Comment by yoasif_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yoasif_ | Hacker News Reader

>Maybe it was when CEO Zuckerberg started to seem less like that geeky, counterculture college kid and more like a run-of-the-mill billionaire.

What? Zuckerberg never seemed "counter-cultural".

Also, and maybe I'm crazy, but Facebook was never cool -- it was always "just" useful. It was a way to learn about people in college and get back to them after you met them at a party. Facebook was a social utility.

It was also better than MySpace, and had more users on it than Friendster. Does that make it cool? Nah, it just makes it better.

I think that the idea that it may have at some point become cool is among... high school kids who couldn't get in, because it was only open to colleges. Later, it became cool to moms and dads because "it's that internet thing and I can see pictures of people I know, cool!".

For everyone else, who were familiar with email and Flickr and hell, even blogs, all that is just noise.

Facebook was never cool -- and if it was, it was cool among the uncool.

For everyone else, who were familiar with email and Flickr and hell, even blogs, all that is just noise.

I agree, yet it seems that there are scores of others for whom those other options were either unfamiliar or insufficient.

It was cool to those for whom the really cool things about the Internet were just a bit out of reach (e.g. too geeky or obscure). The people who before Facebook would share photos by pasting them into a Word doc and E-mailing the resulting file.

It became AOL for the 21C. and it had a ready audience.

It was so cool people even made a movie about it. Zuckerberg is/was the poster-child of the counter-culture: one in which the nerds beat the jocks (literally). Not that he was the first nerd to "win", but still, the image he cultivated (the hooded ceo with the "I'm ceo bitch" business card) is undeniably associated to "counter-culture" and "cool"...

Steve Jobs alone is more of a counter culture figure, with the ashram in India, and the drug use, and the whole garage story.

Zuckerberg was a kid from freakin' Harvard and Phillips Exeter. I think the Harvard thing alone disqualifies him from being a counter cultural figure, especially since he has always seemed squeaky clean and fairly intelligent.

As far as the nerds "winning" -- I thought that was the way of the world. Napoleon wasn't some giant, neither was Bill Gates. The idea that the jock's best years are in high school is a pretty well-known trope at this point, often used to comedic effect in movies like Revenge of the Nerds -- or TV shows like Married with Children.

Well-off kids doing well for themselves is hardly unusual or counter cultural -- it's more like that's what we would expect with the advantages afforded to them.

Your college does not dictate your eventual status as a "square" or counterculture icon. Timothy Leary, whom Nixon described as the most dangerous man in America due to his immense countercultural influence, was a Harvard lecturer. Ted Kaczynski (better known as the Unabomber) was accepted there at age 16 for his undergraduate degree, later became an assistant professor at Berkeley, and has inspired a whole generation of ecoterrorists and neo-luddites. And what about all the free software/open source advocates that came out of buttoned-down tech schools like MIT, including Richard Stallman?

Yep. But all those guys were clearly counter culture figures: drugs, terrorism, open source (that last one is so different and hard to categorize that I just called it what we know it as).

Zuckerberg? Where's his support of Occupy Wall Street, or the Tea Party, or even marijuana legalization?

Facebook doesn't even allow pictures of breastfeeding mothers!

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/breastfeeding-advocates-hold-fa...

I know that you were providing examples where the college someone went to doesn't preclude them from being counter cultural. Zuckerberg, though, while not "square" exactly, is basically what our culture basically expects of people that go to those schools.

Leary and Kaczynski, not so much, and that may actually be a part of the reason that that they grew to have outsize influence as counter cultural icons!

I'm pretty aware you disagree about both the "counter-culture" and "coolness". It just doesn't change facts that MOST PEOPLE AGREE (including whoever wrote the article and hollywood and movie-goers in general), facebook WAS cool and zuckerberg WAS counter-culture. And now facebook is where you meet you mom and zuckerberg is one more sold-out billionaire.

Speaking of which, Steve Jobs was ALSO known as counter-culture (but not nerd) and now is widely perceived as a dictator due to its insistence on closed end-to-end architectures.

Yesterday's David is today's Goliath.

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