Sorry Not Sorry

Apologies should mean something. If they don’t reflect an inner change of heart, they aren’t genuine and most people can tell if you aren’t serious. We’ve been accustomed to the forced apology since fights in grade school got settled by teachers who wanted a quick end to the dust up. “Now say you’re sorry” was part of the deal. Anything else meant getting kicked out or suspended.

Celebrity apologies aren’t new but they’ve been taken to an absurd level. We get ‘sorrys’ via the internet more frequently than rain in spring time. The reasons are simple, a misconception exists that saying sorry gets you back in everyone’s good graces. I can’t prove it, but I don’t think it works that way. It’s frustrating to watch anyone beg forgiveness over something they did publicly when a sorry isn’t warranted. It’s even tougher to hear (or read) a forced apology from someone being coerced into saying it.

Jay Feely (former NFL player) recently apologized for posting a picture (above) with his daughter and her date on their prom night. He is holding a handgun (where is my fainting couch?) in the picture. The subtext of the photo is clear “Don’t take advantage of my little girl dude”. I guess some people were offended by the gun, and blasted him over it. He issued one of those weak kneed ‘sorry if anyone took it the wrong way’ type apologies that are practically cut and pasted from the last celebrity who wrote one.

This isn’t a real apology and he doesn’t have to give one. The picture was set up in the way all prom night pictures are, dressed up kids about to enjoy the night. He can’t be sorry for the photo, only the reaction to it. He didn’t do it accidentally. He meant to post it and he meant for it to be funny. Just because some people didn’t like it, he felt like an apology was due. It wasn’t. If you don’t like something about a particular person, a half-hearted apology won’t change your opinion of them. We know what a forced apology sounds like. Kathy Griffin held a fake bloody Donald Trump head in a now infamous magazine cover. She apologized because the backlash was so strong. But it was as forced as Jay Feely’s. CNN dumped her immediately after the shoot. I can’t imagine anyone who didn’t already like Griffin was moved by her teary apology spectacle. As disrespectful as the cover was, she should have stood by it.

Both are examples of non-apologies of pictures that were well planned. When Michael Richards (Krammer from Seinfeld) was videotaped blasting a heckler with racist tinged language he was roundly criticized. I thought his apology was genuine at the time because his reaction was something done in a moment of anger. Also, he didn’t blame the heckler for his outburst when he could have. He didn’t hedge. He still feels terrible about it. I watched a Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee episode where he talked to Jerry Seinfeld about the incident. The event still bothers him. After all these years he is still saying how awful he felt for grilling the man with racial epithets. 

One way to tell if someone is really sorry is to read (or listen) to the words they use. If the person talks about what they meant to say, or how they mischaracterized, chances are someone is making them do it. Harvey Weinstein famously talked about how ‘in his day’ or ‘I grew up in different era’ as explanations for his behavior. He opted for the explainer version, another way of saying “Sorry I got caught”.

There’s an advantage to letting famous people do what they do without remorse. It allows us to understand what type of person they are and decide for ourselves whether to ignore them or not. Fake apologies allow true scammers a pathway back to the mainstream. It allows companies who threatened to pull sponsorship a way to check a box and forget the whole thing. Instead of letting market forces drive demand, say bad TV ratings, Sponsors try to get in front of the incident by insisting on an apology. We are supposed to believe that companies are looking out for their bottom line and not wanting to lose business over an angry public. But they aren’t worried about Joe Sixpack and his opinion of some celebrity. They’re worried about activist groups bombarding them with threats. Even small motivated groups can cause a real ruckus. Public opinion matters far less than group determination.

I do understand that famous people are held to different standards (I didn’t say higher). Public access and public image is their currency. But public apologies have been cheapened worse than a nineties sitcom remake. I don’t know how much stock individuals puts in them. Corporations that sponsor TV shows or run ads for upcoming films are supposedly the first aggrieved parties. We are supposed to believe they are moved by public opinion. But the same ones who get offended over gun pictures are likely same ones putting pressure on companies to pull support because of an incident. How big a group is this exactly? Something tells me it is small but noisy.

