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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

Back in computing pre-history, Apple (Computer) claimed ownership of the Satanic fruit that got us humans tossed out of paradise 6+ millennia ago. Trendiness wasn’t part of the plan.

In the 1990s, Microsoft claimed ownership of the architectural element that lets the sun shine in while keeping the bad weather out. Trendiness wasn’t part of its plan either.

Which brings us to Meta, facebook’s 180 degree out-of-phase attempt at trendiness.

Here at IS Survivor Publishing we take trendiness seriously. We also take nonsensical half-donkeyed (figure it out) outrage-factory-driven commentary seriously.

“Meta” is slang for ironic self-awareness, which I guess would make it trendy, except that if Mark Zuckerberg is capable of ironic self-awareness he’s kept it well-hidden.

If corporations have personality traits, few would accuse Meta, nee facebook, of ironic self-awareness either. “Meta” is like someone past their prime saying “I’m hip! Trust me! I’m still hip!”

Then there’s the infinity half of Meta’s logo. There is a certain disturbing honesty to it, implying as it does that with the name change Zuckerberg is claiming ownership of everything in the virtual universe.

Which would be less disconcerting if his vision … that we’ll all spend most of our lives in his “metaverse” … weren’t so troublingly reminiscent of Isaac Asimov’s masterpiece, The Naked Sun.

The name change to Meta is the former facebook’s response to the outrage over how it’s fanned the flames of misinformation and disinformation by knowingly spreading it to those most likely to (1) believe conspiracy theories so inane they make flat-earther-enthusiasm seem sane by comparison; (2) read and like (sorry, “Like”) the next conspiracy theory to reach their inboxes, and (3) be so inflamed by these conspiracy theories that they’ll take action on them, with “action” running the gamut from voting for lunatics to invading Congress.

Regular readers here will know I’ve been railing against intellectual relativism in all its forms for more than 15 years now (“Political Science,” 10/3/2005) and the ease with which the Internet can be subverted to spread misinformation starting 10 years before that, in the World Wide Web’s earliest days (“Trusted Information Providers,” 3/17/1997). So I have little sympathy for facebook as it attempts to deal with all the criticism.

But I think the criticism mostly misses the root cause.

One complaint is that facebook was motivated by a desire to maximize profits using all legal means at its disposal.

In the wise words of Mom, “What if everyone did that?”

Oh, wait. That’s what every corporation is supposed to do. Some do more harm than others, and where many pollute the physical world, facebook pollutes the virtual.

But where critics have completely missed the mark is the complaint about facebook being (allegedly) most likely to recommend the most inflammatory posts to those most likely to Like them.

Assume for a moment that facebook is guilty as charged. What it’s guilty of isn’t deliberately spreading misinformation and disinformation to the gullible. It’s guilty of a practice successful retailers have engaged in since retailing supplanted bartering all those millennia ago: cross-selling.

Amazon suggests that if you read Book A you’re likely to enjoy Book B. facebook, in contrast, suggests that if you believe in Jewish space lasers and Like reading posts about them, you’re also likely to believe the entire universe and all of your memories were created last Thursday.

What facebook and Amazon are doing is equivalent.

Except, of course, that in Amazon’s product and service space cross-selling is, if annoying, harmless. In facebook’s marketplace it’s toxic.

Bob’s last word: In 1990 Republicans proposed a superior approach to environmental regulation. They called it cap-and-trade. How it worked: To reduce the sulfur dioxide emissions that were causing acid rain, polluters could, instead of reducing their own emissions, buy pollution credits from another company that already had.

It worked and worked well.

And so I propose Congress pass the Keep the Joint Running Toxic Meme Reduction Act. It would set an overall industry cap on the number of toxic memes that can be posted on social media. When that limit has been reached, any entity that hasn’t yet posted its share could trade them to another that wants to post another toxic meme of its own.

Write your elected officials.

Bob’s sales pitch: The Archives are back!

