
“Behold Mark Zuckerberg’s Revised Origin Story for Facebook” - aaronbrethorst
https://twitter.com/sarahfrier/status/1184908897196429314
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hos234
Where Zuck's "2 simple ideas" will take us, Micheal Crichton already told us
even before Facebook existed -

"I think cyberspace means the end of our species. It means the end of
innovation. This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death.
Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a
thousand birds on an ocean island and they'll evolve very fast. You put ten
thousand on a big continent, and their evolution slows down. Now, for our own
species, evolution occurs mostly through our behaviour. We innovate new
behaviour to adapt. And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs
in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something
done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens.
Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That's the effect of mass media - it
keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every
place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there's a McDonald's on one
corner, a Benetton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences
vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there's less of
everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry
about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual
diversity - our most necessary resource? That's disappearing faster than
trees. But we haven't figured that out, so now we're planning to put five
billion people together in cyberspace. And it'll freeze the entire species.
Everything will stop dead in its tracks. Everyone will think the same thing at
the same time. Global uniformity"

Zuckerberg will go down in history as the guy who helped that process along
the way.

~~~
ksaj
While you could argue this was predictive for certain facets (look at music,
for example), it definitely is wrong in others.

Since the founding of Facebook (arbitrarily chosen because of the comment
establishing this as the moment innovation died), we have advanced robots on
the moon and Mars. We have quantum competition where even amateurs can
contribute from the comfort of their own homes. We have deep
<learning,fakes,etc> that are accessible from powerful computers fit in our
jean pockets. We have Raspberry Pi and other SBCs connecting to a gamut of
high technologies like e-paper, clustering, Google Voice, etc. We have
autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicles. We have bitcoin.

It would be easy to go on and on listing the innovations that have appeared
since "cyberspace" became a thing. But the innovations I listed are _because_
of cyberspace, and not _in spite of_ it.

While _culturally_ the world is starting to blur, it definitely cannot be said
that innovation is suffering in any way. Cyberspace essentially hit the fast-
forward button on innovation.

------
strbean
"I made hot-or-not for my campus, then I made MySpace (but exclusive, .edu
emails only), then MySpace sold out and everyone jumped to my site."

So much luck.

~~~
loceng
More a lack of conscience or morals than luck:

1) The twin brothers hired him to build out ConnectU including the exclusivity
mechanism of .edu emails only

2) Mark purposefully mislead/lied to the twins claiming he was working on
ConnectU that he was contracted/paid to do - meanwhile actually focusing on
his own version called TheFacebook to launch before them; him knowing that you
didn't need to platforms so he wanted to be first to market, a transcript of
him saying as much exists

3) The university was already planning to take their real life physical "The
Facebook" and make an online version. Mark's quoted in the university
newspaper saying he didn't understand why it was taking them so long, that he
could get it done quickly. The reason it was taking "so long" is the
committee, group doing it was thinking/brainstorming through potential
privacy, security, and safety issues that could be a problem, presumably to
design the platform with solutions to protect people; we clearly know now Mark
has never thought about or cared about this, nor proactively cared for any
such things, except for optics purposes.