Here’s a prescription for future apologies; if you’ve done something egregious whether in the heat of the moment or after further consideration, by all means say you made a mistake and mean it. If you do something that you don’t feel is wrong but ‘offends’ a lot of people, don’t apologize. Nothing is worse than a glib ‘if anyone was offended’ Twitter message. We aren’t buying it.  

'Like' for Limited Oversight

Facebook started out as a sharing platform for ‘friends’. We’re all familiar with the story by now. It has morphed since they were a small private startup into something otherworldly. Most people think time has come to rein them in. They hoover up user information and allow third parties to ‘share’ from their trough of data. A good portion of their income is in allowing companies access to sell everything from running shoes to bank loans to its users. It is a problem for privacy, but federal regulation at this stage is the worst option.

 There are good reasons to not regulate FB at the federal level. First, what sort of business does Facebook fall into? If it’s a tech company than it’s nearly impossible to regulate in any meaningful way. Congress doesn’t completely understand what Facebook does or how it works. How can any piece of legislation expect to fix that? Second, anything requiring new laws needs experts to help write them. Who better to write the bill than Zuckerberg and his employees? You can bet they’ll want a seat at the table when the Congress gets serious about restricting them. This would be terrible for anyone competing in the same realm even tangentially. Facebook could easily push out competitors with a few expensive (anti-competitive) measures designed to stay on top. Third, if regulation is a forgone conclusion than let the states sort it out. Illinois and California already have some pending legislation designed to ensure privacy.

The largest tech companies (Amazon, Google, Apple) have been a boon to consumers for the nearly free services they provide. Online shopping is cheap, search algorithms are more precise and iphones make daily life easier than ever. It’s easy to tell when a bank, for instance, has ripped off its customers. Check the excessive and opaque fees against the law. If they misled or lied, easy case. Most law functions this way. Social Media is different. It’s tricky to decide if a law has been broken, especially when user information is offered up freely. Facebook has opt in and opt out requirements for most of their users. It prevents third parties like Cambridge Analytica from scooping up data that hasn’t been opted in to. It doesn’t always work well and often users don’t understand that opting in often means access to portions of their friends’ page. But mostly it works as designed.

With so many people offering up info and ‘sharing’ like hippies in a beach commune, the available information to the third party grows exponentially. In this pile of shared stuff is often private, non-agreed to information. Privacy breaches make people very angry. Facebook is really a platform offered as a service in exchange for personal information. Since they’ve started shutting down websites they don’t like and disallowing certain viewpoints, they’ve moved from platform to media. Media comes with a different set of rules and restrictions. This is a lot more complicated for defining what they actually do. It would be easier for them to merely manage and sell access like they’ve done for most of their existence. With pressure to control what is written, shown and shared they’ve made themselves a target. This one is FB’s fault.

As far as experts go, only a handful of people are equipped to put regulations in place to significantly alter the social media business. A lot of them probably work for Facebook. We’ve grown up with internet connectivity being a constant tool, but few of us (me included) really understand the business enough to write laws. Questions like, who can use personal data and how can it be used, are not as simple to codify they are to say. The consequences of a heavy regulatory hand could be disastrous for companies that rely on social media to spread awareness of their services.

By limiting core functions of what FB does, it would alter the business model of thousands of online services that depend on FB for views.

Once Americans decide they want some consumer protection law, Facebook will insist on writing the details. Not directly of course. They’ll use lobbying efforts to get key pieces inserted into bills. At this point FB isn’t just concerned with staying afloat, they’ll be trying to keep rivals out. No one can compete directly in the same realm as Facebook, but startups may offer cursory services that don’t exist on the social media giant. Instagram had a great cursory service (photo sharing) for while. Facebook purchased the site because of its popularity. After regulation a likely outcome for Instagram type platforms is getting sued by FB for minor infractions or not even getting off the ground, the cost to continue too high.

I can imagine a company like Lifelock offering a social media protection plan and using it as a selling point for consumers.

If states really are the labs of democracy we will soon see how far specific measures can go. The Illinois law that limits certain facial recognition curbs what FB can do in that state. It might be poorly written and it might be overturned by an exasperated public. We don’t know yet. But going at these companies in precise ways might force them to change key structures of the business. Or, they buy companies that offer better privacy tech. There is reason to believe tech companies will go with the flow on privacy measures if the public mood shifts against them in states.

