Ellen Huet
Ellen is a reporter covering startups and Silicon Valley for Bloomberg. Before that, she was a staff writer at Forbes and a crime and breaking news reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle.
We discussed the equity gap and the effect of equity on the relationship between the employer and the employee, the evolution of “hustle culture” in the tech industry, and company incentives for improving privacy for everyday users.
JACKIE
So you recently wrote a story on the equity gap.
ELLEN
It's true.
JACKIE
And you've covered stories on the pay gap in Silicon Valley in the past. Do you think it's changed in the last couple of years or so? What do you see as the desired outcome of these kinds of stories?
ELLEN
On a small scale, I do think that there's been some forward-pushing that has been really good. Even to just think about the equity gap is a concept that I remember only encountering the first time a few years ago—I think it was Erica Baker?
She had already left Google, and she was talking about the salary spreadsheet that she made, and it was really a pivotal time for people to be talking about pay transparency in big tech companies. Maybe it was around then, or soon after that, that she made the point on Twitter that we don't examine equity, that we found this one metric, which was just, "Let's talk about the pay gap," and that was great, and then we had all these conversations about it, and that was it.
I don't know if you listen to the podcast from Rebecca Greenfield, The Pay Check. I really recommend it, not just because I think she's wonderful, but it was a really interesting experience for me to listen to it, even though I feel like I know some about the subject matter. But she brought up the point that equity was really where wealth was made, and I remember thinking at the time, "Wow, we'll get to that someday."
I'm not saying just because there's been one report and one series of stories about the equity gap that that is now a thing that we discuss and a thing that people accept as a thing, but for all these steps that we have to take to address an issue, first we have to name it, get people to care about it, convince people that it's real.
JACKIE
Have some way to measure it.
ELLEN
Yeah, all that. But I think it's cool to get a stamp of, you know, this [problem] is a thing—A Thing—that a few years ago was just an idea and a tweet. To watch that come forth was pretty cool. So I think, in that microcosm, yes. A lot's changed in the period of time that I've been covering this topic, which is not even that long. Five years ago, I was a crime reporter, and I wasn't covering business. So that's exciting.
But then I don't know, I feel like the mood of seeing so many photos of Anita Hill and Christine Blasey Ford, side by side… it's just hard for me to think that, on a longer term, things are changing. Also, I don't have the right perspective.
JACKIE
How do you think that equity fell between the cracks? You know, everyone is talking about pay gaps and pay transparency and, for whatever reason, this huge part—
ELLEN
Because it's so emotional. Sorry to cut you off, but I think because it's not well understood.
You know, I've never held a job where I had equity. Trying to understand how it worked, as someone without any experience of it, was hard. I think, even if you have a job where you have access to equity, they don't teach you about it. People understand salaries. There's just been so much discussed about how much people should be making; dollars don't change in value over time. Except, well, they do, but not as much as equity.
Part of it is also that it's seen as part of your emotional commitment to the company, and that makes it more taboo to talk about it. I hate that that is something that gets exploited in that way, and I see it over and over again... this idea that if you "own" part of a company—and ownership is complicated in its own way when it comes equity, but if you have the option to buy ownership in a company someday, if you have the tax money, and all the pieces fall into place—that's seen as an emotional commitment that I think is higher than should be to your job.
That's a strong normative statement, but I think people, especially young people, at startups or in companies where they hold stake in the company are vulnerable to getting pulled toward agreeing to things that they shouldn't because they're told, "Oh, it's your sweat going into this company! You own part of it." And it just feels to me that it should be handled more responsibly.
In particular, I think of examples like WeWork—they make a big show out of how everyone who is an employee at WeWork, all the way from executives to cleaners, has equity in the company. They don't give you any idea of how much it could be worth, or, you know, whether someone who is making the salary that WeWork cleaners do would be able to afford the tax bill that goes with exercising options. You have no way to compare.
I think you were the one who talked to me about it—you have to push for so much information to compare your size of equity to other people, so just saying that you own part of the company becomes this mythical way to turn work into family that I don't think is always used responsibly. I think it's sometimes used in a one-sided way where people who don't have as much information about what it means are then more vulnerable than those who know more and have more experience and have more visibility into how much it's worth.
“Just saying that you own part of the company becomes this mythical way to turn work into family that I don’t think is always used responsibly.”
JACKIE
Yeah. That's a really good point.
ELLEN
I mean, not that it's bad all the time. It has allowed a lot of people to have so much financial freedom and make really generous life choices.
