> By the time Zuckerberg began extolling the virtues of hacking, he had stripped the name of most of its original meaning and distilled it into a managerial philosophy that contains barely a hint of rebelliousness. Hackers, he told one interviewer, were “just this group of computer scientists who were trying to quickly prototype and see what was possible."
No, Zuckerberg did not somehow give the word "hacking" new meaning - those meanings have been around for a long time.
> Facebook would never put it this way, but algorithms are meant to erode free will, to relieve humans of the burden of choosing, to nudge them in the right direction.
Again, no. The whole article is full of grandiose statements like this that are either flat-out wrong or distorted to fit the author's narrative. Maybe if "algorithms" were replaced with "their algorithms", this argument (which seems to be the thesis) would be slightly more credible. The problems described in the article are not products of algorithms or the "engineering mindset". Those things are just manifestations of the real problem: Facebook's current strategic mission.
I agree with a lot of what the article is saying, but unfortunately it comes across as blaming the use of technology and engineering. Like civil laws, those things can be helpful or detrimental to people (as most tools can), and sometimes they have unintended consequences. Ultimately, the responsibility still lies 100% with the organization creating those algorithms, not in the use of algorithms per se.