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> The "very special boy" who cheekily breaks a few rules in order to build something that is wildly popular and disruptive...and this was something to live up t
by foobarian 2y ago
> The "very special boy" who cheekily breaks a few rules in order to build something that is wildly popular and disruptive...and this was something to live up to?
I think examples like this (also see Bill Gates) were more inspiring because there was an idea that you could get at least some smaller scale of that kind of success with a modicum of talent, hard work, and luck. You would look around your high school class and there would be one or two "whiz kids" who everybody knew would go on to do great things. The role of computers was not widespread yet and there seemed countless possibilities for computers to make life better. Instead of writing numbers by hand into a ledger and adding on a mechanical calculator, you would use a spreadsheet type of thing.
I think what changed is the efficiency of the successes. Success means extraction at largest possible scale, such that there is no more room for one or two whiz kids from every single high school class. There is room for 1 whiz kid per generation; and chances are that guy will need to be a greedy asshole to make it to the top. And then the very nature of this extraction means, now that the productivity gains have plateaued, that resources are taken from the poor and given to the rich.
Sorry to be a downer, I'll see myself back to my bottle. :-D
- Earw0rm 2y agoYes. The problem is scale and pervasiveness. Ethics didn't matter on an Apple ][. Well, not much. You could screw around, break stuff, "should" didn't come into it, you couldn't really touch the parts of the world that matter. Even people hacking phone lines and banks were small-time for the most part. Zuckerberg wasn't particularly original in his thought process, there'd been many like him before, but I think Facebook was the pivotal moment. One, because it was for everyone (even more so than AOL), two, because it was personal in a way that previous social platforms (ICQ, Usenet, Compuserve) hadn't been, and three because by rigidly enforcing real-life identities as the norm, it collapsed the context between online and offline. Ten years earlier, lonely-bored-horny-smart dudes would have joked about building an app to be vaguely creepy around hot girls they were too shy to talk to. Heck, that's basically the plot of Weird Science - by 1985, Hollywood knew that's what geeks were like, so we can guess the first time that conversation happened was about 1972. Smart little boys breaking the rules on an Apple ][ are interesting and funny. When they end up running the world but haven't grown psychologically, it's downright terrifying. Same goes for 25-year-old stoner douchebags making edgy shitposts on 4chan, and those same people when they're 55 and worth $400Bn. With power, responsibility. Grow the fuck up.
- anal_reactor 2y ago> Grow the fuck up. Or else what.
- Earw0rm 2y agoOr else you're a <reaches for expletive> <checks handle> Sigh, never mind.
- sydbarrett74 2y agoI guess the blurring and eventual erasure of the online/offline erasure is where Zuck succeeded and Friendster, MySpace, et al., failed.
- Earw0rm 2y agoI'm not sure the others aspired to, to quite the same extent. Partly a function of timing of course. Stable, universal broadband connections arrived a couple of years before Facebook, and the iPhone a couple of years after. Even as late as 2002, people _went_ online. I think the last time I used a modem must have been summer 2003 or so. By 2007, people _were_ online.
- sydbarrett74 2y agoI can no longer edit my comment. Strike that second instance of 'erasure' and substitute 'red line'.
- sydbarrett74 2y agoYou nailed it: success is a winner-take-all (or maybe most?) proposition. At least in a narrow domain, the dominant solution crowds out all other contenders.