
The Expensive Education of Mark Zuckerberg and Silicon Valley - zonotope
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/02/opinion/the-expensive-education-of-mark-zuckerberg-and-silicon-valley.html
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hodgesrm
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.

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zaptheimpaler
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.

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QualityReboot
> 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/](https://stallman.org/)

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

~~~
zaptheimpaler
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.

~~~
QualityReboot
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.

