Essay on Franklin Foer’s book, World Without Mind by Arnav Joginapally

Traditionally, the term ‘hackers’ are those who defy order for the means of harming others. Typically, when the term ‘hacker’ is brought up, most would establish a negative connotation towards it. On the other hand, large tech companies such as Facebook have utilized this primitive connotation of ‘hacker’ to defy order, but utilize this term for a different purpose: a purpose that rises against the order of society, yet with the motive to establish a new frontier of programming and thinking. CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, transferred the term ‘hacker’ to a desirable quality to employees, instilling a productive value towards this malicious term. In the book World Without Mind, author Franklin Foer illustrates that Facebook itself is meant to spread individualism in Zuckerberg’s mind, yet it may be doing the opposite. With the integration of technological algorithms that ‘hackers’ have established, Facebook’s many users are losing their freedom of privacy as well as conforming to Facebook’s algorithms, which restricts them from portraying their individualism and creativity.

Although Facebook's vision of hackers allows people to express themselves and create new ideas in the future, it is slowly creating a platform that facilitates mass conformity by the nature of the technological algorithms. Mark Zuckerberg’s definition of a ‘hacker’ essentially reveals his intentions for Facebook by revolutionizing the world without restrictions. This term he created, ‘hackers’, is associated with his team of engineers, coders, and other employees as well as his user’s. This is shown when Foer remarks, “To hack is to be a good worker, a responsible Facebook citizen, a microcosm of the way in which the company has taken the language of radical individualism and deployed it into the service of conformism” (Foer 60). This ‘radical individualism’ that Foer refers to suggests that a hacker, in Zuckerberg’s terms, is meant to be able to make their own decisions without the influence of outside sources. Essentially, this allows Facebook to instill its value onto many people’s normal lives, as it gains much intel on all its users, as well as how their users act and behave. This allows Facebook to begin to turn this rebellious essence into one that promotes compliance and conformity between individuals. Going off this, Foer states, “With the looming threat that our embarrassing information will be broadcasted, we’ll behave better” (Foer 60). In this case, fear is that catalyst for those who stick to social norms. Fear of their personal or embarrassing information being shown around the world restricts the information they post, modeled by their social pressures. Furthermore, Facebook’s algorithms may have good intentions but actually shape and restrict users’ actions and what they post.

Similarly, while the “transparency” that Facebook provides is seemingly empowering for users, it actually categorizes users and restricts their individuality, and ultimately only benefits Facebook as an organization. Although algorithms may influence some user’s choices, some argue that this only helps the users and that taking away some element of human choice just increases efficiency. While this may be true to a certain extent, it is important to relate the matter of transparency to this concept. Foer argues that “Though Facebook will occasionally talk about the transparency of governments and corporations, what it really wants to advance is the transparency of individuals or what it has called, at various moments, “radical transparency” or “ultimate transparency”.” (Foer 60). Transparency refers to the revelation of all relevant information of a particular user, whereas, “radical transparency” refers to the mass conformity of user data by utilizing a combination of the user’s past posts and Facebook algorithms. Transparency of the individual means that Facebook, as a company, can use all their information to fuel algorithms. These algorithms allow Facebook to categorize its users and group them based on their interests. This categorization is justified by Facebook, due to the sheer increase of efficiency in the many Facebook algorithms. However, the very principle of grouping the population based on their interests acts as a restriction to the creative and changing minds of the individuals and population as the users are only able to interact with the same ideas which are decided by and paralleled to their interest groups.

Facebook is truly setting the stage for a world that is completely technological and perfectly efficient, one in which Zuckerberg's new robust definition of hacking is praised and society is so simple that it is impossible to avoid widespread adherence. In this society, Facebook's algorithms are shaped by these oversimplifications. Facebook controls users by imposing an image of transparency on them by portraying them as non-controlling "hackers." Facebook likes to believe it has taken initiative in a world of uncertainty and instead of giving its users a platform to be free discussing their individuality, it grasps efficiency in a rather unfulfilling way; it does so by categorizing its users into groups as well as providing algorithms that eliminate the element of human thought. If we take into consideration this prohibitive quality of algorithms, this begs the question: if restrictive algorithms continue to be used and developed in Big Tech companies, how will society evolve?