Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared some deep thoughts this week in a long essay about where he sees humanity going online. Marketplace host Kai Ryssdal spoke with senior tech correspondent Molly Wood about what the nearly 5,000-word treatise had to say. Below is an edited transcript of their conversation.
Kai Ryssdal: So here it is, 5,700-something words from Mark Zuckerberg. Yes, 1.9 billion people use Facebook, but it seemed to me there was no "there there" in this thing. There was no action coming out of this.
Molly Wood: You know, it sort of remains to be seen what action will eventually come. It’s definitely more of a manifesto, I think, about "why." Ultimately, it is an argument for why Facebook should be the place that everyone conducts all of their community, all of their interaction. It was weirdly, despite its lack of action, an argument for total global dominance by Facebook.
Ryssdal: Oh, is that all? But here’s the thing: Facebook is a for-profit company. It has piles and piles and piles and piles of data on all of us. It is controlled by Mark Zuckerberg. There is nothing soothing in what I just said.
Wood: I did not find it particularly soothing. I think that the idea of communities online are really powerful. They have also been around since the '80s, or just a few years later. And so the argument that all of this has to take place on Facebook at the enrichment, ultimately, of Mark Zuckerberg and the sacrifice of our data, is I think, something we should take very seriously. We can accomplish on the open web, where you don’t have to be a member and turn over all your personal information, almost all of the things that he suggested in that post. And frankly, without the oversight and — there’s no other way to put it — censorship that also happens on Facebook.
Ryssdal: This idea of path dependency now, we’re already down the Facebook path, and it’s gonna be tough to break us out of that.
Wood: We are. I think it is exactly Facebook’s size and reach that made it such a platform for fake news and viral misinformation during the election and before. And the monetary structures that reward this fast propagation of information. So the idea that we would centralize all of our communities and all of our communications on one platform that is ultimately for-profit? That’s not something that many technology proponents, including myself, are going to argue for.
Sadly it's difficult for me to leave Facebook as I have friends there who live pretty far away from me.
Seeing current events as they are is wrecking me emotionally. So I say 'farewell' to this forum. For anyone who wonders.
Same here. I would have dropped FB ages ago were it not for friends who use it instead of calling or texting via cell phone. Although I was an idiot when I was younger and actually posted stuff when it first came out, I "removed" everything (yes I know they still have it but at least tis not publically displayed) and now just use it as a glorified MSN messenger
"I reject your reality and substitute my own!" - The official Troll motto, as stated by Adam Savage
I removed myself from Facebook and don't regret it for a single day. Screw Mark. Maybe I'll make a fake account someday, but not today.
Lì ci sono chiese, macerie, moschee e questure, lì frontiere, prezzi inaccessibile e freddure
Lì paludi, minacce, cecchini coi fucili, documenti, file notturne e clandestini
Qui incontri, lotte, passi sincronizzati, colori, capannelli non autorizzati,
Uccelli migratori, reti, informazioni, piazze di Tutti i like pazze di passioni...
...La tranquillità è importante ma la libertà è tutto!
Jeff Bezos actually got into the newspaper business and revived one of the greats. Probably going to expand into local news and try to monopolize the industry if I know him.
Zuckerberg managed to perfectly execute an idea that wasn't even his and gobble up market share. Bezos figured out how to muscle out an entire existing industry and actually generate revenue (though purposely not profit) from the products he sold to consumers instead of from the consumers he sold to products.
I think Jeff will be the guy we honk of as having a news vision. Zuckerberg will just be some guy who managed to get rich off of people being ludicrously tolerant of invasions of privacy. A market which won't last forever, given how quickly their exclusive access to data is being eliminated by microphones and GPS trackers in every pocket.
I had a Bill Maher quote here. But fuck him for his white privelegy "joke".
Simon_Jester wrote:I have a Facebook account but most of it is 5-7 years out of date and was never all that heavily used in the first place...
I guess the only way to almost-win is to almost-not play?
It all hearkens back to the early days of the internet, when we (meaning we early adopters) decided that we weren't going to pay for the internet's content. Pay for access, sure, but by and large the content was and is free. The only way to make money is through selling ad space, and it stands to reason that the more you know about the people who use your site, the better you can wring advertising money out of that traffic. I just wonder if we could have known just how pervasive the internet would become and how (relatively) simple it would be to track our usage, if we would've gone for a different model.
And sure, there have been paywalled sites just as long as there have been free ones, but I wonder if we could've steered it towards the former, rather than the latter, or if freely-available content was always going to dominate the internet. Could an ad- and tracking-free Facebook where you pay 5 bucks a year (about what Facebook makes via ads per account right now) succeed?
"There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance--that principle is contempt prior to investigation." -Herbert Spencer
"Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain." - Schiller, Die Jungfrau von Orleans, III vi.
Do you know, it probably could- at least as an alternative social network for the people who value privacy. The problem would be setting it up in a world where Google and Facebook and so on are already occupying that ecological niche.
