How Facebook’s Naive Optimism Built a Toolbox for Totalitarianism (2014)

http://exponents.co/facebooks-built-a-totalitarianism-toolbox/

by imartin2k • 8 years ago

106 20 8 years ago

Is "Naïve" an accurate word here?

A lot of hay has been made over Zuckerberg's "They "trust me" Dumb fucks" comment, but however it gets exaggerated, it shows he understood the power of this information in the very early days... a complete lack of naïveté.

FreakyT• 8 years ago

Hard to say; it's entirely possible he was "joking" at the time.

It's also completely possible (and this is my belief) that he eventually drunk his own Kool-Aid and came to genuinely believe that Facebook really was about making the world a better place by connecting people.

OrganicMSG2• 8 years ago

Is very hard to know if the promoter of the Kool-Aid has drunk their own Kool-Aid, since the method of getting other people to drink theirs is to first learn to act as though you really, truly believe in the Kool-aid.

PolandKid• 8 years ago

>It's also completely possible (and this is my belief) that he eventually drunk his own Kool-Aid and came to genuinely believe that Facebook really was about making the world a better place by connecting people.

Possible is one thing, but there's no chance anyone with a micron of common sense could believe in that marketing tag line.

Facebook was a better, "cleaner looking" social network in an era of MySpaces, that's all.

The user profiling and data collection is the essential part to building audience demographics for better targeting ads, which they needed to compete with Google's PPC domination.

dfraser992• 8 years ago

When I learned Zuckerberg majored in psychology while at Harvard, the reasons for everything he's done and how he's behaved (and the actions of Facebook) became crystal clear -

Facebook is little more than a Skinner box, fueled by not cocaine but dopamine.

juststeve• 8 years ago

source?

Barrin92• 8 years ago

Is "Naïve" an accurate word here?

No, it's not at all accurate. It's surveillance capitalism, making money with the attention of people, manipulation and violation of privacy on a massive scale, using addictive mechanisms and networks to keep them engaged.

The public is only now recognising how damaging it is to democracy, personal relations and intimacy among other things, but companies like Facebook knew this for a very long time already, it is their business model.

btilly• 8 years ago

I'm not buying naïve.

See https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/10/facebook-person... for a 2013 view of Facebook near the beginning of this decade.

In 2010 I remember hearing rumor that some of the early investors in Facebook were connected with the CIA. I can't readily verify that, but it fits with everything that I've heard about them.

I don't think that we should assume good intentions here.

apo• 8 years ago

This revised 2014 article veers off into some strange territory at the end:

For the first time in human history, ALL of the philosophical, psychological, and educational frameworks and just about every technology necessary to create and sustain abundant, low-cost access to energy, water, nutritious food, high-quality education, physical and mental health, transportation, and shelter exists at the same time.

Right now, in 2018, we already have everything we need to reduce and possibly eliminate nearly all the waste in our systems. And we can do it all in a way that benefits the planet’s environment instead of harming it and possibly destabilizing it.

The obstacles to the widespread deployment of these ideas and technologies are misaligned incentives and scale.

And thanks to an extraordinary invention by a strange reclusive figure who calls itself Satoshi, humanity may have a path around those obstacles as well

No, that invention is not Bitcoin. It is the blockchain, the much more significant technology that makes Bitcoin possible.

In a much bigger upcoming guide to the blockchain, we’ll explore these things as well.

I've seen all manner of wind-ups to "blockchain," but this one was quite unexpected.

If the author is talking about social networks combined with "Blockchain Technology," he can save his breath. This has been done to death.

ggggtez2• 8 years ago

I'm just waiting for the "FreedomCoin" ICO. /s

edit: of course that's a real coin already. Sigh.

abhishekjha• 8 years ago

social networks combined with "Blockchain Technology,"

I don't get the use case properly. Is it the trust issue? How can a distributed voting system fix it? And also, wouldn't that require a lot of processing power?

kromem• 8 years ago

It's basically what Secure Scuttlebutt is doing.

Basically, if you have a cryptographic write only log of social activity, and can exchange that with others, you can create social activity/interactions that are only readable by your social graph (as it should be), and not by third parties/providers.

It's a really, really neat concept (in the vein of the awesome stuff happening with distributed cryptographic consensus in general), and simply needs easier entry points for mass adoption.

Devolver2• 8 years ago

Nope! While your skepticism is totally reasonable, this is not a lead up to anything basic like a social network on the blockchain or any ICO/Coin pitch at all.

That blockchain wind up was only a foreshadowing of another piece of content..an essay that attempts to actually define what the blockchain is (in historical context) AND how it can be applied over the next generation to solve huge problems in energy, food production, transportation, municipal government, civic engineering, education, etc.

debt2• 8 years ago

"huge problems in energy, food production, transportation, municipal government, civic engineering, education, etc."

Completely nonsensical list of unrelated nouns, but nonsense is what fuels crypto hype.

ggggtez2• 8 years ago

Did he really sneak in Blockchain hype in the last 2 sentences?

Why am I even surprised...

How Facebook’s Naive Optimism Built a Toolbox for Totalitarianism (2014)

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