I wouldn't call it hypocrisy, more like having to deal with the unintended consequences of your action.

He and others that have come out to publicly criticize Facebook knew what they were building, they just didn't see how powerful Facebook would eventually become in programming people en masse. The way the last election turned out was the wake up call.

Sean Parker himself admits as much in an interview with Axios:

"When Facebook was getting going, I had these people who would come up to me and they would say, 'I'm not on social media.' And I would say, 'OK. You know, you will be.' And then they would say, 'No, no, no. I value my real-life interactions. I value the moment. I value presence. I value intimacy.' And I would say, ... 'We'll get you eventually.'""I don't know if I really understood the consequences of what I was saying, because [of] the unintended consequences of a network when it grows to a billion or 2 billion people and ... it literally changes your relationship with society, with each other ... It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains."

"The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them, ... was all about: 'How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?'""And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that's going to get you to contribute more content, and that's going to get you ... more likes and comments."

"It's a social-validation feedback loop ... exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you're exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.""The inventors, creators — it's me, it's Mark [Zuckerberg], it's Kevin Systrom on Instagram, it's all of these people — understood this consciously. And we did it anyway."

[0] https://www.axios.com/sean-parker-unloads-on-facebook-god-on...

I think what Sean Parker said was sensible. I'm talking about other people who cross the line.

If these people were such a saint enough to come out and say "Delete Facebook", they had years of opportunity to do so. It's not like Facebook's user exploitation is something new. In fact this breach of user privacy has been the general theme of Facebook from the beginning, even years and years before Facebook acquired Whatsapp.

The appropriate reaction should be them sharing their opinion but in an apologetic sentiment (since they clearly contributed to it AND profited from it) instead of suddenly pretending to be a saint on the other side now that their shares have all vested (and in this case he's working on a competing product, which adds another layer of distaste in my mouth since he's basically leveraging this social justice theme to get more users to use his signal app)

Financial independence is more important. Once you attain that you can seriously fight back, it's about picking your battles. With the money he made in the sell he can do some SERIOUS investment into what he believe's in that's going to create magnitudes more mass in the direction he wants to go then piddling around without it. FI should be everyone's primary goal, because only then can you put your effort to what you truly believe in and be able to back it up no matter what.

So where do you draw the line? What if your way to achieve financial independence turns out to outweight the positive effects you could posssibly achieve later with FI?

That's a tuff line to find, but I'd say it probably relates mostly towards age. The older you become FI the less potential you have to effect a larger change using your FI. This isn't 100% though, because the age would pay dividends with wisdom and networking. I don't know what evidence I'd need to see to change my opinion here. My main idea is based on once you achieve FI you are only reporting to yourself, thus you can now set your goals first and foremost and don't have to do the song and dance of aligning your goals with your funder/employer and seems so freeing.

I feels ya. If they were truly contrite, they'd forfeit their ill-gotten wealth.

That said...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fog_of_War

"Using archival footage, United States Cabinet conversation recordings, and an interview of the then eighty-five-year-old Robert McNamara, The Fog of War depicts his life, from his birth during the First World War remembering the time American troops returned from Europe, to working as a World War II Whiz Kid military officer, to being the Ford Motor Company's president, to serving as Secretary of Defense for presidents Kennedy and Johnson (including his involvement in the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Vietnam War)."

I will always hate McNamara and what he's done. But I respect his mea culpa and attempts to prevent future such mistakes.

> As someone else mentioned on this thread, this is the guy who contributed to the concentration of all things social into Facebook by selling Whatsapp.

As mentioned nearby he apparently owned 20% of the shares so he may very well have been against it yet falling short on voting power.