Antonio Garcia Martinez If you’d come to me in 2012, when the last presidential election was raging and we were cooking up ever more complicated ways to monetize Facebook data, and told me that Russian agents in the Kremlin’s employ would be buying Facebook ads to subvert American democracy, I’d have asked where your tin-foil hat was. – Antonio Garcia Martinez
Antonio Garcia Martinez FBX was my baby that I staked everything on. We shipped it fast, scaled it up, and now the baby talks and can walk to school, but I don’t feel I need to babysit it. – Antonio Garcia Martinez
Antonio Garcia Martinez My next thing could be something in hardware. It’s never been easier to turn bits into atoms. – Antonio Garcia Martinez
Antonio Garcia Martinez The harsh reality is this: to have influence in the world, you need to be willing and able to reward your friends and punish your enemies. – Antonio Garcia Martinez
Antonio Garcia Martinez You don’t realise it, but we’re in a race between technology and politics, and technologists are winning. They’re way ahead. – Antonio Garcia Martinez
Antonio Garcia Martinez When self-delusion and self-flattery enter the mind-set of a product team and the metrics they judge themselves by, like the first plague rat coming onto a ship, the end is practically preordained. – Antonio Garcia Martinez
Antonio Garcia Martinez In Cuba, where Wi-Fi is both slow and terrible, you will be an emissary from the future, a hint of the degeneracy to come. You’re a full-on mainlining internet junkie with the world’s uproar piped into your head 24/7, your emotional landscape terraformed and buffeted by whatever some narcissist just posted on Instagram or some windbag on Twitter. – Antonio Garcia Martinez
Antonio Garcia Martinez Facebook already has a large political ad sales and operations team that manages ad accounts for large campaigns. Zuckerberg hinted that the company could follow the same ‘know your customer’ guidelines Wall Street banks routinely employ to combat money laundering, logging each and every candidate and super PAC that advertises on Facebook. – Antonio Garcia Martinez
Antonio Garcia Martinez Cubans can be as conversant as any Netflix-and-chill American about popular shows like ‘House of Cards’ or ‘Black Mirror’, and they drop allusions to the ‘Lannisters’ and ‘Omar Little’ constantly. – Antonio Garcia Martinez
Antonio Garcia Martinez All the early Facebook employees have their story of the moment when they saw the light and realized that Facebook wasn’t some measly social network like MySpace but a dream of a different human experience. – Antonio Garcia Martinez
Antonio Garcia Martinez I was at Facebook in 2012, during the previous presidential race. The fact that Facebook could easily throw the election by selectively showing a Get Out the Vote reminder in certain counties of a swing state, for example, was a running joke. – Antonio Garcia Martinez
Antonio Garcia Martinez In the early days, a Georgia college kid named Chris Putnam created a virus that made your Facebook profile resemble MySpace, then the social-media incumbent. It went rampant and started deleting user data as well. Instead of siccing the F.B.I. dogs on Putnam, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz invited him for an interview and offered him a job. – Antonio Garcia Martinez
