>I think you're reading a sarcasm into it that I'm not seeing? It's possible - I've also read his book and some other work of his. He's a very good writer, tho

>I think you're reading a sarcasm into it that I'm not seeing? It's possible - I've also read his book and some other work of his. He's a very good writer, though, so if it's there, it's almost certainly intentional. If you follow that paragraph, 'With their free time, they played epic pranks, which happened to draw further attention to their own cleverness – ' is then followed up by Foer's description of them as the enemy of suited bureaucracy. It makes you imagine young people going against a paternal figure, but the examples he chooses both cut their credibility and show that their fight was ultimately useless. It also provides better juxtaposition for his ultimate point about Zuckerberg's perversion of the hacker ethos. You're right, he is painting Zuckerberg as a wannabe. A boy who wants to emulate naive heroes but doesn't have the 'technical virtuosity' and ends up exploiting the culture he's almost but not quite a part of, turning it from something fairly harmless into something that Foer believes is extremely dangerous for society.