9 ms·

Mark Zuckerberg's Hoodie

317 points by pidge 14y ago

guptaneil 14y ago
Based on the title, I thought this article would be about Zuck's fashion choices, but it surprised me by diving into much deeper topics about individual identity, privacy, and revolutions. Great writing.
neumann_alfred 14y ago
"Making the world open"? Facebook doesn't even offer RSS feeds, so thanks for the chuckle. "Making the world connected"? The world is connected anyway, introducing middlemen into it makes it arguably less connected, that is, it introduces more connectedness that sucks, instead of the kind that doesn't. Thanks for honing my doublethink radar or something.
- msoad 14y ago
  > Facebook's mission is to make the world more open and connected.
- freshfunk 14y ago
  1B people disagree with you.
  - pdonis 14y ago
    1B people aren't even asking themselves those questions.
    - freshfunk 14y ago
      If people didn't think FB was making things more open and connected, then why are they even on the site (and returning frequently)? It may not be YOUR narrow definition of open and connected but clearly they are deriving value from connecting and sharing with their friends and family.
      - neumann_alfred 14y ago
        It may not be YOUR narrow definition of open and connected but clearly they are deriving value from connecting and sharing with their friends and family. And that is relevant how, exactly? Even if it was: 6B people are NOT using it.
        freshfunk 14y ago
        A good majority of that is in China where the govt has banned it. Show me a service that's connected more people that hasn't been around for more than 20 years and not named "the Internet." The greatest value FB brings is making it easier to connect and share (ie. be open) with others and 1B people derive enough value in that to come back on a regular basis. That's the point.
      - pdonis 14y ago
        clearly they are deriving value from connecting and sharing with their friends and family. Which they would be doing anyway if FB didn't exist. FB to them is convenience, nothing more. Many of them probably think that FB is "the Internet", just as many AOL users thought that in the 90's. They are only "connected" inside the walled garden; they have no idea of all the things that are outside it.
        freshfunk 14y ago
        Wow that's pretty condescending. Yes, it is a convenience... Much like email is a convenience over snail mail and Face Time is a convenience over meeting in person. Arguably the car is a "convenience" over the horse. Discounting the breakthrough in technology that spawned the term "social networking" doesn't really help your position. AOL may be a defunct company but in their hey day they brought millions of people online. They deserve more than your mockery.
        pdonis 14y ago
        I didn't say there was no value in convenience. Of course there is. I use email. I'm posting here instead of xeroxing and snail mailing what I write. But HN isn't trying to monetize my personal information, and it isn't trying to be my only portal to the Internet. Yes, AOL in its heyday brought lots of people online--and made them think that going through AOL was the only way to get online. Facebook has brought a lot of people social networking--and has made them think that allowing Facebook to monetize their private information is the only way to do social networking. They are encouraging people to choose short-term convenience at the expense of long-term control over their own data and their own online lives. My point is that saying "lots of people use Facebook" is not the same thing as saying "Facebook is doing things that are good for its users, or the Internet, or society, all things considered". Same for s/Facebook/AOL/.
    - freshfunk 14y ago
      If people didn't think FB was making things more open and connected, then why are they even on the site (and returning frequently)? It may not be YOUR narrow definition of open and connected but clearly they are deriving value from connecting and sharing with their friends and family.
  - hayksaakian 14y ago
    "Do you want to post this comment to your Facebook timeline?" [ Yes ] [ in 1 minute ]
  - pavanky 14y ago
    More than a Billion people disagree on pretty much anything.
  - neumann_alfred 14y ago
    Not having much of a thought either way doesn't exactly count as disagreeing in my books. And even if that wasn't true: the arguments matter, not the amount of people that hold a certain opinion.
  - Luyt 14y ago
    Ah, "If many believe so, it is so", the Argumentum Ad Populum [1]. In Roman times, 1 million people believed that you could foretell the future by 'reading' the entrails of animals. That so many people believed this, doesn't make it necessary a reliable way to predict the future ;-) [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_populum http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_populum
- mcpherrinm 14y ago
  Open and Connected doesn't mean what you think it does. That's not a statement about technology. RSS feeds? They're building a product for the masses. They just want to log in and connect with friends, share with them, and gawk at pictures of their friends. "Open" doesn't mean in the neckbeard sense. "Connected" isn't about how many protocols they support. Building RSS support would be a distraction. They have support for applications that could probably give you that -- I'm not sure because I've never wanted it. As Zuck said in Time Magazine, "Open means having access to more information, right? More transparency, being able to share things and have a voice in the world. And connected is helping people stay in touch and maintain empathy for each other, and bandwidth."[1] Complaining about Facebook being a walled garden is a valid point. But complaining that it's doublethink is not. 1: http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2036683_2037183_2037185-7,00.html http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2...
