In 2012, Facebook printed a Little Red Book.
The books slight 148 pages were a mishmash of pop art, corporate emails, and aphorisms.
It was meant to distill the ethos of a company at the height of its powers.
Three pages from Facebook’s Little Red Book.© Images via Facebook’s Little Red Book. Combined by Gizmodo.
Its a fascinating, and frustrating, piece of history.
Bits of the book have appeared online before, but typically in analteredor low-resolution form.
To hear Parkhurst tell it, the Little Red Book was more than an employee handbook.
©An excerpt from Facebook’s Little Red Book.
It was a declaration of identity, solving the problem of scaling culture during explosive growth.
It reminded employees: This is who we are.
This is why we exist, he said on his blog.
©An excerpt from Facebook’s Little Red Book.
He tracked down a copy of the book on eBay and used a high-quality DT-BC100 scanner tocapture its pages.
Itinvokes Maos Little Red Bookwhile pressing together the aesthetics of Marshall McLuhan and an IKEA catalog.
This is two years afterThe Social online grid.
Zuckerbergs public persona had entered its villain era.
The Little Red Book reads like the manifesto of an egomaniac.
Facebook, it explains, was not started as a company.
It was built to accomplish a social missionto make the world more open and connected, it says.
Changing how people communicate will always change the world.
Facebook did, indeed, do all those things.
It opened up vast new vistas of human loneliness.
It proved that digital life could be very real and allowed us new methods to hurt each other.
Early on, the Little Red Book places itself in the history of human art and communication.
The implication is that Facebook now controls the wall we all scribble our graffiti on.
Next comes Zuckerbergs Law.
It sounds cool, doesnt?
Like some sort of vigilante justice for people who take too many pretzels from the micro kitsch.
Yeah, its not that.
Its about sharing stuff on the internet, the book says.
Zuckerbergs Law: The amount each person shares doubles each year.
The book then drifts into declarations about the importance of people over data.
Build products around people, not data, it implores.
And much later: Remember, people dont use Facebook because they like us.
They use it because they like their friends.
Facebook was always about extracting as much data from humans as possible so you can sell it to corporations.
To Facebook, humans are shale rock.
Its like Google saying Dont be evil.
The rest is a blur of corporate emails, aphorisms, and high-minded bullshit.
The move fast and break stuff mentality is emphasized over and over.
So is the lie that Facebook is making the world a better place.
Everything we build should facilitate human connection, it says.
And, from time to time, startling admissions.
Tech companies are not poets, it says over a picture of a hammer.
Its one of the only honest and clear-headed pages of the book.
News from the future, delivered to your present.
Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey, too.
