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Mark Zuckerberg's manifesto for Facebook offers a social dystopia

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Re: Mark Zuckerberg's manifesto for Facebook offers a social dystopia

#71

Post by nosuchthing »

paulpauper wrote: post #67
sveme wrote: post #5

Have we reached peak Facebook yet? I started using Facebook quite early in my country and used it mostly as a social network, communicating and exchanging stuff with friends from all over the world. A couple years later I deleted my account, being disgusted by the potential abusive potential of all the information Facebook had. I came back years later as it became THE tool for ad hoc social initiatives and a way to f…

have we reached 'peak car' 'peak operating system' yet or 'peak computer'? I think Facebook is going to be with us for a very long time and will continue to thrive. Yeah, the comments and posts suck sometimes (I don't use it) but hundreds of millions are addicted to it.

Users migrated to Facebook from other popular social networks.. it doesn't take much to gain critical mass

Re: Mark Zuckerberg's manifesto for Facebook offers a social dystopia

#72

Post by the_rosentotter »

portman wrote: post #64
CodingGuy wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Google Trends is somewhat right, we've definitely reached peak Facebook: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Facebook

According to Google Trends we reached "peak Google" in 2013: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Google What's actually happened is that fewer people are using search engines as their app launcher, because they are using the smartphone home screen instead.

No comparable web properties have the dropoff that Facebook has (twitter, eBay, craigslist, even Yahoo which seems to be fading faster into irrelevance by the day).

Re: Mark Zuckerberg's manifesto for Facebook offers a social dystopia

#73

Post by nostrademons »

zzalpha wrote: post #65
nostrademons wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's much easier to do hard or risky things (and convince others to do hard things) if you believe that doing so will save the world. Whether it's true or not, it's a useful illusion. People who believe that it's all meaningless tend to sit on message boards and shit on others instead.

Instead of what? Buying into the BS? I'd rather take an honest, measured view of these companies. Many have the potential to change our lives, for both good and ill. Buying into the BS is a great way to short circuit healthy skepticism. Selling the BS is a fantastic smokescreen.

Who are the ones actually building the products that everybody else (and probably you, too) are using, though, and getting rich off it? They're the delusional folks who buy the BS.

This is something I've wrestled with a lot in my personal life: you can have an accurate self-image and never really accomplish anything, or you can have an inflated self-image and achievements that probably don't quite justify it but come a lot closer than the achievements of the people with accurate self-images. Empirically, there doesn't seem to be a middle ground, except for a few rare folks who seemingly have no self-image (they just don't think about it much). That sort of delusional megalomania seems to be a necessary motive force for tackling hard, risky problems. And if you don't have it, then some other delusional megalomaniac will be the one who actually attempts it, and gets resources simply because he's the only one trying.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg's manifesto for Facebook offers a social dystopia

#74

Post by paulpauper »

nosuchthing wrote: post #71
paulpauper wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

have we reached 'peak car' 'peak operating system' yet or 'peak computer'? I think Facebook is going to be with us for a very long time and will continue to thrive. Yeah, the comments and posts suck sometimes (I don't use it) but hundreds of millions are addicted to it.

Users migrated to Facebook from other popular social networks.. it doesn't take much to gain critical mass

Some migrated from Myspace and other networks, but Facebook was able to capture the invaluable older demographic who had never used social networking before and are less inclined to switch. Facebook was able revolutionize communication much in the same way the car did for transportation.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg's manifesto for Facebook offers a social dystopia

#75

Post by rm999 »

portman wrote: post #64
CodingGuy wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Google Trends is somewhat right, we've definitely reached peak Facebook: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Facebook

According to Google Trends we reached "peak Google" in 2013: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Google What's actually happened is that fewer people are using search engines as their app launcher, because they are using the smartphone home screen instead.

