Comment by roughly | Hacker News Reader

Comment by roughly | Hacker News Reader

Here's what gets me about this: Mark Zuckerberg bought like 1500 acres of land in Hawaii and is apparently building an underground apocalypse bunker on it. He's doing so, presumably, because he's worried about society collapsing. He's doing it with money that he's made from Facebook, which is the _reason_ society is collapsing.

Mark Zuckerberg has worked his ass off for like 20 years to go live in an underground bunker. Granted, it's a large and luxurious underground bunker, but this does not seem like an improvement.

Mark Zuckerberg controls the largest mass-persuasion device on earth - literally controls, he's got more than 50% of the shareholder votes - and is using the proceeds from owning the globe-spanning apocalypse machine that he's turned Facebook into to build himself a bunker underground to survive the apocalypse his machine is creating.

Just turn off the goddamn machine and you can actually enjoy Hawaii, Mark. All the good stuff is above ground!

The mental model precludes the self awareness you describe. That’s why laws and regulators are needed: you cannot entirely take the lizard brain out of the human.

You’re not going to convince people like Mark, but government can grind slowly, forever. No one else is going to protect you from these people at scale.

Oh I know that. The whole process is so obviously self-defeating that there’s clearly no actual rationality to it. It’s just a shame we’re all stuck on this boat with him.

True story. Onward.

Mega prepper bunker is a bigger signal of selfishness and not giving a fuck what happens to everyone else. I hope it becomes a Winchester Mystery House-type tourist attraction in 100 years.

If only it were possible to just turn it off and have it not exist! Facebook is a faucet of money, and were that Zuckerberg turned his off, one of his competitors or someone new would fill the void. Maybe they’d be better than he is, maybe not. Either way we can’t go back to 2000.

I dont agree with your psychoanalysis, but I do think it is interesting. IF I accept everything you say is true, there are still several questions.

IF Zuckerberg turns off facebook, will Armageddon be averted? will it be hastened?

As long as 1 human in 8 billion is willing to make Facebook 2.0, apocalypse is still on. The only durable solution is for the majority of humans to moderate and control themselves. IF this seems farfetched, consider that self control and moderation has always been a prerequisite for human life and society, albeit with different subjects.

I'm being moderately facetious with "turn off the machine", but - there isn't another Facebook. Facebook has a billion active users, and the Facebook algorithm, Facebook groups, and Facebook interaction design patterns are phenomenally powerful in affecting social discourse. As structured, they nudge towards discord, they reward clannishness, they propagate outrage, they generally push the worst versions of ourselves, and they do so while pushing every dopamine button we've managed to find in the human brain to make people stay within that environment. All of that is Facebook: all of that is what Zuckerberg built, and all of it follows his command. We can lump Instagram and all its various properties in there, too.

I don't know what a version of Facebook looks like that doesn't promote the apocalypse, but I'm also not the guy with his hands on the wheel, and that guy also seems scared of what it's doing. I'm also not particularly sympathetic to the "_someone_ would've sold those kids drugs!" argument.

Lots of rich people are preppers; I don't think AGI is the chief catalyst here

What precisely do you mean when you say society is collapsing because of Facebook?

This is an excellent question which deserves a response. I would argue that there are many factors other than Facebook which are leading the race towards a collapse of civilization.

Some may point to being sued for 150 billion for its alleged responsibility in the Myanmar genocide which was viewed by many as a standin case for countless micro variations of similar incidents that rippled throughout the network daily. And scandals like Cambridge Analytica. The thesis being that it has been transformed into a weapon that powerful entities use to manipulate, control, and harass the weak.

This is going to sound like whataboutism, but while I deleted my FB 10 years ago, it is worth noting that there are also legacy factors like CNN & Fox News (>200k dead in Iraq,) the petroleum cartels, proudly neo-nazi friendly X.com, the greed is good C-suite circle jerk, and many more a-holes in addition to FB.

FB deserves derision, but it is far from the sole reason that civilization is declining.

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