We all fell for Facebook’s utopianism, but the mask is at last being torn away

The spell has been weakening for a while, but last week it finally broke: Facebook is just a company, like the rest. We’ve suspected it for a while, thanks in part to the reporting of Carole Cadwalladr in the Observer. Already this year it was unforgivably slow to acknowledge its role in the Rohingya genocide, was issued the maximum fine available by the UK’s information commissioner for not looking after user data, and hired a rightwing opposition research group to look into George Soros, after the financier turned philanthropist had loudly criticised it.

Each episode was accompanied by the usual apologies and we’ll-do-betters. But last week’s scandal – an email cache released by the tenacious digital, culture, media and sport committee – is different. It revealed the inner workings of a calculating corporate hellbent on growth and crushing competition. The most damning exchange was between Justin Osofsky, a Facebook VP, and Mark Zuckerberg himself. Osofsky proposed limiting the access of Vine – a potential rival – to certain Facebook data after it had released a new feature. “Yup, go for it,” replied the boss. You might not have noticed, but Vine doesn’t exist any more.

Most companies do this sort of thingall the time. Opposition research is standard practice, and what business doesn’t seek to outmanoeuvre rivals? But Facebook had spent years convincing us that it wasn’t like other companies. It was absolutely not The Man and making money was largely coincidental to its social mission of connecting humanity. So when we learn it spends millions on lobbying, buys or crushes competitors and hard-balls regulators, well, it’s just more annoying. Correction: Facebook is different from other companies, of course. By having such a major role in mediating our news and information, it is potentially far more dangerous. But it’s too easy to say Facebook is malicious or evil. Anyone who thinks the company doesn’t care about sexism or extremism on their platform because it earns a few extra advertising dollars isn’t thinking it through properly. And it’s done a few decent, profit-cutting things lately, like making a dent in fake news and cracking down on illegal porn (no matter what the home secretary says). And did you see all that interference in the recent US midterms? Me neither. This has been mostly ignored, because everyone likes piling in when the playground bully is hurt.

The problem with Facebook isn’t malevolence, but something worse: utopianism. The company is defined by an unshakable belief in the power of “connectivity”, and characterised by the default instinct that problems are fixed with more tech. Maybe that’s because its top people are engineers. They are modern-day French revolutionaries, dreaming up a world run on abstract principles of connection, efficiency, networks and data. In my experience, Facebookers are nearly always decent people who believe in the emancipatory power of digital technology. But at least you know where you stand with evil capitalists. The true believers can justify anything in the name of their noble pursuit.

Back in 1995, in a highly perceptive paper, leftwing academics Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron described what they called “the Californian Ideology”: a fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco and entrepreneurial free-market zeal. A profound faith in the emancipatory qualities of technologies allowed these west coast techies to paper over inconsistencies between the yuppie and hippy ideals with the promise that when the revolution arrives everyone will be great and cool and fulfilled and rich. To get to utopia you must smash through old institutions and replace them with something new and digital. Steve Jobs – at once an acid-dropping hippy and ruthless businessman – was the Californian Ideology incarnate.

Over the years the big tech firms have cultivated this image: even though massive multibillion-dollar corporations with PR teams, they pitch themselves as anti-establishment; even though built on a model of data extraction and surveillance capitalism, they purport to be exciting technologies of liberation. It must be confusing to be Mark Zuckerberg sometimes. In 2014, only 2% of Facebook staff were black and less than a third were women. It was also caught providing inaccurate information to the European Commission during its acquisition of WhatsApp. But later that year, Zuckerberg said that “our philosophy is that we care about people first”. The worse these companies behave and the richer they become, the more they seem to spend on looking cool and talking about community. This cannot be a coincidence.

Silicon Valley runs on a Faustian pact: money in exchange for world-changing ideas. But investment brings new responsibilities. Suddenly there are profit margins, quarterlies and growth targets. This dynamic is rarely acknowledged, but it was visible in one telling exchange from last week’s email cache, about the possibility of accessing sensitive data from Android phones: “This is a pretty high risk thing to do from a PR perspective,” writes one Facebook exec, “but it appears that the growth team will charge ahead and do it.” If you’re saving the world, you have to “charge ahead and do it”.

And what of building an industrial-scale advertising machine that sells human attention to the highest bidder? If that plays to your weaknesses or jealousies or prejudices, if that turns elections into a miserable science of invisible micro-targeting – too bad! It’s the price of bringing the world together and building a global community. It’s always worth being suspicious when a man’s direct financial interests and stated principles marry so closely, but a CEO motivated by money alone would have walked away by now. Those who know him best – including critics – insist Zuckerberg really is a true believer.

Will anything change? Surveys show that people are suspicious of social media platforms – but keep on sharing and clicking regardless. And, yes, there are some good things about Facebook too. But resentful users do not make for a sound business model, and I suspect the coming years will see competitor platforms that promise greater privacy, built on a different approach to the “free, for data” cul-de-sac we’re trapped in. True, network effects are hard to overcome – everyone is on Facebook because everyone else is on Facebook – but the ghost of the once dominant MySpace haunts every tech CEO. One thing I’m sure of, however, is that nothing will change Zuckerberg’s mind. When the next scandal breaks, as it surely will, he’ll apologise, and then talk about connectivity – no matter how disconnected it is from reality.

Jamie Bartlett is the author of The People Vs Tech