Sarah Frier and Anna Wiener: National Book Festival 2021

[Music] sponsored by the james madison council hi and welcome to the 2021 library of congress national book festival i'm lori siegel i am a correspondent for 60 minutes plus in cbs news also the founder of dot dot media which looks at the intersection of tech and culture so i have to say as someone who has covered tech for over a decade um i could not be more excited for this panel i'm here with anna weiner the author of uncanny valley and sarah fryer author of no filter um these are two books that really capture an important moment in history this is the second wave of technology that shapes society and all of us and they both get into the complications that came along with it they're very complimentary um so to learn more about sarah and anna you can check out uh the website loc.gov slash book fest and before we start i want to let everyone know that we're going to save the last 10 minutes we're going to speak for 20 minutes and then the last 10 minutes uh we have for questions so please ask questions submit questions i know um these these women want to hear from you and so start submitting questions now um so anna and sarah welcome welcome guys thank you so much for having us i was just saying what a dream team i mean you both have books that really cover such an important moment in in history um this era of startups and disruption as they were becoming mainstream um for both of you guys just to start out what was appealing about you know about the subject about the tech boom i know anna for you you went um and actually worked at multiple startups even with this background you wanted to get into writing and you ended up your journey took you to san francisco for startups and um you know you've covered technology sarah for so long i followed your work for so long in the in the tech space so what was appealing about it for you guys i think that's something that runs as a theme through through anna's personal writing and my uh reporting is like in the tech world there is this mythology that um that is out there about success about how things work about how to win and i think that um what i attempted to do with the instagram story is take this app that you know people just thought this was just a perfect acquisition bought by facebook for a billion dollars which was just unheard of at the time what a success you know they got to have their company within facebook pretty much a separate company none of the risk all of the reward everything's great well you know once you dig behind the scenes actually it wasn't that great there was a lot of tension with facebook and a lot of implications for how we live today based on the decisions that were made by the instagram founders and um things that just were not as perfect as they sounded in the press and so i think the instagram story was a very if not untold than undertold story um that is so powerful and yet so under scrutinized um and i think that that's that's what drew me to it yeah and i mean and i you i love how uh the book kind of opens up with these these dreams and i think a lot of us can relate to coming to new york and our dream is one thing and you end up in san francisco working at uh at a tech company um so what was it that was so appealing to you at the time well i was coming from east coast book publishing and i was really looking for a career shift that would feel like it had a future that it had momentum um i worked at a an e-book startup very briefly in new york and then moved to san francisco and just was sort of intoxicated by the speed at which things moved and the way that i you know individual employees really felt like they were having an impact despite being quite young and inexperienced and i think that like sarah was saying this there was a lot of mythology around silicon valley at the time and i was sort of ambiently aware of that but i absolutely bought into it um because that you know it was in the culture it was very pervasive and i started writing about it mostly as a way to sort of process the the distance between all of this mythology and all of this enthusiasm and excitement and my own experiences as a low-level employee at some of these tech companies um so i i went into it really with no intention of covering of writing about i mean covering is such a journalism term this was not my world at all it was really this i wanted a career shift um and ultimately found that writing about it was a much more comfortable place for me to be and uh but but it really i sort of fell into it backwards in that way um it's a i think that that that distance has narrowed over the last few years between expectation and reality and mythology and reality but um you know thanks to thanks to reporting by people like sarah and like you laurie but um yeah i think that that's really what drew me in in the first place i think that's one of the things that struck me about both of these books right we all kind of grew up in in these different ways right i created our startup beat at cnn back in i think it was like 2009 and you know you say it in your book and it's like two years and in startup years everything moves so quickly and sarah you covered that um and we see so many changes and there was this certain period of time there was a mythology right where we're moving fast and breaking things this was the era of disruption and sarah you describe um instagram and this one story that the public and the media myself included by the way i remember sitting on cnn and being like it sold for a billion dollars like can you believe it you know this was unheard of at the time to facebook you really got in there and unveiled like the craziest most fascinating story of instagram behind the scenes what was it about instagram that you were like okay we've got to know more about this company because facebook has been scrutinized pretty much and now instagram's owned by facebook and then i'm curious as someone who has dealt with facebook how did you deal with the roadblocks and reporting and really kind of getting the story and getting in there yeah so instagram i just i just thought that there's no other app that has such a hold over our culture it's not just about what we do on our phones and what we do on our on the internet in general it's about what we do in our real lives and instagram is changing human behavior it's changing our perception of popularity of of um celebrity of entrepreneurship of all these things um people who are young now you know they they see being an influencer as a path for themselves or they're comparing themselves to other people on instagram um and so i just i wanted to understand that connection between the decisions a company makes and the decisions that we all make as humans you know using their products and it really all went back to that idea of of growth this silicon valley um just obsession with getting more users more attention and this kind of product um product pathway that is like as long as you can get big enough and get enough attention then you can just sell advertising off of it and for um for instagram um the way that they managed to do that while also planting seeds in our culture and deciding who would become famous and um figuring out like what they wanted to be cool i that was just so so so unsilicon valley to me um the fact that you know twitter and facebook are always just like oh we're just a reflection of humanity no instagram was warping humanity for good and for bad and i really wanted to dig into that was there anything like rolling up your sleeves when you got in and you interviewed someone like take us to one of these interviews what was the thing that someone said that you were like oh my god i cannot believe that you know that this happened behind the scenes at instagram oh my gosh there's so many things i mean like hearing the stories of how they bent over backwards for certain celebrities um hearing the stories of how they really were king makers of um deciding who would become famous and not but then also the story with facebook the tension with facebook one of the stories that really jumped out to me early on is when instagram finally joined facebook those first few weeks of integration um facebook wasn't sure if they wanted to help them grow first they had to devise a study to figure out if instagram was a competitive threat to facebook here they spent this ungodly amount of money on this company and they were willing to let it die if it was any thread to facebook and of course that was just foreshadowing for what would happen later um and the most shocking thing that i uncovered in my book was that ultimately mark zuckerberg still uh stunted instagram's gross once he saw that instagram was potentially taking eyeballs away from facebook around when facebook's turmoil really started to to heat up and in the post 2016 election period he was thinking okay we have given instagram all these resources now it's time for them to boost facebook and now instagram's job really is to be a funnel of attention into facebook inc um whereas previously it was trying to attempt to be independent um but the fact that he could just do that to a company that that he owned and it just gives me a sense of how the company feels that they can manipulate our behavior any way that they want it doesn't really matter what is popular yeah i think the humanization and this is for both you and um and anna the humanization of the tech leaders even though and it's so funny and in your book you don't actually say the names or you'll talk about the micro blogging company you'll talk about i think you refer to facebook as the social network everyone hated i don't know if it's facebook you can confirm or deny but you even though you don't really refer to folks or companies by name necessarily there's a lot of humanization there um and i there is this line in your book you said i moved to san francisco at the age of 25 for a job in tech and i live to write about it um which you know this really is a coming-of-age story um and i relate to it in many ways and that i came of age covering technology so i read as you came of age behind the tech the doors of a tech company and you could really sense in the book you're struggling with these kind of what you want to be doing what you think you should be doing how would you describe that inner conflict that you had that's so apparent in the book um when you were quote on the inside well i think that this has a lot to do with the culture inside of many startups in particular i i would imagine that it's maybe a little bit different at a larger company like apple or google or even facebook um but there is this sense that the work you are doing is not only incredibly important and crucial but potentially the most important and crucial work one could be doing in their twenties and i think that that is um often you know sort of in service of having people work longer hours and work harder for the company and feel really committed but it's also it builds camaraderie and i think that that sense of importance is often um when a company is doing well it is affirmed by your revenue stream you know you see money coming in it feels like you're making something useful um and that feels unbelievable especially as someone who's quite early in their career and speaking for myself at least quite inexperienced uh and so i think that that can be very seductive um almost to the extent of obliterating any questions one might have about whether the work itself is actually valuable or advancing a a set of values or a culture that you agree with and also then the more personal question of whether or not it's right for you so i think just speaking for myself i was working at a data analytics company it was building a tool that helped people um helped other app and website makers sort of optimize for certain things on their on their sites and understand user behavior better and i sort of wanted to move away from from this in sort of a value set of you know everything should be optimized and streamlined and kind of um experience should be controlled so that's just sort of one one example for for me but um that was why i one of the reasons i left um that particular company i don't know if that answers your question exactly yeah you know i also think um i'm curious for both of you as women um we've done the whole silicon valley sexism conversation for probably as long as i've covered tech which is over a decade and i can't decide if it's getting better or worse truthfully even though there's a lot of folks talking about it and there was um you really you tackled it in a certain way um in uncanny valley you um you said being the only woman on a non-technical team providing customer support to software developers was like immersion therapy for internalized misogyny i mean what a statement it was pretty extraordinary to see your experience um within the these companies multiple companies and the sexism in silicon valley when you set out to write the book um how and i know i've struggled with by the way because i've i've been writing a book that comes out next year and i've struggled with how to get that conversation about sexism right because it is in so many different facets in silicon valley where it's all made out to be a meritocracy so how did you what was your experience with it when you were behind closed doors there and then how did you know what did how did you want to describe it in the book what did you know what kind of conversations did you have when thinking about how you were going to characterize it sure so i think my experience of sexism was that it was pervasive and often subtle um for me at least i think it was quite unsubtle for a lot of people that i worked with and a lot of other women in tech uh but in writing the book i in this this uh this goes for writing about sexism or writing about the sort of political dimension of technology or other dynamics in the office and in the industry i really wanted to steer as far away from being polemical as possible and hopefully i was successful in that i i wanted to just explain what had happened to me detail my experiences and let the reader sort of come to their own conclusions based on the material at hand you know my observations my feelings about it um obviously there's a bias there but i think that it can be really hard not to move into a sort of a more didactic or polemical mode and um i think for me it was it was more important to just detail how i had you know how i had experienced it in my actual life but i think this is the difference between journalism opinion memoir um i think that's the sort of liberty one can take when writing uh personal non-fiction and sarah i'm curious for your own experience you've covered the startup world for a very long time you've covered recover these companies written extensively now about instagram um what is your take on on the problem do you think things have gotten better with sexism with you know diver when it comes to representation i don't think representation has has gotten better i think the the companies have started to release more internal statistics they've started to um do what they're required to do and in terms of adding them into their board um but you you still get the sense that um companies say that they're not willing to compromise their um their wish to have the best of the best doing the job and they simply aren't considering people who may be the best of the best but just didn't get to have that kind of a network um to get in front of the person and personal relationships are so key here i think as a journalist you do kind of get underestimated um people assume that you'll be more gentle because you're a woman or that you don't know things from a technical level because you're a woman and hopefully over time i've been able to prove them wrong but it does it does as you know sometimes give an advantage in reporting because people will tell you things expecting that um that there's no way you would do anything with them but you know you say i'm doing this on the record i um i very much relate to that from reporting over the stuff that back in the day i've always seen a bit of a double standard too with how uh founders speak to female journalists and male journalists it's been interesting to see um i'm curious because we have you here um sarah because it's been like a big week of news for facebook um and by the way what's not a big week of news for facebook these days but you know i think the wall street journal recently uh obtained an internal uh study conducted by facebook and it paints a pretty bleak picture of the detrimental uh effects of instagram on its younger users there's obviously controversy because this was never made public it also shows that what we've all been asking facebook as journalists politicians have asked this question is this detrimental to the mental health of our um of our children to some degree and you know and we haven't really heard much from facebook on this so i'm curious for your thoughts uh on on the latest facebook news and will it impact the bottom line well that last question is the key right um because i think that over and over there has been wake up call after wake up call about this for employees internally at instagram they have known since at least 2015 when they started studying the issue that anxiety for teens um body image comparing oneself to others that popularity contest was a problem in fact it was a problem so much for the company that it affected growth and and that's where you see it in the bottom line for instagram if people are too anxious to post on instagram um if they're too worried about what people will think of them and they post less that's bad for business but they've been able to make enough product tweaks that that is no longer a problem stories copying stories the 24-hour disappearing post from snapchat was something that really boosted them um out of that that growth problem with anxiety but they didn't do anything about the human problem and i think it goes back to what anna was saying about when you're at a tech company you're seeing those metrics go up and up and up it's easy to think well we're doing something right if people are using our product more they must like it they must feel like they're getting value out of it they must feel good um and and it's really internally people have who have studied this on the research team and who specifically work on teens have seen actually that's not necessarily true yeah yeah i i am i'm curious for both of you guys writing a book is no small feat um you know it it's certainly for you i'm curious sarah how how long did it take you to do the research for for no filter well i had this background covering facebook for many years um and people were like well you could probably just write the book on instagram without any extra reporting no you couldn't because there's there's so much we didn't know about the app and about its internal story so so much in the book is new um my my colleague and boss brad stone told me you have to get like 100 things that nobody knows and then you have a book and so that's really what i tried to do through my interviews and in in-depth reporting and that took took several months of course i had a book deadline so i think i finished it all in 18 months but um but it definitely was a big lift a lot of conversations thank you to all the people who talk to me and by the way in the time that you were doing the book the instagram founders quit so i i can imagine um you know that that definitely turned things around again and you probably had to keep doing tons of research and and that made it even more relevant actually yeah i think that helped people understand that like the story of tension at facebook was going to come out no matter what at some point and so they would might as well talk to me about it sure and um anna what about you i mean the book has so many details right i i'm wondering if you just kept a notepad with you as you worked at the these different startups throughout um it is there are so many vivid details in it what was the hardest part of writing this book um i think just figuring out what to include uh which stories were mine to tell and i think there is a lot of detail in the book and i didn't really take notes in any normal way but i had moved to san francisco from new york and didn't really know anyone and the way that i kept in touch with people was over email so i did have this sort of trove of long emails uh to friends just talking about my life and telling stories and uh those turned out to be extremely useful when i was sort of doing research for the book um and i also interviewed former coworkers and read a lot of coverage from the time that i had been working in tech but maybe wasn't necessarily paying that much attention to techcrunch um so that was all uh very very useful to me but i think that um it's also just you know figuring out what what would go in there are certain the book is just a fraction of my experiences and so there were certain things that really stayed with me and um it seemed obvious that they should be in the book because they're things that i was thinking about six years later you know so um i think i think that's probably a sort of quintessential memoir uh question yeah um i want to get to some user questions too um rob has an interesting question um this is a new news question what is your take on uh the elizabeth holmes trial what does it say about the world of startups especially the ones led by women either of you sarah if you want to take this or anna i don't know i'll pass it to anna i'm very curious you have to think i think that the second part of that question is sort of interesting because i think that um and it's also interesting when we talk about sexism in tech i think that uh there has been an emphasis on you know is is the coverage of fairness sexist is the way that elizabeth holmes is being portrayed sexist um and i think in a lot of ways we actually the story is about the incentives that people in her position have and uh what what leads a person to um to to do what she did and and you know what are the cert the pressures that that person might be under and i think that that is sort of gender agnostic in a way um which is not necessa to excuse her but to just to say that i think sometimes these conversations can sort of miss the forest for the trees um in that you know would facebook be better run if if the ceo is a woman um i assume not you know i think sarah i don't know if you have uh a different perspective on this but i i often feel like the conversation about um about this can be a bit of a red herring like it's actually just as important to look at the economic incentives and structure and the business model of these companies as it is um who is running when it comes to massive fraud absolutely i i mean i think you know when it comes to women as founders in silicon valley and maybe you've been thinking about this a lot laura if you do your own research um i think that that there is this expectation that they also be um like personalities that people can follow whether especially on instagram you've seen the um the ceos of a way of glossier of of um all of these companies that uh you know the wing like they go um rent the runway they go on instagram and they have like this sort of influencer-esque side of their executive leadership and so we're kind of asking double of women in those roles we're asking them to be like you know the embodiment of their products um and i don't know that we ask that of male leaders we ask them to just keep the numbers going up yeah um i'm curious sir for you you talk a lot about instagram um at the beginning right and it was a certain product at the beginning when kevin and mike created it um and then you know there's this idea that it was purchased by uh facebook and there was a long for a while facebook was acquiring companies and the idea was that mark zuckerberg was just going to leave them alone he bought oculus he's going to leave it alone whatsapp he was going to leave it alone this was this public narrative and that didn't happen down the line with instagram and you really get into this in the book about the tension that came along when facebook really tried to utilize instagram and whatnot um it's a very different product than it was at the beginning of the acquisition i'm curious you know what do you think we've got to worry about when it comes to the future of instagram what should we be paying attention to now that it's fully integrated with facebook and we know some of the challenges that come come along with facebook well i think one of the biggest problems is that it's never going to be the top priority for the company and instagram i talked earlier in this conversation about how it has such a tremendous cultural cultural impact and if facebook is not thinking about that cultural impact we're going to have a similar reckoning with instagram um we are i think we are starting to have a reckoning over instagram's impact it's negative impact whether that's through the spread of vaccine misinformation or even you know drug trafficking human trafficking um mental health issues body image issues all of those things the company has known about them but the staffing the way it's organized um facebook takes priority it's it's like the the thinking at facebook is the most important problems to solve are the ones that affect the most people facebook is still a bigger product than instagram is still a higher revenue driving product than instagram though instagram is responsible for most of the revenue growth um they are not going to do anything to fix problems unless they become public crises and we've seen that over and over and over with the company yeah um this is a question from melinda she says i love that you use the same platform to promote the book as the subject of the book did you change the way you saw or used instagram yourself actually yes um because instagram was the place of you know you know as a journalist lori we're we're always on twitter that's just what we do and and i was on facebook a lot because i i've covered facebook