111–120 of 300 posts
"Expand the network at all cost, and increase its engagement."
This went from a little flippant red book to a credo that has now changed elections and democracy as well as culture and view of the human self.
At the time it was radical idealism and today its something different, but its worth seeing and truly understanding.
I remember this. Wish I'd kept my little piece of history. Written at a time when people were still optimistic and hopeful about tech.
Yeah, the dreams of what computers could do around Windows 95, and what the Internet could do around Windows 98/Windows 2000... it felt amazing as a teenager who wanted to go into computer science. IMHO social media heralded the beginning of the end, although no-one knew that at the time. A lot of the 90s nostalgia is just the same rose-tinted glasses as all generations experience, but I think in this one dimension i…
If you want to criticize specific companies - yeah. But I literally do not understand what people are talking about when employing the usual "Social media was a mistake" type stuff
There are STILL people drinking the techno-utopian kool-aid. Plenty of folks think Musk will do something smart someday, for humanity's benefit, despite all evidence to the contrary. I was here when the web showed up, and I can honestly state that we featured blatant techno-utopian rhetoric in nearly every aspect of the industry, as well as our underground nocturnal allegedly musical entertainment. I now feel rather…
I think I’ve become some variety of techno-determinist pessimist. We are what technology lets us be, including when it comes to ethics and government. And major inventions aren’t guaranteed to push the space of the possible in the right direction—but neither can we avoid these changes, as effectively sounding the alarm early enough to matter, while also correctly calling which are bad and how they’re bad, is too hard to practically happen.
Freedom’s a fleeting gift of circumstance, and the world is a machine none of us control and that’s often bad and sometimes destroys important things, I guess is where I’m at now. I’d definite press a button to permanent un-invent the Internet, if someone put it in front of me.
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This take feels very out of touch with how tech was in 2012. It was evident where the trends were heading, but that optimism that was heavy throughout the tech boom in the late 2000s was definitely still there.
There _was_ backlash. It just didn't operationalize very effectively. For instance, news organizations mostly saw FB and Google as a way to undermine and ultimately replace vetted news with unvetted, unprofessional hot takes. Anyone above a certain age likely saw these viewpoints and agreed with them but not enough to start a movement. When facebook became generally available I was maybe 14-15, and even back then I r…
But many of those blogs (which now take the form of subscription newsletters) had incredibly valuable insight and perspectives that were otherwise not being reported on. The news media's alarmism about bloggers was (IMHO rightfully) ignored.
So when a couple of years later they started freaking out about Facebook/Twitter/etc, well, same old story, new platform.
The difference this time was that FB and Twitter algorithmically fed articles to people, instead of articles naturally spreading virally from person to person.
Not that the platforms were that bad at first! Remember that in the early 2010s Facebook was largely a platform for Farmville! It was drowning in spam for free to play social games, but the feed was still largely a timeline. Twitter only released their Apple client in 2010, and there were still a large number of third party clients in 2012.
A few years later Facebook would become inundated with political spam and vitriol, but 2012 was still an insane time of growth and optimism.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can kind of understand having that kind of optimism back in the Internet of, say, 1998, before we saw how vampiric venture-backed winner-take-most tech companies would be. But by 2012, it would be incredibly naive of tech employees (of any company) to seriously believe they were some kind of force for good.
This take feels very out of touch with how tech was in 2012. It was evident where the trends were heading, but that optimism that was heavy throughout the tech boom in the late 2000s was definitely still there.
page 17. android operating system on an iphone 4. i'm crying right now, particularly the way this is juxtaposed with so many critical moments in history.
Or at least a mockup of one.
It has the front-facing camera in the top right corner, which is a hint!
Googling suggests the Facebook phone was an HTC device?
Good job with the scan. I started reading the book and began to feel rage so I stopped after about 20 pages. Is it the most self-unaware book or just people trying their hand at PR?
This was 2012. There was still hope and optimism in the tech space. The Internet had helped overturn powerful regimes and given voice to the disenfranchised. There was the idea that person to person public discourse could resolve many societal problems. Smartphones had exploded just 6 years prior and they were already making inroads into traditionally underserved and neglected communities around the world, helping fa…
fwiw they were still giving the red book to all new hires in ~mid 2013. Personally at the time I found parts of it to be interesting from a "company telling its own history" perspective, and other parts to be extremely cringe-inducing. That said, I'm sometimes a grumpy cynic, and I'm also familiar with some random rare aspects of FB history due to previously working for Harvard IT. (I started working there a year after Zuckerberg dropped out, so didn't have any overlap, but some of my colleagues there were directly involved in the disciplinary hearings regarding Facemash.)
My favorite part was the “Facebook was not created to be a business” quote being juxtaposed against Kevin Systrom saying “instagram was created to be a business” right after the acquisition.