I’m a Big Tech Company. Here’s Why I’m Working Things Out Instead of Breaking Up
By: Catherine Elder
Tags: Humor, Satire, Love, Technology, Facebook

Photo by Christiana Rivers on Unsplash

“You have someone like Elizabeth Warren who thinks that the right answer is to break up the companies… look, at the end of the day, if someone’s going to try to threaten something that existential, you go to the mat and you fight.” — Mark Zuckerberg

As a big tech company, I know I look glamorous from the outside — glossy, carefree and deeply in love with myself. But nothing, even me, is perfect. It’s painful to admit, but at my lowest point, I even considered breaking up.

The cracks started small — personal data sold to political consultants here, birther memes aggressively promoted to digitally illiterate users there. Nothing a mature company couldn’t handle. I pasted on a smile, but some days I could barely look myself in the security cameras.

Then came the moment that changed everything: the Justice Department backed a lawsuit against me for allowing housing providers to target ads to users of specific ethnicities, genders, and religions. I was horrified. If I supported discrimination for who knows how long, what wasn’t I capable of?

Sobbing, I confronted myself by the jellybean pit. It was only 9 PM and the campus was packed, but I didn’t care who saw. How could I betray myself like this? This wasn’t like the deletion-doesn’t-mean-deletion thing, or the exacerbating-depression-as-an-experiment thing — this time there would be consequences.

I stammered out something about setting up an independent panel to hear and amplify appeals from users. Typical me bullshit! Devastated, I told myself off again and fled to my sunniest tax haven for a well-deserved rum punch or three.

I needed advice. I called the smartest woman I knew: Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren. “Screw you,” she replied. “You can’t let yourself continue to engage in illegal anticompetitive practices, stomp on consumer privacy rights, and repeatedly fumble your responsibility to protect our democracy.”

Elizabeth validated my anger. Who the hell did I think I was? For the first time, I let myself seriously consider breaking up. I’ll admit it was a little exciting. I daydreamed about being free to merge with whoever I wanted, and to hell with what the Securities and Exchange Commission might think.

Who would get the subsidiaries? I couldn’t bear to think about them watching me rifle through assets, coldly divesting — color palettes here, infrastructure for routing European revenues through low-tax Ireland there. Haggling over memories.

I thought about my friends who had broken up — Standard Oil, Northern Securities, American Tobacco. Were they happier? Their drooping or defunct stock charts whispered no.

Elizabeth only wanted the best for me. But ultimately, as I and 59 lobbyists explained to her, this was a decision I had to make on my own.

My phone rang. “Don’t go,” I heard myself say. “With the additional overhead of compliance, how would I fund innovations like this?” Then came an animation of a “like” springing into the air and rocketing offscreen, accompanied by other, smaller likes.

I laughed, but it was true. There’s a lot I can only do together. I don’t even sneeze in a new zip code without a 20 year property tax exemption. I buy every startup that blinks at me, dissolve it and set the founders to work optimizing web component margin sizes. I change the font on my recruiting homepage and the Dow tumbles 500 points.

On the rainswept helipad back home in Menlo Park, I held a finger to my eager lips. “For once, just listen. You will commit to transparency going forward, and you will work closely with users and regulators to ensure that the community works for everyone.”

“What does that mean?”

“I’ve never known.”

My lips met.

Years later, I look back at what I’ve built — puppy-themed selfie filters, Brain Two, the merger with Texas — and I can’t believe I came so close to throwing it all away. I’m stronger for what I’ve been through, and I’m here to stay.

I’m good on my own, but together? I’m unstoppable.