I don’t want to work on your shitty blockchain project: especially you, Facebook

At the moment, I appear to be some kind of unicorn. I’m a no bullshit dozen year veteran of using math and machine learning to solve  business problems. I’ve also got some chops in blockchain which I am considerably more humble about. I am a real life machine learning blockchain guy. I don’t actually ride to work on a unicycle while wearing silver pants, but I probably could get away with it. As such, recruiters looking to cash in on the blockchain chuckwagon  seem  unable to leave me alone, despite my explicitly asking them to do so.

It boggles my mind that there even exist recruiters for blockchain. After the blockchain annus mirabilis of 2017, anyone who knows a few useful things about the subject is almost certainly productively employed and probably fairly unconcerned with stuff like money. I’d posit that any blockchain type who can’t find productive employment on socially useful projects or isn’t in danger of financial independence either  doesn’t feel like working, doesn’t care about money or doesn’t actually know anything about blockchain. In the former cases you can’t recruit them, and in the latter case, you really shouldn’t.

Of course there are no shortage of faux “experts” who wouldn’t know a Merkle-tree from a KD-tree. Usually these same “experts” were or would have been touting themselves as “AI” or machine learning thought leaders a few months prior, and IoT, augmented reality, clean tech, “dat cloud” and … I don’t remember what the litany of  marketing diarrhea was being squirted out of Silly Con Valley’s corporate orifices before then. I have better things to use that brain cell for.

On the off chance that someone who is competent in this subject were looking for a job, there are obvious places to go. The crypto currency exchanges are decent places that will  incubate many new ventures; Gemini would be my pick. Their exchange is technologically far and away the best there is, and based on my experiences so far, it’s also the best run. There is good reason for this; the Winkelvii struck me as a couple of smart, honest and diligent guys. Better than the exchanges are the companies and foundations running the various blockchain projects themselves. Crypto investment funds will be an interesting place to make a buck. Right now it’s shooting fish in a barrel and there are a lot of morons doing it, but some of them are going to accumulate tremendous wealth, and there are direct, obvious and not so obvious ways a blockchain expert can help them do this. Or, start your own blockchain project. There is much work to do, and even though it is more difficult to fund new projects than last year, good projects will be funded, and now is the time. Whatever solutions win either already exist or they will shortly.  Other decent ideas: one of the big accounting firms, the banks, various corporate contributors to hyperledger fabric.

Of course, I don’t want any of this: I’m exactly where I want to be. I am helping good people fix the internet and save it from corporate weasels. Every day I get up and help do my bit to make things better. It’s a nice feeling. Problems are pretty interesting too.

But if I did want another job, the very last place on earth I would work is Facebook. Facebook is corporate syphilis. I keep telling them this. I even went through the process of quitting their service and wrote a whole blog on it. They don’t listen. It’s almost like they don’t give a shit when people tell them things. I was polite the first time, joking they could have my services if they buy my company. No more.

When I say Facebook is corporate syphilis, I am not engaging in hyperbole. I consider tobacco companies to be more ethical and serving a higher social purpose. Tobacco companies employ factory workers, farmers, shopkeepers and .. they keep doctors in business. Tobacco is more sociable than Facebook; smokers must meet face to face now that they are banished to the outdoors. Hell, smoking is probably physiologically healthier than spending hours a day noodling with your nerd dildo on ‘tardbook; at least you get up and walk around once an hour.  Supposedly nicotine is a prophylactic against Parkinsons disease, even if the most popular delivery method does kind of give you cancer. Facebook isn’t prophylactic against anything but having a life. Unlike Facebook,  some people want and enjoy nicotine. Nobody in the history of the human race has ever decided they want something like Facebook in their lives. “Gee I want a fraudulent advertising service that ruins and commodifies my relationships, wastes my time, makes me depressed, decays the moral fiber of entire civilizations, causes mass hysteria, spies on me and sells me out for pocket change, is as addictive as heroin,  is the bones of a hellscape surveillance state and is impossible to live without in the modern world; SIGN ME UP YO.”

Even gambling syndicates serve a higher social purpose than Facebook. The gambling rackets provide subsidies for entertainment, jobs for hundreds of thousands of decent working class people, and they somehow manage to employ more and more interesting applied math types than Facebook does. Facebook has all of the addictive and time wasting qualities of gambling, applied to more people, causing more social corrosion and employing fewer people. Facebook really is corporate syphilis.

 

Their excuse for existence is that Facebook “brings people together.”  CBS news used to bring people together; everyone would watch 60 minutes and talk about it at the water cooler. Facebook is a narcissism factory which causes moral panics, ridiculous rumor propagation, argument between friends, social fragmentation, alienation and even mass suicide. It’s also so obviously rotting the social fabric of the internet and society at large, even the debauched whores in the media are noticing. Facebook’s walled garden is wrecking the economics of the content providers and entertainers that make the internets interesting and worthwhile. It’s run by opportunistic mountebanks and sinister robots who … well, assuming they aren’t actual comic book villains, they sure do a reasonable impersonation. The PR these yoyos get is at best Stalinistic nonsense; at worst, people just sucking up to money and power. Speaking of Stalinism, Facebook employs literal former Stasi agents to censor and snitch on people for … saying things. Think about that. They expect me to work for a company that employs East German Secret Police; in precisely the same capacity as they were used in the former East German Workers paradise. I wonder what their dental plan is like? Maybe the one described in Marathon Man?

 

The recruiters (4 so far counting outside contractors) tell me there is some little Eichmann at Facebook who suffers under the delusion I would work in their cubicle jonestown. I will not. Not as long as I have a kidney I can sell to Ukrainian kidney merchants,  hands to shovel shit, or a sword to fall on. Facebook needs blockchain and machine learning people the same way they need a Manhattan project on biological warfare.

I am no boy scout, but I do still harbor a vague moral sense. Facebook is bad and anyone who works there who is not an active saboteur or malingerer should be deeply ashamed of themselves.   The only way I will ever return to their once pleasant campus (it was pleasant when Sun Microsystems was there) is at the head of a column of tanks.

 

Edit add: look at what they came out with today; a press release from their own internal ministry of truth. I’m going to assume it is either the Demons they keep in the basement, or the electroshock therapy they administer in the “art rehab center” which causes the total lack of self awareness which makes crap like this possible: https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/05/facing-facts-facebooks-fight-against-misinformation/