The Filter Bubble - Eli Pariser [71]
Zuckerberg was in an affable mood, dressed in a black T-shirt and jeans and enjoying what was clearly a friendly crowd. Even so, when Jessica Livingston, his interviewer, asked him about The Social Network, the movie that had made him a household name, a range of emotions crossed his face. “It’s interesting what kind of stuff they focused on getting right,” Zuckerberg began. “Like, every single shirt and fleece they had in that movie is actually a shirt or fleece that I own.”
Where there was an egregious discrepancy between fiction and reality, Zuckerberg told her, was how his own motivations were painted. “They frame it as if the whole reason for making Facebook and building something was that I wanted to get girls, or wanted to get into some kind of social institution. And the reality, for people who know me, is that I’ve been dating the same girl since before I started Facebook. It’s such a big disconnect.... They just can’t wrap their head around the idea that someone might build something because they like building things.”
It’s entirely possible that the line was just a clever bit of Facebook PR. And there’s no question that the twenty-six-year-old billionaire is motivated by empire building. But the comment struck me as candid: For programmers as for artists and craftsmen, making things is often its own best reward.
Facebook’s flaws and its founder’s ill-conceived views about identity aren’t the result of an antisocial, vindictive mind-set. More likely, they’re a natural consequence of the odd situation successful start-ups like Facebook create, in which a twenty-something guy finds himself, in a matter of five years, in a position of great authority over the doings of 500 million human beings. One day you’re making sand castles; the next, your sand castle is worth $50 billion and everyone in the world wants a piece of it.
Of course, there are far worse business-world personality types with whom to entrust the fabric of our social lives. With a reverence for rules, geeks tend to be principled—to carefully consider and then follow the rules they set for themselves and to stick to them under social pressure. “They have a somewhat skeptical view of authority,” Stanford professor Terry Winograd said of his former students Page and Brin. “If they see the world going one way and they believe it should be going the other way, they are more like to say ‘the rest of the world is wrong’ rather than ‘maybe we should reconsider.’”
But the traits that fuel the best start-ups—aggression, a touch of arrogance, an interest in empire building, and of course brilliant systematizing skills—can become a bit more problematic when you rule the world. Like pop stars who are vaulted onto the global stage, world-building engineers aren’t always ready or willing to accept the enormous responsibility they come to hold when their creations start to teem with life. And it’s not infrequently the case that engineers who are deeply mistrustful of power in the hands of others see themselves as supreme rationalists impervious to its effects.
It may be that this is too much power to entrust to any small, homogeneous group of individuals. Media moguls who get their start with a fierce commitment to the truth become the confidants of presidents and lose their edge; businesses begun as social ventures become preoccupied with delivering shareholder value. In any case, one consequence of the current system is that we can end up placing a great deal of power in the hands of people who can have some pretty far-out, not entirely well-developed political ideas. Take Peter Thiel, one of Zuckerberg’s early investors and mentors.
Thiel has penthouse apartments in San Francisco and New York and a silver gullwing McLaren, the fastest car in the world. He also owns about 5 percent of Facebook. Despite his boyish, handsome features, Thiel often looks as though he’s brooding. Or maybe he’s just lost in thought. In his teenage years, he was a high-ranking chess player but stopped short of becoming a grand