JACKIE
But yeah, if it is used to make this sell, that it means that you're more invested in the company and so on, then the lack of transparency accompanying it is bizarre.
ELLEN
Yeah, and I think just because it's not the norm to talk about it more, then it becomes this weird topic that you can't discuss. There's just something inherently personal when people have this idea of what it means to work on something that you own, and it's really different from working for the man, where you clock in nine to five.
But the reality is that your employer is not going to treat you like family in all the same ways that they expect you to treat them, for the most part. There are always exceptions. But I generally feel that many people don't understand that well enough and that, especially if you're young and don't have a lot of work experience, you just might be really swayed by it.
“The reality is that your employer is not going to treat you like family in all the same ways that they expect you to treat them.”
JACKIE
Especially if the founder owns twenty, thirty, forty percent of the company, a huge fraction of your labor is exclusively benefiting one person. That's interesting.
Anyway, I wanted to ask about WeWork. I don't know that much about it—I mean, I know enough about it from a cursory point of view, but I don't think about it that often outside of huge mounting valuations and that kind of news. Just because it's not a traditional tech company, right? It's a real estate company with some software. Do you have any thoughts on WeWork as a business and its tactics and what that culture represents in the bigger picture?
ELLEN
I think you can think about WeWork in two ways. One aspect of what's interesting about WeWork is just how dramatically it has grown in the last eight years. How much money it's raised—even today, there was a story about Softbank. I wasn't here earlier because I was working on that.
In that sense, it's a really interesting business. Simply for its rapid rise, it has undeniably become one of the biggest and most interesting—I wouldn't call it a startup anymore—private, venture-backed companies of its crop.
And then I also like to think of it as a culture machine because it is so... I mean, every large tech company ends up with strange, insular, mind-bogglingly self-referential company culture, and I think that happens at Google, at Facebook, at all these places. At WeWork, it's interesting because they're really open about it, and they are so earnest about the way that they present their vision of the world. Even just their slogans—I'm sure by now they have new ones, but they were like, "Better together," "Do what you love," "Make a life, not a living." Hustle is a word they really love.
Anyway, I'm interested in both sides of the company, but I think I find the second one to be more fruitful in thinking about what sort of culture tech is exporting to the greater world. Because if you think about WeWork... you can debate whether it's a tech company, but it's pretty much the essential "not a real tech company under a tech company banner." It's a real estate company.
But they are in this weird position where they export their culture pretty strongly to anyone who is a tenant or member, right? So if you work in a WeWork, you may not feel moved by the idea of their inspirational slogans on the wall, their beautiful citrus water, but you are nevertheless in their space every day, and you get to learn some part of what they do, and the community manager sends you emails about the happy hours and the free beer and the free snacks on the fifth floor.
I have never worked in a WeWork, although I did live in a WeLive for five days, which was crazy but super interesting.
JACKIE
I didn't know WeLive already existed!
ELLEN
It does. It's in two cities. And so there's one in New York and one in DC, and in theory they are building more in Seattle, though my understanding is that it has maybe lost some momentum, but that is at least the plan.
Anyway, WeLive was like WeWork, except WeWork's idea of culture taken even more intensely into a place that is your home. There are a lot of people with interesting thoughts about interior design and the encroaching mass of buildings and spaces and offices and coffee places that all look the same. I wish I had the right vocabulary to describe interior decoration, which I don't.
JACKIE
I was just talking to someone about that the other day, how every tech company looks the same.
ELLEN
I'm going to not say his last name right because I've never met him in person, but Kyle Chayka writes about this topic. I think he may have even written a book about it, but he's all about—
JACKIE
Tracking homogenous interior design?
ELLEN
Yeah. The relentless march of light wood paneling.
JACKIE
Plants.
ELLEN
Hexagonal light coverings and plants and airy spaces.
JACKIE
Gold accents.
ELLEN
Yeah. Gold accents... I'm so guilty of gold accents.
JACKIE
Me, too.
ELLEN
Anyway, as a cultural vehicle, WeWork is pretty powerful in that sense, in that they are doing what a lot of brands do, which is take something that was originally appealing because it was offbeat, like the cool patterns, accent pillows, whatever, and then they put it in every WeWork across a certain region. People don't look at that aspect of them enough, but I think it's important. Because they sell, in theory, community, so all of a sudden there's this really large company that's in the position to be exporting community to many people's workplaces when these workplaces are small and impressionable.
