The Myth of the “Pinto memo” is Not a Hopeful Story for Our Time
A few of the issues I mention below were changed after I finished this post, when Wired “updated” the article on 10/20/21, but I think it is still worth examining the article as it originally came out on 10/14/21, so I have left my post as is.
If historians are going to make analogies in public, we need to do our homework, lest we lead readers astray and give them false understandings.
Last week fellow historian Mar Hicks published a piece in Wired titled “Facebook’s Fall From Grace Looks a Lot Like Ford’s.” The news hook for the piece is Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen’s recent testimony before Congress. Hicks likens Haugen’s whistleblowing to a famous document from the 1970s that has become known as the “Pinto memo,” in which staff at Ford Motor Company did a cost-benefit analysis of a proposed federal technical standard. Hicks argues that the memo constituted a kind of turning point in US automobile regulation: “Before there was Big Tech, there were the Big Three: Ford, Chrysler, and General Motors — and an infamous memo that cemented in the collective consciousness that strong regulation was a necessity, not a nicety.”
The upshot for our current moment, Hicks claims, is that Haugen’s whistleblowing is likely a similar turning point: “If the Ford Pinto memo is any indication…