  - neumann_alfred 14y ago
    Complaining about Facebook being a walled garden is a valid point. But complaining that it's doublethink is not. Okay, so there's more openness and transparency within that walled garden, and that's why it's not doublethink, gotcha. "Open" just "doesn't mean what I think it means", which is a perfectly valid thing to say, while it would of course invalid to claim "open means something else than you or Zuckerberg seem to think".
  - d0mine 14y ago
    If it is "open" can I search for it on google?
privasectech 14y ago
The sad part of an entire article about Mark's hoodie, is that the significance to mark himself was missed. What is inside the back of his hoodie?
- ComputerGuru 14y ago
  The article wasn't really about the hoodie..
mturmon 14y ago
Beautiful, suggestive theme. Nice work.
argonaut 14y ago
>People who know they’re being watched change their behaviour. In a world awash in surveillance devices, hoodies are an element of fashion driven by an architectural condition. They are a response to the constant presence of cameras overhead. People who don’t want to be watched wear them. People who want to be the kind of people who don’t want to be watched wear them. People who want to look like the kind of people who don’t want to be watched wear them. >It is difficult to imagine a more suitable uniform for the notoriously private CEO of a company dedicated to expanding our ideas of what should be public. >June 2, 2010, Zuckerberg, hoodie removed, begins answering Mossberg’s question. Honestly, this seriously reminds me of the kinds of essays that most students fall into the trap of writing in English classes in school - fake certitude, speaking in absolutes, a pervasive tone of academic hysteria, and drawing parallels and implications by mere association. In my view, it tries to dissemble a sense of profundity, however hollow. The final sentence is a particularly egregious example of drawing an association out of thin air. This essay may as well have introduced itself as studying the symbolic motif of the hoodie and its role in the constant conflict between privacy and surveillance in the literary work Facebook, by Reality. EDIT: I would like to lightheartedly add that these essays were always really fun for me to write in school because I would get top marks for them despite knowing how meaningless they were.
- philwelch 14y ago
  I think you're spot on. This is fluff posing as profoundness with irrelevant nuggets of topicality mixed in for flavor.
- InclinedPlane 14y ago
  It also struck me as written by someone on the East Coast, which appears to be the case (the writer lives in Toronto). Here in Seattle nobody would spend so many words writing about the hoodie. People wear them. Business professionals wear them. Sometimes even CEOs. It's not a symbol, it's just clothing.
  - pdog 14y ago
    You missed the entire point of the essay. 1) The hoodie is more than just an article of clothing, and 2) it wasn't really about the hoodies.
nkwiatek 14y ago
Poetic and engaging writing, but ultimately dishonest. It relies on the symbol of the hoodie to carry the speech through pathos, and that does take it quite far, but no argument is given. Are we expected to fear Zuckerberg, or the consumer website Facebook? The author stirs drama but does not direct it, and the resulting flatness feels disingenuous -- yet another Facebook piece that feels important with no insight. The author has identified that there is something significant to culture in Facebook's work that is also frightening, but can't quite articulate it, because that is actually difficult to do given how bleeding edge these issues are; instead, lazily, the author appears to give up. Disappointing. I'd love something with more teeth.
- beatpanda 14y ago
  It's giving you some things to think about without coming to a conclusion for you, and it's interesting how disorienting you find this.
  - nkwiatek 14y ago
    Well, that's the thing: I don't find that interesting, I find it lazy. It's already lazy to write about Facebook, especially in a negative or fearful tone. (How much of that mongering do you see in a day? One article on the frontpage a day on average, yes?) When a writer chooses Facebook's ethos as a topic I'm looking very critically for true insight, but most end up punting on this -- this author included.
    - beatpanda 14y ago
      I don't think it was really about Facebook's ethos at all, and I think people are going to continue writing about Facebook negatively until we all find some way to solve the problems they're causing. It's not just going to go away because it's a dead horse. That's like saying that anti-war protesters should just stop showing up, "because, duh, we all know war is bad, so just put your little placard down, already."
      - 14y ago
nerdfiles 14y ago
I call Eminem.
ck2 14y ago
Even billionaires need their security blankets.
kevinalexbrown 14y ago