Okay, that probably didn’t warrant an exclamation point, especially as Search never went away. With both now working you now have full access (at no additional charge) to 26 years of Keep the Joint Running and its InfoWorld-published predecessor, the “IS Survival Guide.”

There’s good stuff in there, most of it still relevant today.

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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

A ManagementSpeak from 2008: “This is an opportunity to expand your value to the organization and build your career.” The translation: Budget cuts prevent us from hiring the people we need, so we’re increasing your responsibilities and workload (and thanks to Peter Bushman for spotting and translating it).

In 2008, and for who knows how long before that, the promise of career advancement … the promise, not the delivery … has been enough to encourage initiative and hard work delivered in unpaid overtime, donated by career-minded employees in the expectation that the promise will be fulfilled.

Making the promise has no budget impact, a fact many managers take advantage of. And as the actual promotion depends on a more senior or management position being open, failing to fulfill the promise is never the promiser’s fault.

Smart leaders do their best to deliver on the promise, and not make promises they can’t keep. They’re smart, that is, if initiative comes in the form of useful ideas and the hard work and unpaid overtime are executed well.

The career-advancement promise is, that is, contingent on the delivery of high-value results. If ideas are foolish and work is of poor quality? That’s a case of more not always being better, and ought to result in a candid conversation. Employees deserve an explanation of how and why their results don’t qualify.

No fraud, no harm, no foul. It’s a formula that can work well for all parties.

But imagine the workplace evolves as suggested in this space last week, with employees eschewing traditional forms of career advancement. It might be wanting just a job and not a career. It might be a more radical shift away from employment altogether, as people figure out how to piece together a rewarding life and the wherewithal to live it by contracting, by driving for Lyft and Uber, and otherwise signing up for the “gig economy.”

Whatever it is, an unfortunate consequence (for management) is less reason for employees to show initiative, let alone to donate unpaid hours to the CEO’s retirement fund. “An honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay,” is more likely to dominate employee culture than “We give it 110 percent.”

On the other side of the coin, if fewer employees have career aspirations that means, if we’re going to be cynical about it, that managers have more opportunities to dangle in front of the remaining employees who still do. It’s simple math: fewer employees will be competing for roughly the same number of career-advancing positions, so their odds improve.

But what if you’re in the workforce and don’t want the Hobson’s Choice of either climbing the career ladder at the expense of living the life you want, or living the life you want without the sense of personal achievement that has, in the past come from career advancement?

Right now the best you can probably do is sign up with one or more IT services firms that specialize in providing contract talent to their clients. As you succeed in your assignments your billing rate will track your level of accomplishment, as will the title next to your name: The Role you’re sold as being competent in, prefixed by nothing, “Senior,” or “Master.” Along with the prefix comes increasing difficulty and level of interest in the assignments you take on.

Bob’s last word: We are, I think, in the middle of a major transition in how businesses and the workforce relate to each other. The current state of this transition is what we’ve been exploring last week and here.

But we shouldn’t confuse the current state with the end point. If current trends continue, my own forecast is that this will all evolve into the reincarnation of the guild.

A guild, in case you’re unfamiliar with the term, is a membership-based home for practitioners of a trade. It has some characteristics of a union, others of credentialing bodies, along with the role services firms now play in finding work for the professionals they represent.

Companies needing staff with a particular set of skills would no longer go through the dysfunctional recruiting process they and the targets of their potential affection are currently afflicted with. Instead they’d contact the relevant guild, which would be responsible for providing appropriately skilled workers, invoicing for their services, and paying the workers for their time and effort.

This doesn’t mean “employment” would be entirely a relic of a quaint and rosy past. I do think we’ll see a significant shift in this direction.

Bob’s sales pitch: CIO.com has published the second of three articles on Technical Architecture in my IT 101 series. You’ll find it here: “Evaluating technical architecture: 11 key criteria and how to apply them.” If you need to catch up, you’ll find the first technical architecture article in the series here: “Technical architecture: What IT does for a living.”

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