“[WeWork] sells, in theory, community, so all of a sudden there’s this really large company that’s in the position to be exporting community to many people’s workplaces when these workplaces are small and impressionable.”
I know plenty of people who have had a workspace in WeWork, and they left because they didn't like the other people, they thought it was too noisy, it was too expensive, they just wanted more space, other more innocuous and less innocuous reasons. It's not like you're forced to do it. But it is interesting that it is becoming by far the most default option. Although there are plenty of rivals that try to do more adult co-working, so in a way it gets shown for what it is by how people differentiate themselves and they're competing against it.
Anyway, none of that was about what you asked, which was about the rise of how big it is, and I think that's more a statement on SoftBank and their appetite. I don't know that I have huge insights there. In terms of the cultural side, then it's interesting, with the slogans, for instance.
JACKIE
It feels like 2013 or something to me, in terms of the tech industry. I don't know exactly when WeWork started, presumably before that, and so it makes sense that that is the culture that it embodies, but it's fascinating to me that it still does, when I think a lot of the tech industry has slowly started to move away from that, like Facebook no longer has those kinds of slogans everywhere.
ELLEN
They don't still have the propaganda room?
JACKIE
I'm not sure! But there's been a kind of backlash in the last couple of years. I'm thinking, for instance, about the Fiver ads on the subway. Do you think that part of their culture can really last?
ELLEN
It's possible that they have updated some of the slogans I mentioned, but I wonder if, as you get bigger, it is harder to move as quickly away from an idea that you put into place when you were a fifth of the size that they are now. I mean, I'm making up that number, but my guess is that the growth rate has been about that in terms of number of employees and number of places in between now and 2013.
The "Hustle" one, for example, regardless of whether they still have that on X number of walls, in X number of WeWorks, that was one that I remember really embodying to me, similar to what you said about Fiver, this idea that you should be working insanely hard towards something, and sometimes it's not always obvious what the benefit is for you.
I think they meant "Hustle" to inspire the [tenants] who work at WeWork, but it was also language and terminology that they used with their some of their lowest-paid workers—not cleaners, but community managers, people who run the offices in WeWorks. Their job is to change the coffee, respond to member emails, whatever—it just runs the gamut, and it's a really hard job, long hours, and there were various labor complaints against them for allegations of not paying proper overtime wages, not paying proper minimum wage based on hours worked, as well as different opinions about what a manager is, not to get into the details too much.
But the point was, some of these workers who talked to me for the stories felt that the language around "Hustle," and working really hard for the sake of doing your mission and your job, was misused to make them feel like they should be putting more work into their job than they were legally required to do or that they were explicitly asked to do. Illegal amounts of work.
With WeWork, they are probably in tune with what the sort of changes that you were describing, but I don't know, they still have WeWork summer camp every year, which is like a big festival.
JACKIE
Yeah, that's more or less what I mean. It feels like some parts of the tech industry have moved away from like "Peak Hustle," from everything that I read about WeWork, it seems like they're still in that phase, culturally.
ELLEN
I mean, their workforce is a lot more varied, a lot more geographically spread out. If you work in HQ, you're in New York, not usually here, although they have a lot of locations in San Francisco.
JACKIE
And I can imagine how they're opening in new places where tech is less common, and so "Hustle" culture is new there, and it's exciting.
ELLEN
Yeah, in all this talk, I think it's important to keep in mind that they're, for example, growing super fast in Asia, and it's hard to know—what feels right for you and me in San Francisco is not necessarily going to be the same elsewhere.
JACKIE
We're so jaded. So bored of the tech industry.
ELLEN
We're all just here with our phones on grayscale—like, we're over it. But yeah, I don't pretend to understand what feels cutting-edge elsewhere than my world.
JACKIE
Okay, so I've been thinking a lot, especially in the context of all these stories related to tech employees speaking about poor conditions in the company or unethical practices that the company is doing or whatever, and now is a time when that's surfacing a lot more, more and more frequently. Unfair and unethical behavior keeps getting exposed, but I think the vast majority of people are really afraid to talk to reporters and worried about repercussions, no matter what.
I'm not talking about throwing shade at their current employer or revealing trade secrets or anything like that—even with generic commentary about how much they've been paid in the past, there is this reflexive attitude around, "Talking about that is bad, something bad will happen." Do you think that stance is typical of all industries or particularly the tech industry?
For instance, for the equity gap story you wrote, a lot of people were unwilling to talk about instances in which their previous employers discriminated against them, even off the record.
