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The article introduces an interesting guy: > Antonio García Martínez, ad-tech entrepreneur. Helped create Facebook’s ad machine. He puts in some good points i

The article introduces an interesting guy: > Antonio García Martínez, ad-tech entrepreneur. Helped create Facebook’s ad machine. He puts in some good points in the first couple of sections about how the internet was built on hippie good intentions, and how Wall St came in and made it about money, but the really interesting thing is how in the next section, about online ads and how they turned into a mass surveillance regime, he's totally silent. Makes me think this is a bit of a puff piece for these people, who were all totally complacent at the time, speaking up now about how they went wrong, except they have nothing to say about what they personally did. This doesn't look much like an apology. Edit: wow, here's another beauty from Garcia: > The algorithm, by default, placates you by shielding you from the things you don’t want to hear about. That, to me, is the scary part. The real problem isn’t Facebook — it’s humans.

malvosenior 9y ago
The internet was actually built on cold war ideas about how to survive and communicate after a nuclear attack. Maybe you could make the case that consumer computing was based on hippie ideals (Whole Earth Catalog...), but the internet didn't get big until well after those thoughts had turned very commercial.
- nixpulvis 9y ago
  I think there's a key dostinction to be made here between the internet and the WWW.
  - malvosenior 9y ago
    There are tons of distinctions to be made. The internet is comprised of a multitude of protocols, applications and use cases. Blogs/newspapers like this are different than social media, old school forums, apps, co-op games, p2p file sharing, chat... This is an overly broad and reactionary article that's trying to equate recent outrage around FB with the internet as a whole.
    - originalsimba 9y ago
      "The Internet" is a buzzword, a marketing term, and so it means whatever it's user wants it to mean, however: Those of us who live and work on the internet, and who understand how a distributed decentralized network functions, are going to hear "Internet" and think "A decentralized computer network utilizing intelligent failover routing, TCP/IP, Ethernet and Fiber". Applications, protocols, these things ARE NOT the Internet. Applications and protocols can function and exist with or without the internet. So you see they are separate things. TCP/IP is not "The Internet". Ethernet is not "The Internet". The Internet is only the physical network that spans planet earth. It is the cables, the equipment, the public address space, and perhaps even the people who keep it all operational. _Nothing else is "The Internet"._ Here's the problem: I know this. Other network engineers know this. 99% of the population of the planet earth doesn't know this. We need to stop tolerating crap like clickbait journalism that declares "Facebook == The Internet". Those kinds of statements need to be shot down and destroyed immediately, all of the time, so that people will learn fact from fiction.
dschuetz 9y ago
This guy isn't defending Facebook, I think, by making "bad people doing bad things" the culprits of breaking the Internet and making it toxic. I think it's his way saying that Facebook amplified it a lot. I agree, he is not apologizing at all. He's looking for other sources of the problem, and it doesn't seem that he sees Facebook's ad machine as one.

malvosenior 9y ago

The internet was actually built on cold war ideas about how to survive and communicate after a nuclear attack. Maybe you could make the case that consumer computing was based on hippie ideals (Whole Earth Catalog...), but the internet didn't get big until well after those thoughts had turned very commercial.

nixpulvis 9y ago
I think there's a key dostinction to be made here between the internet and the WWW.
- malvosenior 9y ago
  There are tons of distinctions to be made. The internet is comprised of a multitude of protocols, applications and use cases. Blogs/newspapers like this are different than social media, old school forums, apps, co-op games, p2p file sharing, chat... This is an overly broad and reactionary article that's trying to equate recent outrage around FB with the internet as a whole.
  - originalsimba 9y ago
    "The Internet" is a buzzword, a marketing term, and so it means whatever it's user wants it to mean, however: Those of us who live and work on the internet, and who understand how a distributed decentralized network functions, are going to hear "Internet" and think "A decentralized computer network utilizing intelligent failover routing, TCP/IP, Ethernet and Fiber". Applications, protocols, these things ARE NOT the Internet. Applications and protocols can function and exist with or without the internet. So you see they are separate things. TCP/IP is not "The Internet". Ethernet is not "The Internet". The Internet is only the physical network that spans planet earth. It is the cables, the equipment, the public address space, and perhaps even the people who keep it all operational. _Nothing else is "The Internet"._ Here's the problem: I know this. Other network engineers know this. 99% of the population of the planet earth doesn't know this. We need to stop tolerating crap like clickbait journalism that declares "Facebook == The Internet". Those kinds of statements need to be shot down and destroyed immediately, all of the time, so that people will learn fact from fiction.

dschuetz 9y ago

This guy isn't defending Facebook, I think, by making "bad people doing bad things" the culprits of breaking the Internet and making it toxic. I think it's his way saying that Facebook amplified it a lot. I agree, he is not apologizing at all. He's looking for other sources of the problem, and it doesn't seem that he sees Facebook's ad machine as one.