The Expensive Education of Mark Zuckerberg and Silicon Valley | Hacker News Reader

The Expensive Education of Mark Zuckerberg and Silicon Valley

nytimes.com

27 pointszonotope11 comments

Reading this article makes you wonder if Mark Z ever read "Faust." A lot of the problems with social media seem, at least in retrospect, sadly predictable.

More significantly it's hard to see how to fix those problems without changing the basic economics of social media businesses like Facebook.

Oh god this is such bullshit. Its so easy to criticize FB/tech for not predicting the far-reaching consequences of companies they built 10-15 years ago in a ~completely~ different world. Back when no-one used them and the challenges were technical rather than societal.

What was the media, with all its humanities erudition saying back then? Nothing but cheer leading, just like the rest of us. The fact is, NO ONE understood all of these consequences so clearly decades ago.

I don't recall a whole lot of enlightened humanities majors predicting doom back when the iPhone came out or FB came out. The ENTIRE world has had to learn since then, not just SV.

Of course, its the tech industries responsibility to fix it now. But this tired old trope of "shouldn't have let the nerds get in power, they don't understand!!!" is just trash. Show me the enlightened people who were concerned about privacy back when FB was a joke if you want to argue that. I didn't see any.

> The fact is, NO ONE understood all of these consequences so clearly decades ago.

I think a lot of people understood the consequences pretty clearly. Think of the nerds you know who refused to use Facebook. They knew.

> Show me the enlightened people who were concerned about privacy back when FB was a joke if you want to argue that. I didn't see any.

There's a bunch, but RMS immediately comes to mind: https://stallman.org/

Here's a collection of essays sponsored by the FSF: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/essays-and-articles.en.html

Great, but the world as a whole voted with their money and funded Facebook, they voted with their time and used it.

I think its ridiculous for everyone to wash their hands of all responsibility now and blame it on the easiest targets.

The whole world still doesn't care about these issues and still votes with their time and money to fund Facebook. They will until there's something "better". If we care, it's our job to make something better that the public will throw their time and money at.

An op-ed like this one in the New York Times only means that we've transitioned from only privacy-conscious nerds finding Facebook offensive to the elite class beginning to understand that there might be something wrong. That took over a decade. It'll probably take 20 years before Facebook is dead and we've all moved to a decentralized solution.

You didn't see any because you were making fun of them or ignoring them for being "paranoid" about privacy. Or maybe you're just too young to remember.

All the discussions about Google, Facebook Android and iPhone already happened, including on this forum.

I'm sure some people did. The point is billions of people around the world willingly used Facebook, Google etc. Millions funded them. Many millions bought their shares. As a majority, the world voted with money and attention. And yes, as a whole the world did not pay attention to the "paranoid" people.

My only point is most of the world did all this together, pointing fingers at the rich & powerful is not helpful.

Pointing the finger at the rich & powerful is fine, because they have benefited from these adventures, while people and societies swallowed the costs.

If Facebook & Google would share their profits with the users and were always painfully transparent about how the information of the users is processed, maybe it would be hypocritical for them to point fingers.

Gmail and FB happen to have both been launched in Spring 2004. Plenty of people were concerned back then about the privacy consequences of allowing Google to search your mail, and plenty of people didn't want to engage with FB. I think the Gmail situation was clearer at the time.

The EFF has of course been concerned with privacy since the 1990s.

Speaking of 2004, in 2004 the EFF was on the board of organizers of the fourteenth conference on "Computers, Freedom, and Privacy" (http://www.cfp2004.org/program/speakers.html), a conference series they founded in 1991 IIRC. I'm not immersed in the history here, but my recollection is that relatively more time was spent on copyright and privacy w/r/t governments, vs. privacy w/r/t corporations.

Plenty of people saw this shit coming. You and others just opted not to listen to them.

For the record, I warned Mark on April 7, 2005 and August 21, 2005 about the very problems we are having now: exposing friend data linked to given user IDs (Cambridge Analytica), inevitable FTC Section 5 liability, and the effect of spam on the network (fake accounts).

Mark's response: not worth arguing about.

http://www.thinkpress.com/authoritas/timeline.pdf

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