ELLEN
Yeah. I mean, I think employers have for decades tried to control flow of information about the company by giving warnings that are sometimes true and sometimes not a hundred percent true about what repercussions you might face. If you talk to the press—obviously I come at this subject with a completely self-interested angle, but I do truly feel that the way that the most important information about what really happens in the tech industry comes to light is when people who are involved in doing it or were involved in doing it share that information on a large platform.
And that used to be talking to a reporter, but it doesn't have to be. I think Susan Fowler, for example, is maybe the best example of that—she didn't [talk to a reporter], but she just wrote this hugely powerful essay, and the domino effect was undeniable. So it doesn't have to be by going to a reporter, but to me it almost goes back to this feeling of... I'm really fascinated by the way that companies build that feeling of loyalty in their employees.
Having never been someone who's running a company, I'm maybe not in a position to value all the positives about having super-tight loyalty with your employees. But I can imagine that that would be an incredibly powerful force to have within your company.
I'm usually on the other side. I'm trying to get people to do something that is personally risky for them but hopefully feels like it has [importance]. Usually people are idealistically driven if they are willing to take a personal risk to share something for which they might face repercussions. And so usually it's for a good reason—it's not to try to hurt people, but I think that that's often the way it's seen. I would kill to be inside of meetings at Facebook or another big company where they talk about leakers and what that means to the company, not because I think it would be scandalous, but because that's a part of the culture of a company that is so fascinating to me. It does often pit what I think can be a rational choice as an emotional and destructive one. Right?
Let's say you're in a company where, your entire life, you've been told that talking to the press is a betrayal, hurtful, only used as a way to wreak havoc and revenge. And then you're there, and maybe you witness something that you think is wrong, and you try to go through the internal pathways to get it resolved, and it doesn't get resolved, and you start to lose faith in the systems at your company. I imagine a lot of people are plagued with intense guilt, or they're like, "Look, I feel like the right decision is to speak out and yet my entire career I've been told that that's something that only terrible people do."
I've absorbed, over the years, snippets of what that emotional bond is like, how it is created in a new employee, how it is sustained, even internally at large companies—the methods employees have to ask comms people about a story that they don't understand. For example, I think it's been reported that Facebook has internal groups where employees can post stories where they're like, "I don't understand why this story is in the news," and the comms team will explain. From the outside perspective, from someone who's never worked at one of those companies, for me to understand how that bond is formed, would be really hard, and I just find it fascinating.
There's a part of it that is useful. In order to build anything that has high stakes, you need to be able to control information about it, but then in many cases it seems like it's taken a step further where, even if you do something for arguably the right reasons, that goes against what we [the company] want you to do. It's not like we're going to say that that goes against what we want you to do. We're going to say, "People who do that are bad, people who do that hate the company." I don't know, there's just something really human about it. And by no means do I think this pattern is specific to tech; I just think about it all the time.
JACKIE
Well, I guess the way I think about it, I think how it might be different in the tech industry is just that, culturally, the tech industry is so over-the-top. The benefits, the perks, are lavished upon you, and you refer to your CEO on a first-name basis, and—
ELLEN
Oh my god. Sorry, quick sidenote. I only ever hear people in tech referring to the CEO of their company as "my CEO," which is a phrasing that—I'm not used to it. Like, the person is not CEO of you.
JACKIE
Whoa, yeah.
ELLEN
They're the CEO of your company. Anyway, sorry, go back. First name is another way to do it.
JACKIE
Yeah, and so I feel like it's also that—it creates a sense of guilt, that you've been treated so well, and, in spite of that, you would do something, anything, that the company wouldn't want you to do.
ELLEN
And, on top of that, again, there have been mission-driven companies for decades and decades, but so much of the pitch to work at a tech company over another, in the end, for in-demand software engineers such as yourself, comes down to, "Do I feel personally aligned with this mission?" And so you feel like even more is at stake, that it isn't just a job. It's been said a million times, but it's not just a job; it's your calling. That bond can be great, and it can be really terrible. It's just really powerful, and I think I see it used for good and for bad.
JACKIE
“It’s not just a job; it’s your calling. That bond can be great, and it can be really terrible.”
On the subject of leaking—there was recently an incident with the Google Dragonfly situation, where there was information getting live-tweeted by a journalist, and then the observation impacted what was happening.
ELLEN
Right, they stopped the meeting.
