Facebook’s war on free will | Hacker News Reader

Facebook’s war on free will

theguardian.com

44 pointsbem949 comments

Still, Zuckerberg’s juvenile fascination with hackers never died – or rather, he carried it forward into his new, more mature incarnation. When he finally had a corporate campus of his own, he procured a vanity address for it: One Hacker Way. He designed a plaza with the word “HACK” inlaid into the concrete. In the centre of his office park, he created an open meeting space called Hacker Square. This is, of course, the venue where his employees join for all-night Hackathons. As he told a group of would-be entrepreneurs, “We’ve got this whole ethos that we want to build a hacker culture.”

If there's one thing Facebook is not, it is not representative of the Elder Gods that Zuck, at least according to this piece, nominally idolizes. If he really does, he failed his idols in the most catastrophic way.

Hackerdom, to me anyway, is C, Unix, K&R, RMS and (sigh) ESR, Linus, Ian and Debra, GNU, the EFF, and the Grail Quest that is GNU/HURD. It's Freenode; emacs, vi, and the editor holy wars. It's the Woz and a man with a magic whistle.

It is _not_ facebook, in any way shape or form.

It's hilarious to me that the guy who is responsible for turning the open internet into America Online II wants to cosplay as a "hacker."

You hit the nail on the head that Zuckerberg idolizing hacker culture rather than embracing the hacker ethos. They make me think of a guy my friend worked with who was in love with his monitors (seriously, all the pictures on his social media sites are his six monitors) and wearing t-shirts from Think Geek and talking about how cool it was that he could run one npm command and have a whole web server set up. To which my friend replied, "Yeah but it doesn't do anything. You have 40,000 files and you haven't solved a single problem yet."

Interesting article, has similar concerns to those raised by Cathy O'Neil in her book 'Weapons of Math Destruction', and also by Tim Wu in The Attention Merchants. Those of us working in software rarely stop to think about the biases we're hardcoding in our programs, and how it can impact users. We really need to wake up to how we are affecting people's lives.

I couldn't agree more. Engineers are often so far (physically and metaphorically) from the actual impact of what they work on, it can be really easy to miss the damage it does.

People who work for Facebook must have to work very hard to remember the people they are experimenting on are people, not just "users", and that they don't have cart-blanch with how they treat them. Especially if they are building addiction into their service!

Also, Weapons of Math Destruction is a fantastic book.

I heard a guy say once in a talk, "There are only two groups that call their customers 'users': Drug Dealers and Software Developers."

> Cathy O'Neil in her book 'Weapons of Math Destruction'

For those of you who like listening more than reading, she was on 99% Invisible talking about destructive algorithms and her book a few weeks ago: http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-age-of-the-algorit...

Somehow the same thing posted 6 hours later has a lot more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15284020

It started good then the whole article went on a tangent.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com