Zuckerberg’s hacker heroes were disrespectful of authority. These weren’t malevolent data thieves or cyberterrorists. The heroes of his adolescence were the original hackers. Mark Zuckerberg is a good boy, but he wanted to be bad, or maybe just a little bit naughty. It’s a phoniness that is most obvious in the compressed, historic career of Facebook’s mastermind. While it creates the impression that it offers choice, in truth Facebook paternalistically nudges users in the direction it deems best for them, which also happens to be the direction that gets them thoroughly addicted.
Facebook is always surveilling users, always auditing them, using them as lab rats in its behavioural experiments. In reality, Facebook is a tangle of rules and procedures for sorting information, rules devised by the corporation for the ultimate benefit of the corporation. It mimics some of the patterns of conversation, but that’s a surface trait. Facebook is a carefully managed top-down system, not a robust public square. But we shouldn’t accept Facebook’s self-conception as sincere, either. There are parts of the world, even in the US, where Facebook emboldens citizens and enables them to organise themselves in opposition to power.
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