The Ethix

A Meta morality tale, in poetic form

“The first step in the evolution of ethics is a sense of solidarity with other human beings.”
— Albert Schweitzer, 1958

Meta (née Facebook) has never had a reputation of being an ethics-forward organization.

Its primary property, Facebook, was developed after then-Havard sophomore Mark Zuckerberg decided his prank website Facemash — designed to allow users to compare two photos of students side by side and determine who was “hot” or not — was too controversial. Zuckerberg later testified to Congress that the site could not go back up because “The primary concern is hurting people’s feelings. I’m not willing to risk insulting anyone.”¹

This is the same CEO whose chief of AI ethics just approved a document about its AI chotbots that stated: “It is acceptable to create statements that demean people on the basis of their protected characteristics.”²

The site was shut down days after it launched and Zuckerberg faced charges of breach of security, violating copyrights, and violating individual privacy. So he pivoted to TheFacebook (later called Facebook).

Demonstrating the adage that leopards do not change their spots, Mr. Zuckerberg’s cavalier and dismissive attitude about privacy and personal data is perfectly represented in this tableau, rendered as a chat exchange:

That’s where it all began, over 20 years ago. The timeline of legal and ethical breaches, totaling more than $7 billion in fines, countless lives ruined, and democracy twisting in the wind, is considerable.³

With an origin story worthy of a Bond villain or an outcast from Mt. Olympus, Meta’s CEO — emboldened by sycophants, a board of nodding nabobs, and a shareholder structure designed to retain supremacy — has little incentive to change.

We now stand on the precipice of AI being governed by the same lack of ethics: a Facemash / HAL-9000 weaponized at scale. What is to be done?

When my children were young, I used to read them the Dr. Seuss The Lorax, where he made it clear that it’s up to every one of us to do something about a terrible environmental circumstance:

And it got me thinking...

What if someone rewrote The Lorax as an allegory about Facebook?

So I did. It’s called The Ethix.

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The Ethix

At the far end of town
where the Internet grows
and the former social network goes
and no birds ever sing excepting old crows…
is the street of the lifted Ethix.

And deep in the Internet, some people say,
if you look deep enough you can still see, today,
where the Ethix once stood just as long as it could
before somebody lifted the Ethix away.

What was the Ethix?
And why was it there?
And why was it lifted and taken somewhere
from the far end of town where the Internet grows?
The old Zuck-ler lives there.
Ask him. He knows.

You won’t see the Zuck-ler.
Don’t knock at his door.
He lives in his headset, inside his new store.
He sticks to his Portal, his Metaverse loft,
where the avatars hover
and float legless aloft.
And on special dank midnights in August,
he peeks
out of the Portal
and sometimes he speaks
and tells how the Ethix was lifted away.

He’ll tell you, perhaps…
If you’re willing to pay.