8 ms·

I think the FSF is off here. Time's Person of the Year was never about positive or negative influences, just influences. To prove my point, former honorees incl

by yock 16y ago

I think the FSF is off here. Time's Person of the Year was never about positive or negative influences, just influences. To prove my point, former honorees include Deng Xaioping, Adolf Hitler, and Joseph Stalin. Honoring Zuckerberg as POTY only indicates that they see him as the single most influential person of 2010 with regards to world events.

nostrademons 16y ago
Even under that criteria, though, I think Julian Assange would've been a much better choice. Most of the stuff FaceBook did to change the world happened around 2007. Heck, the fact that the movie's coming out now indicates that the important stuff happened long ago.
- robryan 16y ago
  If they were recognizing a person in a particular year, but took into account there past accomplishments also I think he is a decent choice. Just this year though nothing person of the year ground breaking has happened, with the movie coming out it's almost delayed recognition, when it was all happening not many actually knew it.
- greyman 16y ago
  Can you specify in more details what you think is the scale of Julian's impact? From media coverage it looks like the impact has been huge, but is it really? I am not against Julian, I would not object if they selected him instead of Mark, I am just not sure that until now the real impact (of Wikileaks) on how the world operates was that big.
  - nostrademons 16y ago
    I believe he's a harbinger of things to come. Not necessarily in the sense of new leaks coming from WikiLeaks, which has been fairly tame so far. I think, though, that Julian's basically validated the idea that a.) it's possible to collect, vet, and release potentially damaging information about powerful entities and b.) people care when you do. We've had time periods like this in the past (eg. the Muckraker era at the turn of the 1900s, the Pentagon Papers from the early 70s, Watergate), but the last such era seems to have been over 30 years ago. In the last 10+ years, we seem to have accepted the idea that it's okay for government and corporations to spy on us, but not okay for us to spy on them. Julian was just the guy who had the balls to say "Umm, two can play at this game" and follow through on it. He's validated the market. It's like Napster and Friendster: the services themselves failed, but they paved the way for iTunes and FaceBook, which have become huge. Can you imagine what'll happen when some enterprising anarchist hacker hooks up spyware, a botnet, and a spam network? It's not terribly difficult to write malware that scans each infected computer for any documents and posts them as spam comments to blogs or sends them out as spam emails. The thing is - once the information is out there, it naturally gets collaboratively-filtered. The interesting tidbits will be forwarded on or posted to Reddit, while the boring stuff will be deleted as garden-variety spam. I suspect that there's already malware out there that does exactly this, but instead of posting confidential info to random blogs, it just uplinks it to the Chinese government or some Russian mafia syndicate. The impact of WikiLeaks is that it's turned a spotlight on the damage that can be done - and more important, the attention that can be gained - by leaking information. That makes it far more likely that some bright, naughty teenager is going to think "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if everything was out there?" and dump everything out there.
  - jhamburger 16y ago
    I'd give it to Julian over Mark because of the "Somebody would have done it anyway" factor.
  - ScottBurson 16y ago
    The balance of power between governments and citizens has been changed forever. In 100 years everyone will remember Julian Assange; no one will remember Mark Zuckerberg. And that's true even if WikiLeaks were now to vanish; there will be dozens of replacements (like OpenLeaks).
    - rimantas 16y ago
      I seriously doubt many will remember him three years from now. The most noise about him is related to his Sweden affairs not something truly remarkable he has done. And after listening to him on BBC I started to dislike him rather a lot. I may be terribly wrong, but my gut feeling is that his main agenda is personal fame, or something else, not common good.
- yock 16y ago
  I didn't say it was a good choice, it's just their choice. For what it's worth, I agree that there were better options.
- edanm 16y ago
  "I think Julian Assange would've been a much better choice." I have to wonder - Assange has only received serious press attention for the last few weeks. Isn't this just a case of him being more fresh in our minds? Asked another way, looking back 3 years from now, who will most people has made a bigger impact on the world?
  - robryan 16y ago
    Depends, Wikileaks at least seems to credibly have a stack of incriminating stuff on the big banks. Who know's what else people will pass along to them now it's been shown how effectively they can capture the worlds attention.
    - hugh3 16y ago
      If I had some important secret documents to leak which provided evidence of wrongdoing on the part of government officials, I'd leak it to the New York Times or other major newspaper. They're the best place to go for stuff like that -- they have a huge readership, a staff who will dig into the surrounding issues, and a heck of a strong reputation (as opposed to ugly-website-run-by-creepy-alleged-rapist). I'd only leak to wikileaks if I (for some reason) wanted to leak ten gigabytes of randomly selected secret documents of no particular consequence. Wikileaks is the open mic night of leaking -- it's where you find the random crap, not the big stories.
      - jonknee 16y ago
        The NY Times would very likely not run with your leak. That's why WikiLeaks came to being.
