern that Facebook put “its own” interests ahead of those of “us”. From 60 Minutes:
“The thing I saw at Facebook over and over again was there were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook,” Haugen told Pelley. “And Facebook, over and over again, chose to optimize for its own interests, like making more money.”
This idea — that a company’s self-interest should not form its modus operandi — is new and strange. Facebook is after all a corporation. Its success is measured in how many people use it, and how much revenue is made after taking all costs into account. That is a function of whether people like it and remain users, or whether they do not.
It seems that all companies are like that. The New York Times has a self-interest that guides its actions, so does Greenpeace and so does FedEx. Those interests, should they deviate from what people want, would lead to declining use. Here are the numbers of users over time:
