From Harvard to Facebook: The Question of Complicity
When I first read about the Harvard Psilocybin Project in our assigned text, my instinct was simple: the people most responsible for ethical wrongs are the ones in charge. The graduate students, the secretaries, even the undergrads whose tuition money funded the lab all seemed like bystanders. Most of which probably need to make a living before they can even dream about reforming the world. But as the text kept pushing, I realized how blurry the line really is. Complicity doesn’t stop at the top, and even small roles tie you into the system. This thought process really unsettled me.
It continued as I turned to Tony Haile’s Facebook Papers: The Great Unbundling and thought about Facebook’s stakeholders. He explains how Facebook took over almost every function of media except content creation. On mobile, where most people get their info, the traffic basically is Facebook. The feed decides what gets distributed, what gets buried, and what gets monetized. Content that used to live within a bundle is now atomized, stripped from its context, served up or swallowed by the algorithm and this undermines informed citizenship.
Why Facebook Feels Different
At first, I wanted to answer the “Would you work at Facebook?” question with the original rationale I had with Harvard: yes. You work, you earn a paycheck, and the executives above you carry the real responsibility. Maybe you can even justify it by saying that to fix problems, you sometimes need to first get inside flawed systems or use them to get the power to change them.
But the more I thought about Haile’s ideas, the less comfortable that answer became. I felt like this grey area was impossible to escape and I wondered if it was always like this. I then realized Facebook doesn’t just sit inside the grey area; it enlarges it. By owning distribution and curation, it magnifies the interconnectedness that makes ethical compromise harder to avoid. The feed doesn’t just decide what one person reads; it reshapes the incentives of publishers, advertisers, and entire industries. Working there wouldn’t just tie me to one company’s missteps; it would mean helping sustain the system that multiplies complicity everywhere and forces others to make unfair choices. There could be no more wrongdoing than before, but the increasingly hyperconnected society they are creating makes the wrongdoing impossible to avoid touching.
Living with the Grey
That last idea is what unsettles me most. From my Christian perspective (liberal in interpretation but committed to honesty), I don’t expect to live without compromise. But I do feel responsible for whether my work adds to the fog or helps clear it. If I worked at Facebook, I would already be compromised; the company itself is in the grey. The only way I could accept a role is by being honest about that fact and openly acknowledging the contradiction instead of lying to myself. Otherwise, the paycheck isn’t worth the price.
Still, some roles could lessen the weight. Work that reinforces transparency, strengthens authorship signals, or safeguards public-interest journalism would not erase the ethical cost, but it could tilt my presence toward resistance rather than acquiescence. That distinction between adding to the fog and clearing it would likely guide my decision.