JACKIE
Do you ever think about—I'm sure you do—but do you ever think about whether your reporting can have that impact, and how do you factor that into what you do and don't print? I mean, that was a really specific example.
ELLEN
I think that one is an interesting case because it was, you're right, the observation effect meant that the meeting ended. If you're talking more generally, how do I decide for sources who put themselves at some risk to share information how much guidance to give them, to talk them through that process?
JACKIE
Well, I meant specifically in the context of leaks—journalists often have this stance that leaks are good because they increase transparency and public pressure, and so it can help a certain cause, but there's another stance of employees with that same cause who are like, "We have some sway here, and leaks damage our exposure to information, so potentially publishing more information might actually make it harder to achieve our shared goal."
ELLEN
I don't know that I've been in a position that's exactly like that. Usually it's someone who is wrestling with a decision about how much information—either about something on which they worked or of which they have knowledge or about themselves—how much information that they want to be published. I think any responsible journalist would talk [them through it].
The number one line is that we're not lawyers. We can't give legal advice, and many people who talk to me are people who are talking to press for the first time, and there's no reason to pull anything on these people. You just want to try to give them all the information you can about what might happen. Your responsibility is to make sure that they understand what is going to be published, generally, so that there are no surprises there on the process, and talk them through every definition of "on background," "not for attribution," "off the record." Everyone has different ideas of what these terms mean, and I found that it's not good enough to just say it's on background because people treat that really differently from journalist to journalist.
I feel moved to make sure people understand what that process is like, especially because it's scary to talk reporter, and if it's your first time... I get so anxious worrying that someone is going to feel like I didn't make it clear enough to them what was going to happen. I worry about it all the time. Anyway, separately about publishing stories that might impact the events, I don't know that I've ever personally been in that position.
JACKIE
Yeah, that makes sense. To me, it's just interesting that, if one employee has decided to leak, maybe they're not on the same page with other employees who are like, "Oh, no, we had this trust, and now they won't even tell us what they're going to do." It's an interesting tension.
ELLEN
Sure. Yeah.
JACKIE
So privacy. It is a perennial issue, but lately it's just been every other day that there's a new privacy issue or security breach or whatever. For instance, with Facebook, the fifty million users and the 2FA phone numbers. What do you see as the future of that? Do you think that there will be government regulation, and, if so, how would that impact tech companies? There's now a camp that says, "Who cares about privacy? That's how the internet has become what it is; people got services for free."
ELLEN
Oh, I think that's a great question because, in the last year or two, I have tried to notice more often— and many people have as well—the behavioral cues that control 40% of my day. That's including my sleeping hours, so a lot of my waking hours.
I'm still mad about the 2FA incident with Facebook. Facebook wants your phone number for a lot of reasons. And I think Kashmir Hill has done incredible reporting about what ways Facebook can use even snippets of information by you that you don't even provide to them, that other people provide to them on your behalf, to map out every person you've ever met, the people you know, what you're likely to want, how to show you ads, and all that. So I highly recommend her work.
Knowing that and then receiving prompts over and over again when you're trying to log in to Facebook... You're at a vulnerable time because you just lost access to your account, and you're like, "Oh, I really want to make sure that doesn't happen again." Facebook's like, "Okay, great, you haven't provided your phone number to us yet. How about you provide your phone number so that you can be sure that you can log in again in the future?" Which is maybe 2% of the reason why they want your phone number, but they don't say that. I don't know who said it, but design is not neutral. You just know that—
JACKIE
People deliberated over it.
ELLEN
Making this word blue and bold and this other word black and not bold is really significant! We don't control [how we perceive this kind of information]. We understand so much less of what our brains are doing than many people realize, and that's a lesson I've had put into my head over and over again. So, zooming back out, when you talk about whether people will care about privacy, I'm not sure it's even important whether they want to care about it because what's more powerful is what everyone else wishes that they would pick. In each little moment where you wonder if you should give your phone number, the easiest way is the way that people will go.
Not that I'm an expert on how to get consumer adoption of privacy, but I imagine one of the better ways to get people to take preventative measures that help keep their digital lives secure isn't by making them care about it; I think it's more powerful to make something that's easier for people to use. A password manager is probably much much more effective at getting people to improve their security online than proselytizing about how important it is to care about personal security.
“We understand so much less of what our brains are doing than many people realize.”
JACKIE
Well, so password managers work because people can make money from it, so maybe there's a parallel.