What a thoughtful essay. "But it uses a silly writing device to illustrate a point it could have just made plainly!" Whoa there, critical-thinking-by-the-numbers guy, maybe the article is also about fashion. As a child, I considered style choices a silly and inconsequential distraction from the beautiful truths of the universe: e^(ipi) + 1 doesn't care what I'm wearing, so neither should I, therefore it doesn't matter, QED. While today I still wish fashion would just go away so I could wear this conference t-shirt in peace, I contend it offers a reflection of who we are. Consider that while half the Senior Developers of the world can't program their way out of a FizzBuzz test, and half the world can't even read at all, everyone can look at someone's dress and decide if it's fashionable for their demographic. "No, it offers a reflection of what the establishment wants us to be!" I'll leave it to the reader to reconcile those two views. "But I just care about finishing Project Euler problems in APL so I just decide to wear sandals and this old shirt like all my friends!" Fashion mattering doesn't depend on you caring. Even you, APL-man, know Zuck couldn't wear his hoodie working for Quinn Emanuel unless he owned it (real question: how many people show up in suits at facebook?). I was shopping for pretty scarves (!) with a product designer and suggested that ads are the clearest reflection of what a given demographic is. He agreed so quickly I wondered if I were late to the party. So when the Scientology ad in the Atlantic showed up, I thought of my favorite TLP quotation: if you're reading it, it's for you. The obvious question was "why is the Atlantic publishing this!?" The more depressing question is "why am I in Scientology's target demo?" Fashion is an advertisement about yourself. "But the relationship is not always so obvious!" Hence the hoodie the world's richest web geek refuses to remove. "But I don't care what Zuckerberg wears!" If you're reading it, it's for you.
- pdog 14y ago
  TLP: "The Last Psychiatrist" http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/ http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/
- kevinpet 14y ago
  "everyone can look at someone's dress and decide if it's fashionable for their demographic." You may have forgotten where you are discussing this topic. I certainly have no clue whether something is fashionable. I'd be hard pressed to tell you if two colors go together. I do no know if I dress more or less formally than my coworkers, or if my normal clothes present any sort of image. My style is not a conscious rejection of fashion, it is simply some clothes that I've concluded aren't too far outside what I'm expected to wear and therefore don't make me stand out.
beatpanda 14y ago
Based on the responses here on Hacker News, it seems like some of you didn't get it. This article is about social privilege, and how different the life circumstances of the founder of Facebook are from many of the people using his product. It's underscoring the fact that Graph Search could only be built by someone who doesn't understand the sometimes life-or-death importance of privacy, who has never had to fear any real consequences from any expression of identity or presenting the same face to all people. A large segment of the readers of Hacker News have the same blind spots as Mark Zuckerberg, and this comes out whenever any question of social privelege as it relates to technology comes up here. This is a problem. The products we're building have huge, and usually unexamined, social consequences, and I don't think ignoring those consequences will work long term. This is true in other fields that claim "neutrality" the way technologists do. Most working U.S. journalists, for instance, work for pro-government, pro-Capitalist news outlets. We call this "objective". Any deviation from that norm is "bias". Keeping identifying information in a centralized location that is subject to subpoena by law enforcement is a norm now, too, one that has serious social consequences. So your decision to roll your own auth system and saying "fuck it, I'll just make them log in through Facebook" is about a lot more than how many keystrokes you have to enter and how much maintenance you're going to have to do down the road. We should start factoring social consequences in to our technical decisions, like, ten years ago, and I'm afraid it's going to take a lynch mob empowered by Graph Search for people to get this.
- yuhong 14y ago
  I prefer people post under their real name if possible, but know that it is not always possible. I do want these problems fixed eventually if possible too.
  - cynest 14y ago
    But is that truly de-anonymizing? I share my legal name with several famous people, and numerous SEO'd professionals. Barring more specific searching knowing specific details I am relatively hard to identify. Same with just about anyone who fits the (common first name, common last name) paradigm. On the other hand (rare first name, rarer last name) is relatively easy to uniquely identify.
gfodor 14y ago
I've been telling my friends this: Graph Search is going to be the biggest privacy shitstorm we've ever seen, by a large margin. The only way it's not going to be is if Zuck et al cave quickly and lock it down to just search in your own network before the media picks it up. Basically Graph Search is the piece de resistance of Zuckerberg's vision for the world: ultimate transparency aided by algorithms to surface "public" information (ie, information the person posting it did not realize it was public.) It's the last big piece of the puzzle and closes the loop. The current product launch is just one "frontend" to these algorithms. Make no mistake the creation of this search engine is a huge inflection point since now things can be built on top of it. The thesis (I think) has always been there would need to be a huge trial by fire, teaching the public about what information is actually public, and what it means to be "on the Internet" not via privacy settings, or blog posts, or tutorials, but by pure unadulterated necessity through fear. You will have to lock your shit down now or face the consequences of massive dissemination of that information. There will be no more friction. There will be causalities, and I think Facebook thinks it is an inevitability that "privacy through obscurity" becomes a thing of the past, so might as well be them to kill it. If you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet, particularly one that is going to be made by someone, so be it. "Market efficiency" of social data is going to be achieved: just like when a news report comes out about a company its stock price instantly updates to reflect it, so to will the world itself, and the people in it, reflect the publication of personal information thanks to the ability of the world to see it via software like Graph Search. Anyone who wants to know anything about you or what you do will be able to, instantly, unless you understand the scope of the things you publish intimately.
