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All Quotes by author - Antonio Garcia Martinez
" 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. "
Story
Dream
Experience
" At the Facebook engineering level are some of the smartest people I've ever worked with. "
People
Facebook
Level
" 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. "
Facebook
Money
Value
" 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. "
American
Mirror
House
" 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. "
Money
Street
Team
" 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. "
Influence
Political
Team
" 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. "
School
Need
Feel
" 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. "
Democracy
Control
Welcome
" If the world really does end, there aren't going to be many places to run. "
Going
Many
Places
" 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. "
American
Election
Cooking
" If you're a small startup considering selling your company, there's definitely far worse places to work than Facebook. "
Company
Far
Selling
" 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. "
Internet
You
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. "
Facebook
Curiosity
Cuba
" 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. "
Data
Early
Job
" 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. "
Race
Running
Election
" 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. "
Ability
Way
Original
" My next thing could be something in hardware. It's never been easier to turn bits into atoms. "
Next
Never
Atoms
" 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. "
Process
Diligence
Sure
" '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. "
Lab
Drawing
You
" 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. "
Reality
World
You
" 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. "
End
Rat
Product
" 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. "
Growth
Planning
Early
" You don't realise it, but we're in a race between technology and politics, and technologists are winning. They're way ahead. "
Politics
You
Winning
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