
Facebook’s war on free will - bem94
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/19/facebooks-war-on-free-will?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Submit_to_HN
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hprotagonist
_Still, Zuckerberg’s juvenile fascination with hackers never died – or rather,
he carried it forward into his new, more mature incarnation. When he finally
had a corporate campus of his own, he procured a vanity address for it: One
Hacker Way. He designed a plaza with the word “HACK” inlaid into the concrete.
In the centre of his office park, he created an open meeting space called
Hacker Square. This is, of course, the venue where his employees join for all-
night Hackathons. As he told a group of would-be entrepreneurs, “We’ve got
this whole ethos that we want to build a hacker culture.”_

If there's one thing Facebook is not, it is not representative of the Elder
Gods that Zuck, at least according to this piece, nominally idolizes. If he
really does, he failed his idols in the most catastrophic way.

Hackerdom, to me anyway, is C, Unix, K&R, RMS and (sigh) ESR, Linus, Ian and
Debra, GNU, the EFF, and the Grail Quest that is GNU/HURD. It's Freenode;
emacs, vi, and the editor holy wars. It's the Woz and a man with a magic
whistle.

It is _not_ facebook, in any way shape or form.

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naravara
It's hilarious to me that the guy who is responsible for turning the open
internet into America Online II wants to cosplay as a "hacker."

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MagicAndi
Interesting article, has similar concerns to those raised by Cathy O'Neil in
her book 'Weapons of Math Destruction', and also by Tim Wu in The Attention
Merchants. Those of us working in software rarely stop to think about the
biases we're hardcoding in our programs, and how it can impact users. We
really need to wake up to how we are affecting people's lives.

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bem94
I couldn't agree more. Engineers are often so far (physically and
metaphorically) from the actual impact of what they work on, it can be really
easy to miss the damage it does.

People who work for Facebook must have to work very hard to remember the
people they are experimenting on are people, not just "users", and that they
don't have cart-blanch with how they treat them. Especially if they are
building addiction into their service!

Also, Weapons of Math Destruction is a fantastic book.

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Zelphyr
I heard a guy say once in a talk, "There are only two groups that call their
customers 'users': Drug Dealers and Software Developers."

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lgas
Somehow the same thing posted 6 hours later has a lot more discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15284020](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15284020)

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stefanwlb
It started good then the whole article went on a tangent.