- philwelch 14y ago
  I have an easy solution to that, personally: I don't share my deepest darkest secrets on social networking sites. I can't imagine anything I've posted to Facebook being a problem if it was all printed in tomorrow's New York Times. Maybe other people should take the same approach.
  - icebraining 14y ago
    Let's hope other people don't post them for you. At least when email was the main social network, the effects of indiscreet friends and acquaintances didn't usually appear on Google.
junto 14y ago
Very interesting. The linked UK Police (FIT) spotter cards, contain a well known British personality, namely Mark Thomas. http://quietbabylon.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Police-spotter-card-002-500x367.jpg http://quietbabylon.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Police-sp... He can be seen on here on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASPL8hlKJCk&list=PL06987B4A09FB8A8D http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASPL8hlKJCk&list=PL06987B... Legend...
chanux 14y ago
Off topic but I've heard that Zuck has a cupboard full of same hoodie (or t-shirt) so he doesn't have to worry about what he is going to wear in the morning.
- Karunamon 14y ago
  That's a pretty common trope - supposedly Steve Jobs was the same way. I wonder how true it is.
  - corporalagumbo 14y ago
    I recently bought ~30 pairs of the same underwear which I prefer. I definitely see locking down a set of favourite items for the basics of your daily wardrobe, and then buying those items in bulk, as a big efficiency boost if you have more important things to do with your mind than worry about the what you're going to wear each day. Makes sense to focus on basic items: socks, undies, t-shirts, pants, jerseys. Then you don't have to worry about needing to do laundry all the time, running out of items you prefer, choosing between different models, choosing when you go shopping again. Ultimately you would want to extend this beyond clothes: food, household items etc. and automate it as much as possible, so you don't even have to worry about re-buying - your system is set up to order replacements on schedule as required. Edit: just realised I'm in the process of doing basically the same thing with discovering and standardising my favourite haircut.
  - gnaritas 14y ago
    Probably true; lots of people do this, myself included. I don't want to think about what I wear every day. I find a set of clothes I like, a shirt, shorts, or pants, and buy a bunch of them so I wear essentially the same outfit every day with the only variation being the color as I buy that thing in many colors if possible.
etfb 14y ago
"It's 1945. I sit in a Brooklyn kitchen, fascinated by an arrangement of cogs on black velvet. I am sixteen years old. It is 1985. I am on Mars. I am fifty six years old..." That's what the style of this article instantly reminded me of. Like the source I quote, the article was done very well indeed; well enough that I picked up what was happening without the use of Dave Gibbons' art. Good language, even good poetry. Impressive. And the point he's making? Memorable. Doesn't matter if I agree with his point or the connections he's drawing. This is quality stuff all round.
- corporalagumbo 14y ago
  Damn, I gotta read Watchmen again soon.
meaty 14y ago
When you grow up, the hoodie is replaced with a Berghaus fleece :)
gench 14y ago
Jobs had black turtlenecks as a signature style. I think Zuckerberg sees Jobs as a role model and imitates his practice with hoodies. What else could he choose to look "cool"?
corporalagumbo 14y ago
This isn't wholly bad writing, but what he's published is really just an early draft: ~version 0.3 in the writing process, the point where you've meandered your way through your early thoughts, lost direction and momentum, then squished all the loose ends and odd thoughts into a limp pseudo-conclusion, because you generally don't have anything clear to say in your mind the first time round. At this point I would be stepping back, taking some time to think about and deconstruct what and why I was exactly interested in in the first place, looking for the seeds of what really interests me. Then I'd strip it down to its fundamentals, generate a potential argument, do some more research, and start a new draft cycle. Usually I'm only getting to something I would consider publishing around 3.0 or 4.0. Or I've realised that the ideas didn't pan out and I've shelved the project - another very important skill for writers! Anyway putting in this extra effort is hard work but worth it, because otherwise your thoughts always come out like this: pretty, suggestive, but directionless. Basically people need to learn to be patient and not rush their ideas - a hard but necessary lesson in our times. (I usually edit most of my comments here multiple times: written and posted hastily, then subjected to extended consideration.)
mieubrisse 14y ago
Very interesting writing style, and a wonderfully thought-provoking read!
zevyoura 14y ago
The site has gone over its bandwidth limit, so mirror time. Here's Google's cached copy: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:quietbabylon.com%2F2013%2Fmark-zuckerbergs-hoodie%2F http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:quietba...

