Ask HN: What do you believe is Facebook's ultimate place in world history?
4 comments
Herman Hesse's novel "the glass bead game" discusses a movement he calls The age of the Feuilleton When a sports writer is asked for his opinion on nuclear physics, and a chef might expound on the relative merits of gay love and modern dance. At the time I first read this (the 1970s) it felt like a very odd artifice, an unlikely situation: who the hell would care about this?
But in the context of Facebook, insta-famous, I think Hesse might have been on the money: we've descended into a rats-nest of opinion-that-matters coming from D list celebrities, and we ignore real ideas, because they're just too hard to cope with.
I think FB owns some of this: the idea we glom onto people and give giant thumbs-up signals to the ones who say things we can relate to even if we are doing a thumbs-up to a picture of a starving Kid: we reduced the mental effort to participate to a single button click, and rank people by influence which is judged by engagement which is judged by likes
So I'd reduce the impact of Facebook down to likes -This idea may have been birthed elsewhere, but Facebook is where it exploded to worldwide relevance.
But in the context of Facebook, insta-famous, I think Hesse might have been on the money: we've descended into a rats-nest of opinion-that-matters coming from D list celebrities, and we ignore real ideas, because they're just too hard to cope with.
I think FB owns some of this: the idea we glom onto people and give giant thumbs-up signals to the ones who say things we can relate to even if we are doing a thumbs-up to a picture of a starving Kid: we reduced the mental effort to participate to a single button click, and rank people by influence which is judged by engagement which is judged by likes
So I'd reduce the impact of Facebook down to likes -This idea may have been birthed elsewhere, but Facebook is where it exploded to worldwide relevance.
Not good.
Something negative is eventually going to be written about big tech, and Facebook stands out as the easiest to be negative about / even scapegoat.
Not only that, but the story is incredibly easy to write. Mark Zuckerberg is a single individual with near total control of the country. It’s almost Shakespearean. Writing about any other company would be a muddled narrative with many different sides, hard to trace blame, etc.
Something negative is eventually going to be written about big tech, and Facebook stands out as the easiest to be negative about / even scapegoat.
Not only that, but the story is incredibly easy to write. Mark Zuckerberg is a single individual with near total control of the country. It’s almost Shakespearean. Writing about any other company would be a muddled narrative with many different sides, hard to trace blame, etc.
Is this solely because there is no alternative (there have been many, some still exist)? Or because the network effect (one of the strongest of all-time)? Or that most people simply don't care as much as a very vocal minority (it seems) who is writing so many of these articles and doing these investigations? I wonder...
I created my Facebook in 2005, I was in 10th grade. I want to DELETE mine but it's like a time capsule, it's a piece of history now if you think about it.
Anyways, share whatever comes to mind. Let's talk this out, all angles and caveats. This is one of the most important questions of our time if you ask me.