        hugh3 16y ago
        No, they frequently run leaks which they think are in the public interest. And they have pretty low standards for what they think is in the public interest -- ultimately they just need to be able to come up with a good justification for believing it might be in the public interest, since their primary purpose is to sell newspapers. They would refuse to leak random diplomatic cables which don't show any wrongdoing by anybody, though. (Although they're quite happy to publish a story about them if someone else is responsible for the leaking.)
- ankimal 16y ago
  He was a runner-up. http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2036683_2037118_2037146,00.html http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2... I wonder if certain people and agencies had a hand in this?
- matwood 16y ago
  Instead of Assange they could have done the 'anonymous' leakers since it's their information that is really on display. Also, given the criteria where is Osama Bin Laden? His actions have done more to change the everyday world for people in the US than any other person in the last decade.
  - nostrademons 16y ago
    I thought he was a runner up in 2001, which is the year he should've won.
  - pfarrell 16y ago
    Time magazine considered Bin Laden, but decided he was a minor leader who got incredibly lucky in his plot. Guiliani got it instead.
    - nlogn 16y ago
      And how silly does that look in hindsight? Person of the year, really?
  - hugh3 16y ago
    Isn't it well known that Bradley Manning is the leaker?
- cies 16y ago
  i also wondered why it was zuckenberg over assange.
- kemiller 16y ago
  What has he actually impacted? Whose lives are affected, really, by what he did? Facebook, for good or ill, actually affects many people lives, and he was in the news in addition.
jpr 16y ago
Maybe I have missed something, but what did Zuckerberg do to deserve the title this year?
- epoxy 16y ago
  He didn't publish an archive of secret governmental cables.
fredoliveira 16y ago
I agree with what you're saying about the selection, but I have to disagree with Mark Zuckerberg being the most influential person in 2010 with regards to world events. Sure, Facebook is a huge company, and is still growing. Mark Zuckerberg has grown considerably as a leader (his recent interview with Jessica at Startup School was proof enough). But Facebook doesn't shape cultures, advance technology [1] or help solve some of the pressing problems of the world. In the end, people do need to connect to eachother, and facebook lets you do that - but the 10.000ft view is just a status/photo/updates sharing site. Mark set that in motion, but does that make him POTY? Maybe we need more people trying to make real impact. [1] it does - I know - just not as much as certainly other things do
ryandvm 16y ago
I suppose it's Time's little tradition so they can name whoever they want, but I still feel like they missed the mark on this one. Most people would admit that Facebook is a pretty interesting phenomenon. That a few hundred million people are at least shallowly engaging with people they haven't seen in years is pretty remarkable. But where I disagree with Time is that I don't think Zuckerberg was a particularly necessary ingredient. Facebook hit the scene as basically a cleaner, better designed MySpace. Zuckerberg's execution was spot on, but frankly, a lot of people could have done it. A large part of Facebook's success was being at the right place at the right time. And once the network effect kicked in, it pretty much drives itself. Assange on the other hand has put his ass on the line and managed to embarrass and disgruntle some of the most powerful players on the planet - ostensibly in the name of transparency. The implications of his actions are that world super powers are having to reconsider many of their assumptions about diplomacy and security, and that the world's citizenry are having to ponder the value and risks of free speech. Or at least they should be...
- larrik 16y ago
  There were a ton of websites trying to be Facebook, and really only Facebook succeeded. Give them a little credit, jeez.
  - rbanffy 16y ago
    Sometimes it's impeccable execution, sometimes is perfect strategy or exquisite timing, and yet, sometimes, it's like winning the lottery. Some people/companies, for reasons that defy logic, get incredibly lucky.
- spitfire 16y ago
  I actually suspect facebook succeeded in spite of Mark not because of him. If you look back to friendster et al, they all had very smart people trying to do fancy graph algorithm searches. They failed to deliver the basics that people wanted. Mark I suspect isn't nearly as good a programmer as the press (or his company PR) makes him out to be. Early versions of the site were a simple PHP index app. Only now once they've hired significant talent has he started harping on and on about the "social graph". Simply put I don't think he was up to the level to even do graph traversals/searches/etc at that point. If Mark had tried to do the graph stuff first, would he be just another corpse littering the landscape? I suspect so. So his incompetence was his lucky pot of gold.
praptak 16y ago
I don't think the main point of the FSF article is to disagree with the choice. To me it sounds like FSF just took a chance to remind the general public about the issues they always try to publicize. The disagreement is probably just added for some extra publicity.
IsaacL 16y ago
You are right that PotY is supposed to be about impact, regardless of for good or bad (though since this has caused controversy in the past, they've shied away from awarding it to "baddies" like Bin Laden in recent years). However, I'd disagree with placing Deng Xiaoping in the same list as Hitler and Stalin. He's arguably the architect of modern China, and such a towering positive achievement is only mildly dented by his responsibility for the Tiananmen massacre (IMO).

