#49: Swearing in the Woods
When satellite radio was still relatively novel, about twenty years ago, the late comedian Mitch Hedberg told a story about doing an XM interview and learning he was allowed to swear during the segment. He observed that this wasn't surprising because no one was actually listening to XM Radio: "You can swear in the woods too." Unlike satellite radio, Facebook never had an unpopular phase, at least according to its creation myth—it was instantly popular and grew quickly—but in terms of its expected impact on society, a dorm-room version of "Hot or Not" began similarly in the woods, a place where everything was basically OK because only college students were using it. When Facebook arrived on my campus in 2004 and people immediately started spending six hours a day checking profiles and poking one another, there was clearly something powerful about the platform, but no one foresaw the site's eventual embroilment in some of the world's biggest problems.
Mark Zuckerberg's testimony before Congress this week has received exhaustive coverage, which I won't recap, but it's strange and amusing to see the contrast between what Facebook has become and what it was when we first found out about it. And it's not just Facebook: Many technology companies can expect a similar pummeling once they achieve such visible dominance, and for good reason. They built their products to solve humble problems of convenience and play but somehow became basic social and political infrastructure. Technical debt is a software development term for the disorder that accumulates from a series of too-easy decisions (the programming equivalent of casually tossing every new item onto your desk and eventually realizing you can't find anything). Facebook, however great its actual code is, embodies the social equivalent of technical debt. It's a platform once optimized for frivolous interaction that couldn't grow up and get serious as fast as it gained importance; the hubris everyone's revolting against now is Facebook's belief that of course it could.
During the 2008 financial crisis, the cynical phrase "too big to fail" emerged to describe certain banks. Today's software megaplatforms may be too big to fail as well, but we're also finally realizing they're too big to really be good. There are a variety of concepts that inform and reflect Silicon Valley's fast-moving, experimental philosophy: "Move fast and break things." "Perpetual beta." "Release early, release often." All are useful values for a world in which software lives and grows in the innocent sandbox of pure information. Unfortunately, software already left that sandbox and became the operating system for much of the world. Now, moving fast and breaking things often means breaking people, institutions, or even countries. Perpetual beta at Facebook's scale means we all live in a continuous experiment, not just amid stuff that already worked predictably but imperfectly. Mark Zuckerberg knows he's not in the woods anymore, but he's still swearing too much.
Reads:
"The End of Reality." How the long-standing belief that video represents truth is coming to an end. "The internet has always contained the seeds of postmodern hell."
Michael Kimmelman on forensic architecture: Using building design and spatial analysis to solve crimes.
There's been an increase in self-proclaimed time travelers, whose preferred channel of communication happens to be YouTube.
Until next time,
Drew