Isn't that a plot of people who search Google for the term "google"? If so, I imagine it's something people who are familiar with computers and the internet do not do often.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg's manifesto for Facebook offers a social dystopia

#76

Post by lazaroclapp »

zzalpha wrote: post #69
lazaroclapp wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Each of those companies has the potential to significantly impact the world. Whether that change is for better or worse depends on your values. But given that they will likely have a big impact on society, I'd rather have them thinking through the ethical implications of what they do even superficially and grandiosely than not at all. A hypocritically preachy Facebook corporation is much better than an absolutely cyn…

A hypocritically preachy Facebook corporation is much better than an absolutely cynical one. If you ask me, for a lot of these tech companies, this is a false dichotomy: they're outwardly preachy and inwardly cynical. How better to justify bad behaviour than to dress it up in grandiosity?

Most of the ones I have been on the inside of (I am not currently inside of any of those) are fairly preachy internally and do discuss the ethics of what they are doing. Sure, that discussion is more "realist" than what their PR pushes out, but it is still not even close to absolute cynicism. They don't always pick the ethical choice when push comes to shove if there is a lot of money on doing the wrong thing, but it depends somewhat on the level of wrong (for the record, I am talking about perfectly legal actions here, just with possible ethical externalities). In as much as they justify things, they justify them to themselves too. You can argue that they are more cynical as you go closer to the center, but I have no evidence for it either way, and the ones actually designing and implementing the features are not in that center. I'd rather deal with someone who has to rationalize their unethical actions and thus at least consider the downsides than someone who just doesn't care. In my experience, S.V. companies are more often full of the former than the later.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg's manifesto for Facebook offers a social dystopia

#78

Post by astrodust »

judah wrote: post #58
simplehuman wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mother Teresa wasn't a good person? That's news. Why?

She worked for over 4 decades (!) with orphans, poor, the sick and dying. Four. Freaking. Decades. It's not right to say, "Mother Teresa was not a good person because [minor thing I disagree about]." Her views do not cancel 45 years of service. I wish more people would be "bad" like Mother Teresa. There would be fewer depressed, fewer lonely, fewer suicidal, fewer addicts, fewer outcasts. The atheist Hitchens wrote s…

The criticism is not that she didn't work with the sick and the dying for decades, it's that she maximized their suffering and sickness to glorify herself and to aid in fund-raising.

She raised billions of dollars and very little of it ended up helping the people she was supposed to be caring for.

> I wish more people would be "bad" like Mother Teresa.

Don't worry, there are people like Benny Hinn, like Peter Popov, like Creflow Dollar who are out there taking mountains of money from people in the name of faith to spend on their gold-plated jets.

Mother Theresa did more damage to the world than you can possibly imagine. If instead of celebrating misery she worked to mitigate, instead of being staunchly opposed to birth control she had encouraged family planning, if instead of using the sick and dying as a fund-raising tool instead of helping them get back on their own feet to lift themselves up the world would be a better place.

Mother Theresa clearly didn't give a shit about women's rights.

> The world is made better by the good things people do for others.

Especially if those good things help others pay it forward. She kept her flock just sick and miserable enough they didn't escape. She's like someone with Munchausen syndrome by proxy in a monstrous scale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munchausen_syndrome_by_proxy

Re: Mark Zuckerberg's manifesto for Facebook offers a social dystopia

#79

Post by GuiA »

nostrademons wrote: post #39
zzalpha wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the tech delusion. I don't know a start-up that doesn't have some grandiose vision of themselves as the future saviors of humanity. Uber, Tesla, Facebook, Airbnb, you name it... it's all the same "save the world" rhetoric. The scary thing is, I think a lot of people on the industry actually believe their own BS...

It's much easier to do hard or risky things (and convince others to do hard things) if you believe that doing so will save the world. Whether it's true or not, it's a useful illusion. People who believe that it's all meaningless tend to sit on message boards and shit on others instead.

Hey, some people sit on messages boards and shit on others AND manage to build successful businesses that let them live the lives they want. I'd rather choose them as models than the douchebags drinking kombucha in their Tesla.

(i <3 u 'idlewords)

Re: Mark Zuckerberg's manifesto for Facebook offers a social dystopia

#80

Post by mnm1 »

Sure, but if you name the solution to this problem "virtual identity suicide" (I had to look it up too) you're not going to get many adopters. That's like naming marriage "single status suicide". It's not even accurate. What things are named matters a lot because most people cannot tell the difference between the name and the thing named nor can they easily remove implied yet unintended meaning from text.
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