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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 29 2016, @05:00PM
Who would have guessed that a proud and outloud libertarian like Thiel would absolutely love one of the biggest anti-privacy corporations in the world? Unelected groups that extract a tax from people by taking their privacy and selling it, often without their knowledge are sooo much better than government!
The older I get, the more it becomes apparent that people just pick labels that justify their own biases (which usually means their own $$$).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 29 2016, @10:34PM
If Zuckerberg made me a billionaire, I'd sing his praises too. I LOVE the Facebook!!!!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 01 2016, @08:41PM
He was already comfortably wealthy, thanks to the CIA.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/08/14/agent-of-intelligence-how-a-deviant-philosopher-built-palantir-a-cia-funded-data-mining-juggernaut/2/ [forbes.com]