What would be better for consumers, a federal law or no federal law? Consumers benefit when regulation is loose and competition is tight. FB will grow more entrenched with federal oversight and be impossible to change if regulation gets off the ground. Facebook is miles ahead of whatever federally designed law would try to stop. The individual state laws governing consumer information will probably be enough to rein in the tech giant.

Regulation hurts small companies more than big ones.

     

Amazon's HQ2

Amazon is planning to put up a new facility. A lot of cities are vying for the affections of the top hiring company like would-be grooms hoping the prettiest girl picks them. The internet behemoth is expected to hire upwards of 50,000 employees to fill out its ranks next year. That alone is enough to make most cities give away nearly everything in tax breaks. You can hardly blame them. City governments spend a lot of their time trying to get businesses to locate within. When giant corporations call, you get in line and make the best offer.

From the letter Amazon sent out to possible locations, it certainly eliminates a few right off the top. They want cities with more than a million people (sorry Tulsa). They insist on a business friendly environment (sorry Chicago). They insist on cities with a university system, ostensibly used as a feeder for corporate talent. Some of the final cities selected are kind of on the bubble in terms of size. Raleigh, Nashville and Newark are well below the threshold of a million. But Newark is so close to Philadelphia and New York it probably doesn’t matter as much. Raleigh has great Universities, NC State is located in the city and Duke and North Carolina are just a few hours away. Nashville is the largest of the three and probably selected for its business friendly environment within the state.

Since the details of the tax proposals are private we don’t know what was offered. We can bet there were some sweet deals though. The online retailer certainly wants a workforce that is easy to replace. I don’t know how many they expect to relocate from other areas. I imagine cities would rather Amazon hire as much talent from within the state as possible. Mayors constantly work to retain talent and bring additional business to their cities. With a large group like Amazon Co. they can expect other businesses to move along with a growing population. Not to mention, the increased tax revenue from workers who’ve seen a jump in wages.

It shouldn’t make a difference to me who ultimately gets the corporate behemoth, but for some reason I’m rooting for Indianapolis, Columbus or Nashville. Tennessee has no income tax and I like to see states rewarded for their fiscal discipline. Indiana has a very low income tax which was recently reduced. Ohio has seen countless factories shuttered and a lot of workers cut loose due to offshoring.  

Nothing against cities on the costs but it seems like the New York and Los Angeles are already stuffed with high earners and the best of city life. It would be nice if something growth oriented happened in the Midwest (minus Chicago). Maybe Nashville isn’t considered the ‘Midwest’ but there are other cities on the list where Amazon could have an outsized impact. Even Raleigh and Austin are good options.

A lot of business writers think Washington DC has the advantage because of the proximity to the national government. It makes sense. The next decade will probably see some increase in regulation directed at online companies like Facebook and Amazon that don’t do enough to protect personal data. Jeff Bezos will want to lobby for smart legislation, limited in scope and oversight. They could also make it tough for other online sellers to compete through regulation. This is always the worst part of new legislation. I don’t think he needs to be located in the district to make that work though.

There is a lot of criticism of turning cities into playgrounds for companies that leave a massive footprint. Amazon will certainly cause housing prices to rise in and around the city. The well paid tech workers tend to push out lower paying city dwellers. San Francisco is famous for driving up rents to a level that makes it impossible to live there without significant income. But San Francisco is the hub for most of the major tech companies in the country. That kind of wealth creates an environment all its own. If Amazon chooses one of the smaller cities (relatively) on the list it would make a difference, but as long as the zoning requirements aren’t rigid it won’t cause a drastic change.  

Some complain about losing the ‘local character’ of an urban area. This seems silly. Most cities experience this at some point every 30 years or so anyway. Whether through immigration or career moves to other regions of the country, most cities change as economies change. New York, Philadelphia, Detroit all experienced influxes and outflows as immigration patterns moved from Western Europe to Eastern Europe and South America during the last century. Local character is a subjective measure anyway. You’ll probably miss that famous Greek restaurant in the downtown area, but jobs are more important to most people.

The retailer will make a decision this year and start hiring next year. I don’t know the timetable but it has to be soon because this kind of construction takes a while.