by yock 16y ago

nostrademons 16y ago

Even under that criteria, though, I think Julian Assange would've been a much better choice. Most of the stuff FaceBook did to change the world happened around 2007. Heck, the fact that the movie's coming out now indicates that the important stuff happened long ago.

robryan 16y ago
If they were recognizing a person in a particular year, but took into account there past accomplishments also I think he is a decent choice. Just this year though nothing person of the year ground breaking has happened, with the movie coming out it's almost delayed recognition, when it was all happening not many actually knew it.
greyman 16y ago
Can you specify in more details what you think is the scale of Julian's impact? From media coverage it looks like the impact has been huge, but is it really? I am not against Julian, I would not object if they selected him instead of Mark, I am just not sure that until now the real impact (of Wikileaks) on how the world operates was that big.
- nostrademons 16y ago
  I believe he's a harbinger of things to come. Not necessarily in the sense of new leaks coming from WikiLeaks, which has been fairly tame so far. I think, though, that Julian's basically validated the idea that a.) it's possible to collect, vet, and release potentially damaging information about powerful entities and b.) people care when you do. We've had time periods like this in the past (eg. the Muckraker era at the turn of the 1900s, the Pentagon Papers from the early 70s, Watergate), but the last such era seems to have been over 30 years ago. In the last 10+ years, we seem to have accepted the idea that it's okay for government and corporations to spy on us, but not okay for us to spy on them. Julian was just the guy who had the balls to say "Umm, two can play at this game" and follow through on it. He's validated the market. It's like Napster and Friendster: the services themselves failed, but they paved the way for iTunes and FaceBook, which have become huge. Can you imagine what'll happen when some enterprising anarchist hacker hooks up spyware, a botnet, and a spam network? It's not terribly difficult to write malware that scans each infected computer for any documents and posts them as spam comments to blogs or sends them out as spam emails. The thing is - once the information is out there, it naturally gets collaboratively-filtered. The interesting tidbits will be forwarded on or posted to Reddit, while the boring stuff will be deleted as garden-variety spam. I suspect that there's already malware out there that does exactly this, but instead of posting confidential info to random blogs, it just uplinks it to the Chinese government or some Russian mafia syndicate. The impact of WikiLeaks is that it's turned a spotlight on the damage that can be done - and more important, the attention that can be gained - by leaking information. That makes it far more likely that some bright, naughty teenager is going to think "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if everything was out there?" and dump everything out there.
- jhamburger 16y ago
  I'd give it to Julian over Mark because of the "Somebody would have done it anyway" factor.
- ScottBurson 16y ago
  The balance of power between governments and citizens has been changed forever. In 100 years everyone will remember Julian Assange; no one will remember Mark Zuckerberg. And that's true even if WikiLeaks were now to vanish; there will be dozens of replacements (like OpenLeaks).
  - rimantas 16y ago
    I seriously doubt many will remember him three years from now. The most noise about him is related to his Sweden affairs not something truly remarkable he has done. And after listening to him on BBC I started to dislike him rather a lot. I may be terribly wrong, but my gut feeling is that his main agenda is personal fame, or something else, not common good.
yock 16y ago
I didn't say it was a good choice, it's just their choice. For what it's worth, I agree that there were better options.
edanm 16y ago
"I think Julian Assange would've been a much better choice." I have to wonder - Assange has only received serious press attention for the last few weeks. Isn't this just a case of him being more fresh in our minds? Asked another way, looking back 3 years from now, who will most people has made a bigger impact on the world?
- robryan 16y ago
  Depends, Wikileaks at least seems to credibly have a stack of incriminating stuff on the big banks. Who know's what else people will pass along to them now it's been shown how effectively they can capture the worlds attention.
  - hugh3 16y ago
    If I had some important secret documents to leak which provided evidence of wrongdoing on the part of government officials, I'd leak it to the New York Times or other major newspaper. They're the best place to go for stuff like that -- they have a huge readership, a staff who will dig into the surrounding issues, and a heck of a strong reputation (as opposed to ugly-website-run-by-creepy-alleged-rapist). I'd only leak to wikileaks if I (for some reason) wanted to leak ten gigabytes of randomly selected secret documents of no particular consequence. Wikileaks is the open mic night of leaking -- it's where you find the random crap, not the big stories.
    - jonknee 16y ago
      The NY Times would very likely not run with your leak. That's why WikiLeaks came to being.
      - hugh3 16y ago
        No, they frequently run leaks which they think are in the public interest. And they have pretty low standards for what they think is in the public interest -- ultimately they just need to be able to come up with a good justification for believing it might be in the public interest, since their primary purpose is to sell newspapers. They would refuse to leak random diplomatic cables which don't show any wrongdoing by anybody, though. (Although they're quite happy to publish a story about them if someone else is responsible for the leaking.)
ankimal 16y ago
He was a runner-up. http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2036683_2037118_2037146,00.html http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2... I wonder if certain people and agencies had a hand in this?
matwood 16y ago
Instead of Assange they could have done the 'anonymous' leakers since it's their information that is really on display. Also, given the criteria where is Osama Bin Laden? His actions have done more to change the everyday world for people in the US than any other person in the last decade.
- nostrademons 16y ago
  I thought he was a runner up in 2001, which is the year he should've won.
- pfarrell 16y ago
  Time magazine considered Bin Laden, but decided he was a minor leader who got incredibly lucky in his plot. Guiliani got it instead.
  - nlogn 16y ago
    And how silly does that look in hindsight? Person of the year, really?
- hugh3 16y ago
  Isn't it well known that Bradley Manning is the leaker?
cies 16y ago
i also wondered why it was zuckenberg over assange.
kemiller 16y ago
What has he actually impacted? Whose lives are affected, really, by what he did? Facebook, for good or ill, actually affects many people lives, and he was in the news in addition.