317 points by pidge 14y ago

Based on the title, I thought this article would be about Zuck's fashion choices, but it surprised me by diving into much deeper topics about individual identity, privacy, and revolutions. Great writing.

neumann_alfred 14y ago

"Making the world open"? Facebook doesn't even offer RSS feeds, so thanks for the chuckle. "Making the world connected"? The world is connected anyway, introducing middlemen into it makes it arguably less connected, that is, it introduces more connectedness that sucks, instead of the kind that doesn't. Thanks for honing my doublethink radar or something.

msoad 14y ago
> Facebook's mission is to make the world more open and connected.
freshfunk 14y ago
1B people disagree with you.
- pdonis 14y ago
  1B people aren't even asking themselves those questions.
  - freshfunk 14y ago
    If people didn't think FB was making things more open and connected, then why are they even on the site (and returning frequently)? It may not be YOUR narrow definition of open and connected but clearly they are deriving value from connecting and sharing with their friends and family.
    - neumann_alfred 14y ago
      It may not be YOUR narrow definition of open and connected but clearly they are deriving value from connecting and sharing with their friends and family. And that is relevant how, exactly? Even if it was: 6B people are NOT using it.
      - freshfunk 14y ago
        A good majority of that is in China where the govt has banned it. Show me a service that's connected more people that hasn't been around for more than 20 years and not named "the Internet." The greatest value FB brings is making it easier to connect and share (ie. be open) with others and 1B people derive enough value in that to come back on a regular basis. That's the point.
    - pdonis 14y ago
      clearly they are deriving value from connecting and sharing with their friends and family. Which they would be doing anyway if FB didn't exist. FB to them is convenience, nothing more. Many of them probably think that FB is "the Internet", just as many AOL users thought that in the 90's. They are only "connected" inside the walled garden; they have no idea of all the things that are outside it.
      - freshfunk 14y ago
        Wow that's pretty condescending. Yes, it is a convenience... Much like email is a convenience over snail mail and Face Time is a convenience over meeting in person. Arguably the car is a "convenience" over the horse. Discounting the breakthrough in technology that spawned the term "social networking" doesn't really help your position. AOL may be a defunct company but in their hey day they brought millions of people online. They deserve more than your mockery.
        pdonis 14y ago
        I didn't say there was no value in convenience. Of course there is. I use email. I'm posting here instead of xeroxing and snail mailing what I write. But HN isn't trying to monetize my personal information, and it isn't trying to be my only portal to the Internet. Yes, AOL in its heyday brought lots of people online--and made them think that going through AOL was the only way to get online. Facebook has brought a lot of people social networking--and has made them think that allowing Facebook to monetize their private information is the only way to do social networking. They are encouraging people to choose short-term convenience at the expense of long-term control over their own data and their own online lives. My point is that saying "lots of people use Facebook" is not the same thing as saying "Facebook is doing things that are good for its users, or the Internet, or society, all things considered". Same for s/Facebook/AOL/.
  - freshfunk 14y ago
    If people didn't think FB was making things more open and connected, then why are they even on the site (and returning frequently)? It may not be YOUR narrow definition of open and connected but clearly they are deriving value from connecting and sharing with their friends and family.
- hayksaakian 14y ago
  "Do you want to post this comment to your Facebook timeline?" [ Yes ] [ in 1 minute ]
- pavanky 14y ago
  More than a Billion people disagree on pretty much anything.
- neumann_alfred 14y ago
  Not having much of a thought either way doesn't exactly count as disagreeing in my books. And even if that wasn't true: the arguments matter, not the amount of people that hold a certain opinion.
- Luyt 14y ago
  Ah, "If many believe so, it is so", the Argumentum Ad Populum [1]. In Roman times, 1 million people believed that you could foretell the future by 'reading' the entrails of animals. That so many people believed this, doesn't make it necessary a reliable way to predict the future ;-) [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_populum http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_populum
mcpherrinm 14y ago
Open and Connected doesn't mean what you think it does. That's not a statement about technology. RSS feeds? They're building a product for the masses. They just want to log in and connect with friends, share with them, and gawk at pictures of their friends. "Open" doesn't mean in the neckbeard sense. "Connected" isn't about how many protocols they support. Building RSS support would be a distraction. They have support for applications that could probably give you that -- I'm not sure because I've never wanted it. As Zuck said in Time Magazine, "Open means having access to more information, right? More transparency, being able to share things and have a voice in the world. And connected is helping people stay in touch and maintain empathy for each other, and bandwidth."[1] Complaining about Facebook being a walled garden is a valid point. But complaining that it's doublethink is not. 1: http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2036683_2037183_2037185-7,00.html http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2...
- neumann_alfred 14y ago
  Complaining about Facebook being a walled garden is a valid point. But complaining that it's doublethink is not. Okay, so there's more openness and transparency within that walled garden, and that's why it's not doublethink, gotcha. "Open" just "doesn't mean what I think it means", which is a perfectly valid thing to say, while it would of course invalid to claim "open means something else than you or Zuckerberg seem to think".
- d0mine 14y ago
  If it is "open" can I search for it on google?

privasectech 14y ago

The sad part of an entire article about Mark's hoodie, is that the significance to mark himself was missed. What is inside the back of his hoodie?