ELLEN
Yeah, if it takes having a business model to make someone build a good product, that is good. I'm not opposed to that. I don't think making money off of something is tainted in any way. It's just become more clear to me over time how much less control we have over what decisions we make than we think we do. It's pretty disturbing to think about it every day. Regulation. I don't know. I'm not good on that one.
JACKIE
Yeah, I do think making privacy the default is the only way people will act in a way that puts privacy first.
ELLEN
I'd be curious for your thoughts. How do you think companies end up making decisions that go against their short-term self-interest? Do you just have to make it so much more painful for them to go down that path than the other way?
One of my housemates here is a behavioral economist, and she just thinks all day about how to get people to do something by either increasing the benefits to doing the action, increasing the risks to not doing the action, and lowering the barriers to doing the action. I mean, it's really basic, and so maybe it's obvious to people, but once you see those three options, I think that's just your first tiny step toward understanding why you do what you do. Removing the barriers to something—that's Netflix auto-play. Increasing the benefits to something—she usually uses an example of that is putting mint in toothpaste. You want people to brush their teeth, so then you also make it refreshing and wonderful. I wish I had a good tech example for that one.
But you get the idea, right? Once you start to see these patterns, you can do a lot.
JACKIE
I think it's probably making it painful because it will always be the most profitable option to have more data. From an engineering standpoint, it makes your job easier. The more data you have, the more you can do with it. Otherwise, you're just guessing and approximating, and the result is not great. So I think the push, the tendency, will always be toward that. I find it hard to imagine that people would ever have the ideal state be less data to use.
ELLEN
Do you think a stronger penalty is public opinion or regulation, if you think the best mechanism is increasing penalties?
JACKIE
I don't know. GDPR is a pretty interesting example because I've talked to a couple people about that, and that certainly had an impact. A lot of people I know spent a lot of time building or rebuilding their services to be GDPR-compliant. So, at least to the extent that we ask whether companies will do anything, it worked. I don't know what the end game of that specifically will be—I think we'll have to measure that. But it's one potential interesting case study in five, ten years.
ELLEN
Yeah, that's good. Because I don't have that lens into how much work it took to do it. It does seem like, in the end, it was, at least on paper, an effective enforcer. Work was done.
JACKIE
People spent time on it.
ELLEN
Companies sent the emails we all received. I think revisiting in a few years, figuring out whether it had the intended long-term effect, would be fascinating.
JACKIE
Okay, so I usually ask one more question. I always try to end these conversations on a more positive note because they can get pretty bleak sometimes. Is there anything in tech that excites you right now?
ELLEN
I'm pulling a blank. Sometimes I still think about this moment that I had a few years ago where I was going to travel overseas and I was like, "I wish I could download Google's maps ahead of time so that I didn't have to use data when traveling to figure out where I was going." Somehow it came up in conversation, and someone was like, "Oh, that already exists." And it's such a wonderful product. I use it all the time. Every time I use it, I'm so happy. It is exactly what I want—specifically offline. Just specifically.
I remember I had some shitty workaround where I would load the route ahead of time, then I would keep it open in the car, and then inevitably if you made a wrong turn it wouldn't redirect properly because it didn't have access to the internet. So maybe it's the little joys like that.
“The things that a technology can help you do today are the things that you need it to do for you tomorrow, and I hate that cycle.”
But, then, see, even Google Maps is problematic! They track everything. I turned off all my location-tracking on Google Maps, and even then I'm worried that I missed something. What a disappointing answer.
I do think people people build tools that are really useful to other humans, and we didn't have access to them before, but as soon as I'm saying that, I'm already thinking—the things that a technology can help you do today are the things that you need it to do for you tomorrow, and I hate that cycle. I hate that, like, I grew up reading paper maps with my mom when I was a kid. My mom showed me how to flip over the map and look for the street name, and we would go and plot it out on the map. It was an interesting skill that I had, an experience that people born even five or ten years after me are never going to have, and our dependency makes me despair sometimes, but maybe that's just the nature of the world. Maybe that's the nature of tools like Google Maps.
It is undeniably a wonderful product that has helped so many people in a moment of need. But the tech line of, "Well, the good outweighs the bad..." I mean, that's a whole other discussion—we can dissect that another time. That has been discussed a lot lately because that was a line that came up in David Marcus's response to the WhatsApp story, with Brian Acton. He said that the good outweighs the bad. That was a really interesting statement. If you ever want to talk about the rhetoric of Facebook executives, I would love to talk more about that someday.
