This is an amazing article from the NY Times about Facebook's cynical and Trumpist style public relations campaign, which also shows us why corporate Human Resources liberalism is a problem that must be confronted and solved nearly as much as Trumpist Republicans.
But as I read the article, I had a personal shock as I read the name Monika Bickert and then saw her photograph in the article.
Monkia Bickert was my perhaps top Mock Trial High School student when I taught Mock Trial in the 1990s in Orange County, and more particularly Lake Forest, California. Monika was a poised, brilliant and kind young woman who went from high school to Rice University on a volleyball scholarship, excelled as a student athlete there, and went to and graduated from Harvard Law School. She then went to the Justice Department handling I believe anti-trust matters. I lost contact with her after she had graciously come to my book-reading for my novel in DC where she was living at the time while working for the federal government. She is also the source of a story that came through her father, a now retired dentist, I believe, and his comment to an old friend who was a patient of his. Monika had aced her Evidence Law class in her second year at Harvard, and the professor told her she was the best student he had ever taught in his Evidence class. He asked if a parent was a lawyer because she knew down cold the rules of evidence. She laughed and said, No, but the best law professor she ever had was her high school Mock Trial coach, who taught her the rules of evidence in a matter of weeks, and was so effective, she never forgot the rules. Of course, when I applied for Chapman Law School as a professor when it opened in the late 1990s, I couldn't even land an interview. :)
I did produce a few top lawyers as a coach over the years I taught (1989-1999), including a Cornell Law grad who is a major partner at a top international law firm, and a possibly now former Department of Education lawyer who contacted me out of the blue just before we moved from CA to NM--and several other lawyers and at least one journalist, Matt Klickstein (see here and here for two recent books of his). When I introduced The Daughter to Matt when he was on his book tour for his oral history of Nickelodeon, he told her, "Your Dad is one of the greatest influences on me! I still have the books he gave me from high school..." then turning to me, he said, "...and one day, I'm going to write that book on Kent State (the shooting)." Matt's mother is a cousin of former Sixties activist, Todd Gitlin, so I figure I take a bow for my apparently having had a large influence.
As The Wife says, whenever I say how much of a failure I've been, that I did influence a lot of young people over the years. But it looks like Monika got caught up in the go-go world of the high tech industry, and perhaps should practice some of the anti-trust philosophy again....Facebook should also consult with David Brin to figure out how to better navigate openness and privacy rather than pursue misleading, corrupt, and anti-Semitic public relations. Perhaps Facebook could begin to act like an online newspaper in terms of filtering but from what I see so far, a reliance on algorithms creates at least as much chaos and misdirection as it is supposed to stop.
