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Alyson Shontell writes at Business Insider that Peter Thiel, a longtime friend and mentor of Mark Zuckerberg, recently gave a talk that imagined what a Zuckerberg-less world would look like and it's pretty grim. According to Thiel, the web would be a not-very-safe, not-very-fun, totally anonymous place and it wouldn't be baked into our social lives at all. "You can imagine an alternate history in which people don't become comfortable using [the Internet] to meet their friends and family," said Thiel. "It could have remained a wild and dangerous place — maybe an exciting place to escape for a while, but maybe not part of your daily social life. Facebook has led a long and subtle but deeply important trend away from mob behavior, away from the kind of nastiness that hides behind masks and rules in shadow."
Thiel added that without Zuckerberg, information would be at the center of the Internet, not people. "If you could go back to the first years of the new millennium in Silicon Valley, you would hear a lot more about 'information' than about people. 'Organizing the world's information' was the idea of the age," Thiel told the audience. "While the implicit goal of computer science had been to build a machine that can do everything a human can do, Facebook has made software that only makes sense as a tool for humans. Its success in doing so has helped to gradually orient software developers away from the mania for replacing people." Thiel made his speech while Zuckerberg received the first-ever Axel Springer Award for being an outstanding entrepreneur (Google translation) in Berlin. Thiel and Zuckerberg have known each other for a long time and Thiel was an angel investor in Facebook who invested $500,000 in Facebook in 2004 and cashed out in 2012 for $1 billion.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Monday February 29 2016, @01:17PM
The history revisionists are already at work, while the history is still being made.
Somehow, I don't recall the internet being all that dangerous before Suckerberg came along. If it was "dangerous", then it is still equally so today. Someone - anyone - define "dangerous" for us.
Now, all because of Suckerberg, the internet is "safe"? "Tamed"? "Civilized"? Huh, wut?
Wasn't long ago that the US government announced that someone had hacked into their databases, and stole all the personal information on government employees. "Safe".
Revisionists can't even wait til Zuckerbugger is an old man before they start rewriting history.
Alternative für Deutschland
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Monday February 29 2016, @01:51PM
Somehow, I don't recall the internet being all that dangerous before Suckerberg came along. If it was "dangerous", then it is still equally so today. Someone - anyone - define "dangerous" for us.
I assume he means there are fewer unpatched machines (by percentage) out there connected directly onto the internet without at least a NAT protecting them from incoming traffic. Coupled with bandwidth bottlenecks everywhere meant there were real consequences that slowed down the acquisition of porn. Code red used a significant portion of my incoming traffic back in the day, partly due to it's prevealance, partly due to how limited bandwidth was.
Today's dangers are different, they're not blind worms using up bandwidth and processing power, they're far more targetted attacks, but on the other hand they don't affect individuals as immediately.
Different danger I think
(Score: 2, Informative) by massa on Monday February 29 2016, @02:00PM
This has absolutely no relation to Fackbook.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 29 2016, @03:34PM
I believe isostatic is trying to warn us to mind our privacy online!
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 29 2016, @03:42PM
Now, all because of Suckerberg, the internet is "safe"? "Tamed"? "Civilized"? Huh, wut?
In a very limited sense, he's right. For a lot of people, Facebook is the internet. If you never leave your walled garden, you're relatively safe. If you randomly wander the wilderness, eventually you're gonna stumble upon 4chan or something.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Monday February 29 2016, @04:16PM
> you're relatively safe...
... from everyone except the gardener.
Besides, don't we still hear regular stories about teen suicides prompted by facespace-related "cyber-bullying"? Face it, walled garden or not, if you've got a system with a billion+ people communicating with one another, then some of those people will be shitholes, and you can't make people "safe" from them.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Nerdfest on Monday February 29 2016, @03:51PM
FaceBook is a cage. Cages are usually pretty safe from things outside. Of course, sometimes the problem is the other things in the cage.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Monday February 29 2016, @05:54PM
Any time you put any bunch of animals in a cage there is always a pecking order established, with the weaker ones having nowhere to hide.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Common Joe on Monday February 29 2016, @08:32PM
Indeed. Isn't one of the biggest vectors of malware Facebook serving up malware through games and ads?
(Score: 2) by Arik on Monday February 29 2016, @08:39PM
They have done their part to make what was once a very safe space into one crammed full of land-mines.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Bogsnoticus on Tuesday March 01 2016, @12:30AM
It is safe.
Without Facebook, all of those lamewads, dipshits and morons would be let loose on the interwebs in general.
Think of it like a prison, where the scum of society are locked up for the greater good.
As a side note, and a FTFY for the article;
Zuckerberg received the first-ever Jerry Springer Award for being an outspoken enabler of bullshit arguments over mundane topics.
Genius by birth. Evil by choice.