jpr 16y ago

Maybe I have missed something, but what did Zuckerberg do to deserve the title this year?

epoxy 16y ago
He didn't publish an archive of secret governmental cables.

fredoliveira 16y ago

I agree with what you're saying about the selection, but I have to disagree with Mark Zuckerberg being the most influential person in 2010 with regards to world events. Sure, Facebook is a huge company, and is still growing. Mark Zuckerberg has grown considerably as a leader (his recent interview with Jessica at Startup School was proof enough). But Facebook doesn't shape cultures, advance technology [1] or help solve some of the pressing problems of the world. In the end, people do need to connect to eachother, and facebook lets you do that - but the 10.000ft view is just a status/photo/updates sharing site. Mark set that in motion, but does that make him POTY? Maybe we need more people trying to make real impact. [1] it does - I know - just not as much as certainly other things do

ryandvm 16y ago

I suppose it's Time's little tradition so they can name whoever they want, but I still feel like they missed the mark on this one. Most people would admit that Facebook is a pretty interesting phenomenon. That a few hundred million people are at least shallowly engaging with people they haven't seen in years is pretty remarkable. But where I disagree with Time is that I don't think Zuckerberg was a particularly necessary ingredient. Facebook hit the scene as basically a cleaner, better designed MySpace. Zuckerberg's execution was spot on, but frankly, a lot of people could have done it. A large part of Facebook's success was being at the right place at the right time. And once the network effect kicked in, it pretty much drives itself. Assange on the other hand has put his ass on the line and managed to embarrass and disgruntle some of the most powerful players on the planet - ostensibly in the name of transparency. The implications of his actions are that world super powers are having to reconsider many of their assumptions about diplomacy and security, and that the world's citizenry are having to ponder the value and risks of free speech. Or at least they should be...

larrik 16y ago
There were a ton of websites trying to be Facebook, and really only Facebook succeeded. Give them a little credit, jeez.
- rbanffy 16y ago
  Sometimes it's impeccable execution, sometimes is perfect strategy or exquisite timing, and yet, sometimes, it's like winning the lottery. Some people/companies, for reasons that defy logic, get incredibly lucky.
spitfire 16y ago
I actually suspect facebook succeeded in spite of Mark not because of him. If you look back to friendster et al, they all had very smart people trying to do fancy graph algorithm searches. They failed to deliver the basics that people wanted. Mark I suspect isn't nearly as good a programmer as the press (or his company PR) makes him out to be. Early versions of the site were a simple PHP index app. Only now once they've hired significant talent has he started harping on and on about the "social graph". Simply put I don't think he was up to the level to even do graph traversals/searches/etc at that point. If Mark had tried to do the graph stuff first, would he be just another corpse littering the landscape? I suspect so. So his incompetence was his lucky pot of gold.

praptak 16y ago

I don't think the main point of the FSF article is to disagree with the choice. To me it sounds like FSF just took a chance to remind the general public about the issues they always try to publicize. The disagreement is probably just added for some extra publicity.

IsaacL 16y ago

You are right that PotY is supposed to be about impact, regardless of for good or bad (though since this has caused controversy in the past, they've shied away from awarding it to "baddies" like Bin Laden in recent years). However, I'd disagree with placing Deng Xiaoping in the same list as Hitler and Stalin. He's arguably the architect of modern China, and such a towering positive achievement is only mildly dented by his responsibility for the Tiananmen massacre (IMO).