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Comment by drdrek | Hacker News Reader

This is exactly the type of people the cultural purge in big tech came to flush out. Trying to change a multi billion dollar company from the inside is delusional, self serving, narcissistic and ineffective. Who the hell do you think you are in the great machine of 100,000+ employees companies, of billions invested in them.

The change is going to be political, regulatory. These companies always can't change until regulation is there, and then they miraculously adapt. If you took big tech money for 7 years you were not part of the solution.

The lengths some people will go to self explain why they were not egotistical is amazing! This is not an expose, everything is well known, this is a books worth of convincing herself she is a good person after all.

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I don't think this is about convincing anyone that she's a good person. She's forthright about her instincts and values and the institutions she worked at that fostered her understanding of the world.

She documents in detail critical moments where Facebook executives made decisions that exemplified their incompetence and damaged their potential impact.

That the "cultural purge" in big tech is flushing out people with these instincts is precisely why the industry is flailing and groveling at the feet of power, for they have no internal compass save for growth for growth's sake.

Everyone can see that now laid bare on these pages, and these companies that rely on their user's willingness to exchange details about their personal lives for cheap dopamine hits may find that generosity well run dry.

I don't understand your "delusional, self serving, narcissistic and ineffective" / "egotistical" point. All of this would apply to people trying to change things from the outside too.

Who the hell do you think you are in the great machine of hundreds of millions of US citizens, or billions of people globally, to think you can effect political and regulatory change?

And yet, this is how things change, by people working to change them, from either the inside or the outside. Maybe your point is right that anyone trying to be a change agent is self serving and egotistical. But don't fool yourself that there is some big difference here between internal and external activists.

You are equating "Hard" with impossible. Its impossible to turn a for profit company against itself from the inside, its hard to push for regulatory change. One system is built to create shareholder value, the other is to create social value. Its like a vegan working in a pig farm for 7 years to change the industry from the inside, at some point you need to ask yourself, is she just whitewashing her time there.

This just isn't true that one thing is hard and the other is impossible. Both things are nearly impossible to a similar degree.

What system is "built ... to create social value"? You mean government?

My friend, I'm sorry, but no. Government is built to wield power. Bending that power toward social value is just as hard as bending a business toward ethical behavior.

That's what the author (the linked blog's author, not the book's) also believes and concludes his post with.

Lina Khan just needed a couple more years.

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