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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: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 29 2016, @01:33PM
I have no Facebook account and will not. It is a trap that can make one unemployable with the simplest misstatement or picture.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by isostatic on Monday February 29 2016, @01:45PM
Everyone has a facebook account. If you don't, you're unemployable.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 29 2016, @01:50PM
Never had an employer try to look at my Facebook profile. Hell many of them don't even look at LinkedIn either.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 29 2016, @02:22PM
I'm going to say that if they're an employer who cares at all if you have a Facebook account they're an employer you shouldn't want to work for.
Admittedly, I work for a municipal IT department so maybe the "atmosphere" is different here than businesses that are in the business of making money, but zero of the people in the department (there are 11 of us) have ever used Facebook here.
Which arbitrary websites you choose to use or not use has no relevance to your ability to do a job.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by isostatic on Monday February 29 2016, @03:30PM
The assertion that the AC made was that employers look at facebook, somehow get pas the privacy settings, and find a post they don't like so discount you from the job.
Those employers are just as likely to discount you from the job if you don't have a facebook account at all.
(Score: 2) by DNied on Tuesday March 01 2016, @01:07AM
So slyly suggest you're not on FB because it's a waste of time, and you'll turn your absence into a plus (you're not one to waste time). Don't be blunt - because if you call it a waste of time right there, you'll insult your prospective employer for being on FB. Say something like "I've seen from my friends' experience FB can be so addictive that I prefer to stay away from it, I would probably spend way too much time there".
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday February 29 2016, @02:33PM
Everyone has a facebook account. If you don't, you're unemployable.
By Facebook. There are other employers out there.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 01 2016, @02:20AM
Um, been steadily employed in IT for the last 24 years. Stayed on the bleeding edge most of the time. Have comfortable income, have no Facebook account.
Get off my lawn.