
How Facebook’s Naive Optimism Built a Toolbox for Totalitarianism (2014) - imartin2k
http://exponents.co/facebooks-built-a-totalitarianism-toolbox/
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apo
This revised 2014 article veers off into some strange territory at the end:

 _For the first time in human history, ALL of the philosophical,
psychological, and educational frameworks and just about every technology
necessary to create and sustain abundant, low-cost access to energy, water,
nutritious food, high-quality education, physical and mental health,
transportation, and shelter exists at the same time.

Right now, in 2018, we already have everything we need to reduce and possibly
eliminate nearly all the waste in our systems. And we can do it all in a way
that benefits the planet’s environment instead of harming it and possibly
destabilizing it.

The obstacles to the widespread deployment of these ideas and technologies are
misaligned incentives and scale.

And thanks to an extraordinary invention by a strange reclusive figure who
calls itself Satoshi, humanity may have a path around those obstacles as well

No, that invention is not Bitcoin. It is the blockchain, the much more
significant technology that makes Bitcoin possible.

In a much bigger upcoming guide to the blockchain, we’ll explore these things
as well._

I've seen all manner of wind-ups to "blockchain," but this one was quite
unexpected.

If the author is talking about social networks combined with "Blockchain
Technology," he can save his breath. This has been done to death.

~~~
ggggtez
I'm just waiting for the "FreedomCoin" ICO. /s

edit: _of course_ that's a real coin already. Sigh.

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awakeasleep
Is "Naïve" an accurate word here?

A lot of hay has been made over Zuckerberg's "They "trust me" Dumb fucks"
comment, but however it gets exaggerated, it shows he understood the power of
this information in the very early days... a complete lack of naïveté.

~~~
FreakyT
Hard to say; it's entirely possible he was "joking" at the time.

It's also completely possible (and this is my belief) that he eventually drunk
his own Kool-Aid and came to genuinely believe that Facebook really was about
making the world a better place by connecting people.

~~~
PolandKid
>>It's also completely possible (and this is my belief) that he eventually
drunk his own Kool-Aid and came to genuinely believe that Facebook really was
about making the world a better place by connecting people.

Possible is one thing, but there's no chance anyone with a micron of common
sense could believe in that marketing tag line.

Facebook was a better, "cleaner looking" social network in an era of MySpaces,
that's all.

The user profiling and data collection is the essential part to building
audience demographics for better targeting ads, which they needed to compete
with Google's PPC domination.

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ggggtez
Did he really sneak in Blockchain hype in the last 2 sentences?

Why am I even surprised...

