In January 2004, Mark Zuckerberg registered thefacebook.com and changed the world.
It was the dawn of social media: Facebook’s launch rewrote the rules of human interaction and engagement, and it fired a starting gun for other tech companies hustling to gain a stake in the new, promising, and profoundly exciting market for online communities.
But in the years that followed, Facebook would also force us to grapple with extremely complex legal and ethical challenges — many truly unprecedented in nature. For example, the site’s meteoric rise raised questions about the legality and ethics of political influence; it gave birth to a new type of information warfare; and it exacerbated some of the worst traits of humans: our ability to bully, victimize, and objectify others.
Just a few months after Zuckerberg introduced the world to Facebook, a New York socialite with a remarkable network, a wicked sense of humor, and a gift for producing brilliant but biting social commentary launched her own version of the social media platform, or more accurately, a spoof of it: Catch27.com.
On the site, individuals were encouraged to put themselves up for sale or buy and sell friends, like stocks or commodities. It was all a joke, admitted creator E. Jean Carroll, the famed columnist who would later go on to sue Donald Trump for sexual harassment.
But for all of Catch27.com’s comedic value, it was also trying to teach us something — to warn us, according to Rob Lalka, a professor and executive director of the Albert Lepage Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Tulane University.
At Columbia Business School's second annual Think Bigger Innovation Summit, Lalka spoke about his new book, The Venture Alchemist: How Big Tech Turned Profits Into Power, and the larger meaning behind Carroll’s satirical social media platform. He noted that, yes, the site was a lark — designed to poke fun at Facebook — and not something that was taken particularly seriously at the time, but it also was trying to do something important.
“She was mocking Facebook because she knew that there were problems,” Lalka said. “She was trying to bring decency into social media and into online marketplaces, and into, frankly, the dating world and social society.” Carroll, in effect, was implicitly asking whether Facebookwas actually making the world a better place or bringing out the worst in us.
Lalka shared one other anecdote. In 2004 — long before artificial intelligence entered our common lexicon and long before online avatars were commonplace — Peter Thiel wrote the following in a journal: “The price of abandoning oneself to such an artificial representation is always too high, because the decisions that are avoided are always too important by making people forget that they have souls. The Antichrist will succeed in swindling people out of them.”
It might sound somewhat cryptic — a little lofty, perhaps — but it’s a worthy warning nonetheless, Lalka said.
In our quest to create ventures that change the world and transform the way we live, it’s imperative to ensure we don’t lose sight of what’s truly important. We must constantly ask ourselves whether what we’re creating is actually in the interest of our collective well-being. Thinking bigger means thinking better, and it means doing so responsibly. The thrill of unchartered territory can be intoxicating, but let’s not forget what’s really important.