ComputerGuru 14y ago
The article wasn't really about the hoodie..

mturmon 14y ago

Beautiful, suggestive theme. Nice work.

argonaut 14y ago

>People who know they’re being watched change their behaviour. In a world awash in surveillance devices, hoodies are an element of fashion driven by an architectural condition. They are a response to the constant presence of cameras overhead. People who don’t want to be watched wear them. People who want to be the kind of people who don’t want to be watched wear them. People who want to look like the kind of people who don’t want to be watched wear them. >It is difficult to imagine a more suitable uniform for the notoriously private CEO of a company dedicated to expanding our ideas of what should be public. >June 2, 2010, Zuckerberg, hoodie removed, begins answering Mossberg’s question. Honestly, this seriously reminds me of the kinds of essays that most students fall into the trap of writing in English classes in school - fake certitude, speaking in absolutes, a pervasive tone of academic hysteria, and drawing parallels and implications by mere association. In my view, it tries to dissemble a sense of profundity, however hollow. The final sentence is a particularly egregious example of drawing an association out of thin air. This essay may as well have introduced itself as studying the symbolic motif of the hoodie and its role in the constant conflict between privacy and surveillance in the literary work Facebook, by Reality. EDIT: I would like to lightheartedly add that these essays were always really fun for me to write in school because I would get top marks for them despite knowing how meaningless they were.

philwelch 14y ago
I think you're spot on. This is fluff posing as profoundness with irrelevant nuggets of topicality mixed in for flavor.
InclinedPlane 14y ago
It also struck me as written by someone on the East Coast, which appears to be the case (the writer lives in Toronto). Here in Seattle nobody would spend so many words writing about the hoodie. People wear them. Business professionals wear them. Sometimes even CEOs. It's not a symbol, it's just clothing.
- pdog 14y ago
  You missed the entire point of the essay. 1) The hoodie is more than just an article of clothing, and 2) it wasn't really about the hoodies.

nkwiatek 14y ago

Poetic and engaging writing, but ultimately dishonest. It relies on the symbol of the hoodie to carry the speech through pathos, and that does take it quite far, but no argument is given. Are we expected to fear Zuckerberg, or the consumer website Facebook? The author stirs drama but does not direct it, and the resulting flatness feels disingenuous -- yet another Facebook piece that feels important with no insight. The author has identified that there is something significant to culture in Facebook's work that is also frightening, but can't quite articulate it, because that is actually difficult to do given how bleeding edge these issues are; instead, lazily, the author appears to give up. Disappointing. I'd love something with more teeth.

beatpanda 14y ago
It's giving you some things to think about without coming to a conclusion for you, and it's interesting how disorienting you find this.
- nkwiatek 14y ago
  Well, that's the thing: I don't find that interesting, I find it lazy. It's already lazy to write about Facebook, especially in a negative or fearful tone. (How much of that mongering do you see in a day? One article on the frontpage a day on average, yes?) When a writer chooses Facebook's ethos as a topic I'm looking very critically for true insight, but most end up punting on this -- this author included.
  - beatpanda 14y ago
    I don't think it was really about Facebook's ethos at all, and I think people are going to continue writing about Facebook negatively until we all find some way to solve the problems they're causing. It's not just going to go away because it's a dead horse. That's like saying that anti-war protesters should just stop showing up, "because, duh, we all know war is bad, so just put your little placard down, already."
    - 14y ago

nerdfiles 14y ago

I call Eminem.

ck2 14y ago

Even billionaires need their security blankets.

