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“Behold Mark Zuckerberg’s Revised Origin Story for Facebook”

hos234 7y ago
Where Zuck's "2 simple ideas" will take us, Micheal Crichton already told us even before Facebook existed - "I think cyberspace means the end of our species. It means the end of innovation. This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they'll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big continent, and their evolution slows down. Now, for our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behaviour. We innovate new behaviour to adapt. And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That's the effect of mass media - it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there's a McDonald's on one corner, a Benetton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there's less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity - our most necessary resource? That's disappearing faster than trees. But we haven't figured that out, so now we're planning to put five billion people together in cyberspace. And it'll freeze the entire species. Everything will stop dead in its tracks. Everyone will think the same thing at the same time. Global uniformity" Zuckerberg will go down in history as the guy who helped that process along the way.
- ksaj 7y ago
  While you could argue this was predictive for certain facets (look at music, for example), it definitely is wrong in others. Since the founding of Facebook (arbitrarily chosen because of the comment establishing this as the moment innovation died), we have advanced robots on the moon and Mars. We have quantum competition where even amateurs can contribute from the comfort of their own homes. We have deep <learning,fakes,etc> that are accessible from powerful computers fit in our jean pockets. We have Raspberry Pi and other SBCs connecting to a gamut of high technologies like e-paper, clustering, Google Voice, etc. We have autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicles. We have bitcoin. It would be easy to go on and on listing the innovations that have appeared since "cyberspace" became a thing. But the innovations I listed are because of cyberspace, and not in spite of it. While culturally the world is starting to blur, it definitely cannot be said that innovation is suffering in any way. Cyberspace essentially hit the fast-forward button on innovation.
strbean 7y ago
"I made hot-or-not for my campus, then I made MySpace (but exclusive, .edu emails only), then MySpace sold out and everyone jumped to my site." So much luck.
- loceng 7y ago
  More a lack of conscience or morals than luck: 1) The twin brothers hired him to build out ConnectU including the exclusivity mechanism of .edu emails only 2) Mark purposefully mislead/lied to the twins claiming he was working on ConnectU that he was contracted/paid to do - meanwhile actually focusing on his own version called TheFacebook to launch before them; him knowing that you didn't need to platforms so he wanted to be first to market, a transcript of him saying as much exists 3) The university was already planning to take their real life physical "The Facebook" and make an online version. Mark's quoted in the university newspaper saying he didn't understand why it was taking them so long, that he could get it done quickly. The reason it was taking "so long" is the committee, group doing it was thinking/brainstorming through potential privacy, security, and safety issues that could be a problem, presumably to design the platform with solutions to protect people; we clearly know now Mark has never thought about or cared about this, nor proactively cared for any such things, except for optics purposes.

Where Zuck's "2 simple ideas" will take us, Micheal Crichton already told us even before Facebook existed - "I think cyberspace means the end of our species. It means the end of innovation. This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they'll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big continent, and their evolution slows down. Now, for our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behaviour. We innovate new behaviour to adapt. And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That's the effect of mass media - it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there's a McDonald's on one corner, a Benetton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there's less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity - our most necessary resource? That's disappearing faster than trees. But we haven't figured that out, so now we're planning to put five billion people together in cyberspace. And it'll freeze the entire species. Everything will stop dead in its tracks. Everyone will think the same thing at the same time. Global uniformity" Zuckerberg will go down in history as the guy who helped that process along the way.

ksaj 7y ago
While you could argue this was predictive for certain facets (look at music, for example), it definitely is wrong in others. Since the founding of Facebook (arbitrarily chosen because of the comment establishing this as the moment innovation died), we have advanced robots on the moon and Mars. We have quantum competition where even amateurs can contribute from the comfort of their own homes. We have deep <learning,fakes,etc> that are accessible from powerful computers fit in our jean pockets. We have Raspberry Pi and other SBCs connecting to a gamut of high technologies like e-paper, clustering, Google Voice, etc. We have autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicles. We have bitcoin. It would be easy to go on and on listing the innovations that have appeared since "cyberspace" became a thing. But the innovations I listed are because of cyberspace, and not in spite of it. While culturally the world is starting to blur, it definitely cannot be said that innovation is suffering in any way. Cyberspace essentially hit the fast-forward button on innovation.

strbean 7y ago

"I made hot-or-not for my campus, then I made MySpace (but exclusive, .edu emails only), then MySpace sold out and everyone jumped to my site." So much luck.

loceng 7y ago
More a lack of conscience or morals than luck: 1) The twin brothers hired him to build out ConnectU including the exclusivity mechanism of .edu emails only 2) Mark purposefully mislead/lied to the twins claiming he was working on ConnectU that he was contracted/paid to do - meanwhile actually focusing on his own version called TheFacebook to launch before them; him knowing that you didn't need to platforms so he wanted to be first to market, a transcript of him saying as much exists 3) The university was already planning to take their real life physical "The Facebook" and make an online version. Mark's quoted in the university newspaper saying he didn't understand why it was taking them so long, that he could get it done quickly. The reason it was taking "so long" is the committee, group doing it was thinking/brainstorming through potential privacy, security, and safety issues that could be a problem, presumably to design the platform with solutions to protect people; we clearly know now Mark has never thought about or cared about this, nor proactively cared for any such things, except for optics purposes.