1mo ago

Stop Talking to Technology Executives Like They Have Anything to Say

www.stilldrinking.org

4 comments

A damn good find - bringing particular attention to this passage, since it pinpoints one of the major causes of the rot:
The following doesn’t apply to everybody in technology, but it applies to enough of them: At some point STEM education was the only thing the Olds cared about because of something something Asia, and now we have a couple of generations that are highly educated on paper and comically unaware of the complexity of the world outside of WordPress plugins.
- yes, i found it particularly mentionable b/c of its laconic observations. as far as analysis goes i doubt there's a need for something new, Kritische Theorie has it covered.
I can't believe we ever thought that someone like sleezy Zuckerberg had anything worth saying to begin with.
On day two of his testimony on Capitol Hill, Representative Billy Long, a Republican from Missouri, was the first to mention Facemash.com, the website Zuckerberg first created at Harvard in order to compare photos of his classmates and allow users to rate their looks.. In an awkward exchange, Long asked Zuckerberg what Facemash is and whether it is still up and running. Zuckerberg called it a "prank website" in response, and claimed that it "has nothing to do with Facebook."
It's almost comical to me that it's serious until someone calls them on it, THEN it's just a joke. FACEmash has nothing to do with FACEbook. Fucking lizard person.
- Weird story perhaps. Bit I also once created a sort of 'rate your fellow students' system as a joke. (It was more a 'had done interesting things' point system). Only it was created because we were trying to convince someone we had this at a gathering, and I tosses together some nicknames (obv I wasn't going to use real names) and points randomly. And the moment I noticed that people outside of the direct people involved (still members of the same social circle) took it too seriously and came up to me to tell me private things to increase their score, I changed the code to just return 'ha, this was all just a joke created to convince X we had done it'. Not my proudest moment, but this is how I'd think people should behave if it is just a joke and if the 'its a prank' isnt just an excuse.
  This also caused me to become quit the anti 'rate/record your fellow students/social circle' systems btw. It is annoying how often the idea returns, and how much you have to argue this is a dumb idea.
  So in short, if it is just a prank, why is it still up when it is hurting people.