kevinalexbrown 14y ago

What a thoughtful essay. "But it uses a silly writing device to illustrate a point it could have just made plainly!" Whoa there, critical-thinking-by-the-numbers guy, maybe the article is also about fashion. As a child, I considered style choices a silly and inconsequential distraction from the beautiful truths of the universe: e^(ipi) + 1 doesn't care what I'm wearing, so neither should I, therefore it doesn't matter, QED. While today I still wish fashion would just go away so I could wear this conference t-shirt in peace, I contend it offers a reflection of who we are. Consider that while half the Senior Developers of the world can't program their way out of a FizzBuzz test, and half the world can't even read at all, everyone can look at someone's dress and decide if it's fashionable for their demographic. "No, it offers a reflection of what the establishment wants us to be!" I'll leave it to the reader to reconcile those two views. "But I just care about finishing Project Euler problems in APL so I just decide to wear sandals and this old shirt like all my friends!" Fashion mattering doesn't depend on you caring. Even you, APL-man, know Zuck couldn't wear his hoodie working for Quinn Emanuel unless he owned it (real question: how many people show up in suits at facebook?). I was shopping for pretty scarves (!) with a product designer and suggested that ads are the clearest reflection of what a given demographic is. He agreed so quickly I wondered if I were late to the party. So when the Scientology ad in the Atlantic showed up, I thought of my favorite TLP quotation: if you're reading it, it's for you. The obvious question was "why is the Atlantic publishing this!?" The more depressing question is "why am I in Scientology's target demo?" Fashion is an advertisement about yourself. "But the relationship is not always so obvious!" Hence the hoodie the world's richest web geek refuses to remove. "But I don't care what Zuckerberg wears!" If you're reading it, it's for you.

pdog 14y ago
TLP: "The Last Psychiatrist" http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/ http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/
kevinpet 14y ago
"everyone can look at someone's dress and decide if it's fashionable for their demographic." You may have forgotten where you are discussing this topic. I certainly have no clue whether something is fashionable. I'd be hard pressed to tell you if two colors go together. I do no know if I dress more or less formally than my coworkers, or if my normal clothes present any sort of image. My style is not a conscious rejection of fashion, it is simply some clothes that I've concluded aren't too far outside what I'm expected to wear and therefore don't make me stand out.

beatpanda 14y ago

Based on the responses here on Hacker News, it seems like some of you didn't get it. This article is about social privilege, and how different the life circumstances of the founder of Facebook are from many of the people using his product. It's underscoring the fact that Graph Search could only be built by someone who doesn't understand the sometimes life-or-death importance of privacy, who has never had to fear any real consequences from any expression of identity or presenting the same face to all people. A large segment of the readers of Hacker News have the same blind spots as Mark Zuckerberg, and this comes out whenever any question of social privelege as it relates to technology comes up here. This is a problem. The products we're building have huge, and usually unexamined, social consequences, and I don't think ignoring those consequences will work long term. This is true in other fields that claim "neutrality" the way technologists do. Most working U.S. journalists, for instance, work for pro-government, pro-Capitalist news outlets. We call this "objective". Any deviation from that norm is "bias". Keeping identifying information in a centralized location that is subject to subpoena by law enforcement is a norm now, too, one that has serious social consequences. So your decision to roll your own auth system and saying "fuck it, I'll just make them log in through Facebook" is about a lot more than how many keystrokes you have to enter and how much maintenance you're going to have to do down the road. We should start factoring social consequences in to our technical decisions, like, ten years ago, and I'm afraid it's going to take a lynch mob empowered by Graph Search for people to get this.

yuhong 14y ago
I prefer people post under their real name if possible, but know that it is not always possible. I do want these problems fixed eventually if possible too.
- cynest 14y ago
  But is that truly de-anonymizing? I share my legal name with several famous people, and numerous SEO'd professionals. Barring more specific searching knowing specific details I am relatively hard to identify. Same with just about anyone who fits the (common first name, common last name) paradigm. On the other hand (rare first name, rarer last name) is relatively easy to uniquely identify.

gfodor 14y ago

I've been telling my friends this: Graph Search is going to be the biggest privacy shitstorm we've ever seen, by a large margin. The only way it's not going to be is if Zuck et al cave quickly and lock it down to just search in your own network before the media picks it up. Basically Graph Search is the piece de resistance of Zuckerberg's vision for the world: ultimate transparency aided by algorithms to surface "public" information (ie, information the person posting it did not realize it was public.) It's the last big piece of the puzzle and closes the loop. The current product launch is just one "frontend" to these algorithms. Make no mistake the creation of this search engine is a huge inflection point since now things can be built on top of it. The thesis (I think) has always been there would need to be a huge trial by fire, teaching the public about what information is actually public, and what it means to be "on the Internet" not via privacy settings, or blog posts, or tutorials, but by pure unadulterated necessity through fear. You will have to lock your shit down now or face the consequences of massive dissemination of that information. There will be no more friction. There will be causalities, and I think Facebook thinks it is an inevitability that "privacy through obscurity" becomes a thing of the past, so might as well be them to kill it. If you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet, particularly one that is going to be made by someone, so be it. "Market efficiency" of social data is going to be achieved: just like when a news report comes out about a company its stock price instantly updates to reflect it, so to will the world itself, and the people in it, reflect the publication of personal information thanks to the ability of the world to see it via software like Graph Search. Anyone who wants to know anything about you or what you do will be able to, instantly, unless you understand the scope of the things you publish intimately.