and instagram is a place where i was kind of just personal um i'd post pictures of my wedding i'd post pictures of my vacations during this book project project it became a place to reach out to really interesting creators around the world people who have you know teens who have really strong opinions about instagram um people who could help drive my reporting um because they come from different walks of influencer life or um instagram entrepreneur life or um heavy user or former user or people who've had problems with the product so now my instagram is a place where i talk to people about their use of instagram and people reach out to me from around the world after reading the book and say you know this is what this made me think of this is a problem i'm having or this is what i wish you would write about and that's been that's been really world opening and i i do appreciate that aspect of it i think both of you guys talk in different ways about the attention economy and the business model silicon valley and whatnot and there's this great line um there's kind of this turning point and and the memoir where you decide it's you know you are going to leave at some point you know you can tell you're you're really beginning to get jaded and you say um life in the attention economy has made me oblivious um what did you mean by that when you wrote it oh i think i just meant that i was very aware of a um a social media landscape that had been curated for me and uh a little bit oblivious to what was happening outside of that was there a point was there a big breaking point for you where you just knew you wanted to leave silicon valley you were really disillusioned by what you'd seen was there any specific event or was it kind of the culmination of a lot of things i would call it a slow burn um john wants to know um any idea how the corporate culture of tech firms is different in countries outside of the united states tick tock comes to mind um i'm not sure if this is something either of you guys if you guys want to weigh in on i don't feel personally qualified to answer that do you sarah i mean i think that that the model of silicon valley i'll push this forward a little bit and say um this these next few years are going to be a big experiment um with more companies pivoting to work from anywhere um whether silicon valley remains the the um epicenter of tech talent it's probably still going to remain the epicenter of tech culture um but i think that we will start to see that culture homogenize a little bit as people are able to come work for these companies from anywhere um and as the companies decide not to buy really expensive real estate in san francisco and the surrounding area and instead hire people wherever they live or wherever they want to live yeah i think and we have to wrap soon but i'll say i think we're in such an extraordinary moment uh when it comes to this next iteration of technology and this next wave of tech and and you guys have both written pretty historical books i think on this this last wave of technology um a lot of people talk about web 3 this idea that we're now entering a new era of technology with the metaverse and nfts and cryptocurrency and don't worry i'm not going to ask specifically about all of these things but it does for me as someone who's covered technology i'm like oh god we're just going to repeat all of these mistakes all over again if we're not careful um but hopefully but there's this idea that can we be optimistic so for both of lo to end it i would like to ask both of you guys um are you optimistic about the future of tech and humanity because i think tech has become such a big part of humanity at this point are you optimistic i'm optimistic about the fact that tech will become more and more convenient i'm i'm pessimistic about what that will do for our information diet because as anna said you know you become a passive user of these products um when you google something now when you have an amazon alexa eventually when you have it in your ear and you ask a question you're just going to be served whatever answer algorithmically makes sense for just to send you at the moment and i i really think that people have to think critically as we move into this era where tech becomes more passive um more served up to us on a platter of whatever they think we might want whatever might increase engagement or revenue um we have to to actually use these products mindfully and think well is this really answering my question what is my intention as i've opened up this gaming system or you know what am i trying to accomplish and if i'm just trying to waste time like what is that what does that do for me sure anna what do you think are you are you optimistic do i see a future of you going back into silicon valley to work for a startup you can you'll see me on on web3 um i i am not optimistic but i am hopeful i think constitutionally and i think that it is very important to uh remain hopeful that things can change and so i think that that's sort of where i would come down on that question great great um you know i'm going to sneak in one last one because i think you guys are great i'd love to just have any details on will there be another book coming at any point sarah if are you going to take on another company and anna what's going to be the next you know vividly written you know book that you write anything of interest to you guys definitely want to write another book i'm waiting for um a story that is as undertold as the instagram one and and taking my time to do the right one because you know a book project can be all consuming so i want to be appropriately obsessed that's fair i think i think to write a book you have to be appropriately obsessed it's not an easy process i can imagine anna how about you i'm really excited to explore some of the same themes that i wrote about in uncanny valley ambition youth failure wealth um but in fiction [Laughter] so i think that that will probably be the next book length project that i uh work on awesome well thank you guys so much i'm sorry we're out of time because i could go home with you guys for a long time but thank you uh sarah and anna for sharing your time with us and thanks to the audience for all your questions keep enjoying the national book festival at loc.gov bookfest and we'll see you guys soon thank you so much this was a privilege [Music] you

Channel: Library of Congress

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Length: 35min 47sec (2147 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 21 2021