Author: Jason Parham / Source: WIRED
In the dawning days of the millennium, a great harvest was promised. A new class of young revolutionists, who saw the world as not yet living up to its grandeur and thus felt the duty to order it in their vision, vowed a season of abundance and grand prosperity.
Among these strivers was Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, whose pursuit—equal parts singular, noble, and naive—was to rewire communication. Beset by a pioneer spirit, Zuckerberg sculpted ambition into reality, upending the way we document, exchange, and consume information. In doing so, he has in part revolutionized the capacity of human potential. But just as a harvest rewards, so will it forsake. What has since transpired from those early moments of millennial innocence is as tragic as it was inevitable. The cost of utopia, we are now seeing, may be too high.I won’t recount Facebook’s indiscretions here—many of my WIRED colleges have mapped the chaos since news first broke that political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica mined personal data from 87 million users across the social network—but it is helpful to understand the extent of the carnage. That Cambridge Analytica, a data analysis firm that worked on President Trump’s 2016 campaign, likely used that data to target voters and shape history, exposes one of the cracks of the Great Utopian Project: Innovation is only as good as the spirit of the people who brandish it.
The problems, though, are bigger than one platform. Connectivity, as it’s been digitally reshaped in the form of email and social media, is now polluted with all manner of contagions. We’ve gained a lot, but what we’ve lost—trust and empathy, possibly the right to an honest democratic process—registers with even greater consequence.
The online outbreak that followed the Cambridge Analytica breach was marked by an anti-Facebook campaign steered on Twitter, with tech luminaries like WhatsApp cofounder Brian Acton imploring users to #DeleteFacebook. “When you put people’s precious photos and private personal data on the auction block behind their backs every day, you’re not going to be a king for long,” the actor James Woods
Sometime around 2009, during my first year of graduate school, I decided I’d been spending a dangerous amount of time on Facebook and…
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