philwelch 14y ago
I have an easy solution to that, personally: I don't share my deepest darkest secrets on social networking sites. I can't imagine anything I've posted to Facebook being a problem if it was all printed in tomorrow's New York Times. Maybe other people should take the same approach.
- icebraining 14y ago
  Let's hope other people don't post them for you. At least when email was the main social network, the effects of indiscreet friends and acquaintances didn't usually appear on Google.

junto 14y ago

Very interesting. The linked UK Police (FIT) spotter cards, contain a well known British personality, namely Mark Thomas. http://quietbabylon.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Police-spotter-card-002-500x367.jpg http://quietbabylon.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Police-sp... He can be seen on here on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASPL8hlKJCk&list=PL06987B4A09FB8A8D http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASPL8hlKJCk&list=PL06987B... Legend...

chanux 14y ago

Off topic but I've heard that Zuck has a cupboard full of same hoodie (or t-shirt) so he doesn't have to worry about what he is going to wear in the morning.

Karunamon 14y ago
That's a pretty common trope - supposedly Steve Jobs was the same way. I wonder how true it is.
- corporalagumbo 14y ago
  I recently bought ~30 pairs of the same underwear which I prefer. I definitely see locking down a set of favourite items for the basics of your daily wardrobe, and then buying those items in bulk, as a big efficiency boost if you have more important things to do with your mind than worry about the what you're going to wear each day. Makes sense to focus on basic items: socks, undies, t-shirts, pants, jerseys. Then you don't have to worry about needing to do laundry all the time, running out of items you prefer, choosing between different models, choosing when you go shopping again. Ultimately you would want to extend this beyond clothes: food, household items etc. and automate it as much as possible, so you don't even have to worry about re-buying - your system is set up to order replacements on schedule as required. Edit: just realised I'm in the process of doing basically the same thing with discovering and standardising my favourite haircut.
- gnaritas 14y ago
  Probably true; lots of people do this, myself included. I don't want to think about what I wear every day. I find a set of clothes I like, a shirt, shorts, or pants, and buy a bunch of them so I wear essentially the same outfit every day with the only variation being the color as I buy that thing in many colors if possible.

etfb 14y ago

"It's 1945. I sit in a Brooklyn kitchen, fascinated by an arrangement of cogs on black velvet. I am sixteen years old. It is 1985. I am on Mars. I am fifty six years old..." That's what the style of this article instantly reminded me of. Like the source I quote, the article was done very well indeed; well enough that I picked up what was happening without the use of Dave Gibbons' art. Good language, even good poetry. Impressive. And the point he's making? Memorable. Doesn't matter if I agree with his point or the connections he's drawing. This is quality stuff all round.

corporalagumbo 14y ago
Damn, I gotta read Watchmen again soon.

meaty 14y ago

When you grow up, the hoodie is replaced with a Berghaus fleece :)

gench 14y ago

Jobs had black turtlenecks as a signature style. I think Zuckerberg sees Jobs as a role model and imitates his practice with hoodies. What else could he choose to look "cool"?

corporalagumbo 14y ago

This isn't wholly bad writing, but what he's published is really just an early draft: ~version 0.3 in the writing process, the point where you've meandered your way through your early thoughts, lost direction and momentum, then squished all the loose ends and odd thoughts into a limp pseudo-conclusion, because you generally don't have anything clear to say in your mind the first time round. At this point I would be stepping back, taking some time to think about and deconstruct what and why I was exactly interested in in the first place, looking for the seeds of what really interests me. Then I'd strip it down to its fundamentals, generate a potential argument, do some more research, and start a new draft cycle. Usually I'm only getting to something I would consider publishing around 3.0 or 4.0. Or I've realised that the ideas didn't pan out and I've shelved the project - another very important skill for writers! Anyway putting in this extra effort is hard work but worth it, because otherwise your thoughts always come out like this: pretty, suggestive, but directionless. Basically people need to learn to be patient and not rush their ideas - a hard but necessary lesson in our times. (I usually edit most of my comments here multiple times: written and posted hastily, then subjected to extended consideration.)

mieubrisse 14y ago

Very interesting writing style, and a wonderfully thought-provoking read!

zevyoura 14y ago

The site has gone over its bandwidth limit, so mirror time. Here's Google's cached copy: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:quietbabylon.com%2F2013%2Fmark-zuckerbergs-hoodie%2F http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:quietba...