As a child, I considered style choices a silly and inconsequential distraction from the beautiful truths of the universe: e^(ipi) + 1 doesn't care what I'm wearing, so neither should I, therefore it doesn't matter, QED.
While today I still wish fashion would just go away so I could wear this conference t-shirt in peace, I contend it offers a reflection of who we are. Consider that while half the Senior Developers of the world can't program their way out of a FizzBuzz test, and half the world can't even read at all, everyone can look at someone's dress and decide if it's fashionable for their demographic. "No, it offers a reflection of what the establishment wants us to be!" I'll leave it to the reader to reconcile those two views. "But I just care about finishing Project Euler problems in APL so I just decide to wear sandals and this old shirt like all my friends!" Fashion mattering doesn't depend on you caring. Even you, APL-man, know Zuck couldn't wear his hoodie working for Quinn Emanuel unless he owned it (real question: how many people show up in suits at facebook?).
I was shopping for pretty scarves (!) with a product designer and suggested that ads are the clearest reflection of what a given demographic is. He agreed so quickly I wondered if I were late to the party. So when the Scientology ad in the Atlantic showed up, I thought of my favorite TLP quotation: if you're reading it, it's for you. The obvious question was "why is the Atlantic publishing this!?" The more depressing question is "why am I in Scientology's target demo?"
Fashion is an advertisement about yourself. "But the relationship is not always so obvious!" Hence the hoodie the world's richest web geek refuses to remove. "But I don't care what Zuckerberg wears!" If you're reading it, it's for you.
> Fashion mattering doesn't depend on you caring.
In general, there are actually quite a few things like this in the world. Just because it is out of the scope of your concern does not mean it isn't of any concern.
In one hundred years, will it matter what any of us are wearing today?
I'm not sure who you're calling a "critical-thinking-by-the-numbers guy," but since I was one of those criticizing the article, I'll respond that it is wrong of you to assume that our criticism must be due to the fact that we/I don't understand that fashion in some ways represents who we are. Because I certainly recognize that fashion represents not only who we are, but who we want to be. But that does not absolve the article of having made no meaningfully substantiated conclusions apart from interesting points about the anonymizing use of hoodies.
If you asked me, the only reason Zuckerberg wears/wore hoodies is because he is/was a twenty-something. In his case it has nothing to do with anonymity/surveillance, etc. etc. They're just what was in fashion when he was in college. They're still in fashion. I wear them. They're comfortable. For youth, they're not uncool to wear. A suit would be uncool. Imagine all the grief you'd get if you wore a suit to high school.
EDIT (reply to below): While your reply may or may not be accurate, I think the fact that this is yet another interpretation of what the author's point makes my argument even clearer, that the essay has no point at all.
When the advertisement is more important than the person, even if you would feel better without the hoodie, you keep it on, to feed your image. Whether that's right or wrong in the general case is beyond my scope to say. Maly is using Zuckerberg's choice as a prism on facebook and modern tech in general, saying that those who adopt facebook will have to make similar decisions, that people who always believe they are being watched may elevate the need to project an image over other more human needs.
The key to the article is that Maly believes Zuckerbergmay have kept his hoodie on because it was more uncomfortable to take it off than to experience physical discomfort, and that people who are being watched may do the same. I enjoyed the vignettes but Maly could've benefited from highlighting Zuckerberg's choice as the "strange thing" that his article grew out of and then using the history of the hoodie as a layer on top of the "strange thing" instead of juxtaposing the two threads.
You may have forgotten where you are discussing this topic. I certainly have no clue whether something is fashionable. I'd be hard pressed to tell you if two colors go together. I do no know if I dress more or less formally than my coworkers, or if my normal clothes present any sort of image. My style is not a conscious rejection of fashion, it is simply some clothes that I've concluded aren't too far outside what I'm expected to wear and therefore don't make me stand out.
I couldn't blame anyone for this stereotype but I don't think it's true. I suspect quite a lot of people here are into or have a nose for fashion (though not necessarily in the haute couture/catwalk sense).
This is where you agree with the post you're replying to. The entire decision process of "what I'm expected to wear" is exactly what they're talking about. You're soaking in it, as indifferent as you appear to think you are is just one facet of accounting for fashion's role in your life, which, to be sure, is not absent.
There is a threshold where good enough is good enough. Once above that threshold, your e^(ipi)+1 still rings true. It is one of many of our versions of the peacock frock.
RSS feeds? They're building a product for the masses. They just want to log in and connect with friends, share with them, and gawk at pictures of their friends. "Open" doesn't mean in the neckbeard sense. "Connected" isn't about how many protocols they support. Building RSS support would be a distraction. They have support for applications that could probably give you that -- I'm not sure because I've never wanted it.
As Zuck said in Time Magazine, "Open means having access to more information, right? More transparency, being able to share things and have a voice in the world. And connected is helping people stay in touch and maintain empathy for each other, and bandwidth."[1]
Complaining about Facebook being a walled garden is a valid point. But complaining that it's doublethink is not.
1: http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2...
Okay, so there's more openness and transparency within that walled garden, and that's why it's not doublethink, gotcha.
"Open" just "doesn't mean what I think it means", which is a perfectly valid thing to say, while it would of course invalid to claim "open means something else than you or Zuckerberg seem to think".
[ Yes ] [ in 1 minute ]
>It is difficult to imagine a more suitable uniform for the notoriously private CEO of a company dedicated to expanding our ideas of what should be public.
>June 2, 2010, Zuckerberg, hoodie removed, begins answering Mossberg’s question.
Honestly, this seriously reminds me of the kinds of essays that most students fall into the trap of writing in English classes in school - fake certitude, speaking in absolutes, a pervasive tone of academic hysteria, and drawing parallels and implications by mere association. In my view, it tries to dissemble a sense of profundity, however hollow.
The final sentence is a particularly egregious example of drawing an association out of thin air. This essay may as well have introduced itself as studying the symbolic motif of the hoodie and its role in the constant conflict between privacy and surveillance in the literary work Facebook, by Reality.
EDIT: I would like to lightheartedly add that these essays were always really fun for me to write in school because I would get top marks for them despite knowing how meaningless they were.
This article is about social privilege, and how different the life circumstances of the founder of Facebook are from many of the people using his product.
It's underscoring the fact that Graph Search could only be built by someone who doesn't understand the sometimes life-or-death importance of privacy, who has never had to fear any real consequences from any expression of identity or presenting the same face to all people.
A large segment of the readers of Hacker News have the same blind spots as Mark Zuckerberg, and this comes out whenever any question of social privelege as it relates to technology comes up here. This is a problem. The products we're building have huge, and usually unexamined, social consequences, and I don't think ignoring those consequences will work long term.
This is true in other fields that claim "neutrality" the way technologists do. Most working U.S. journalists, for instance, work for pro-government, pro-Capitalist news outlets. We call this "objective". Any deviation from that norm is "bias".
Keeping identifying information in a centralized location that is subject to subpoena by law enforcement is a norm now, too, one that has serious social consequences. So your decision to roll your own auth system and saying "fuck it, I'll just make them log in through Facebook" is about a lot more than how many keystrokes you have to enter and how much maintenance you're going to have to do down the road.
We should start factoring social consequences in to our technical decisions, like, ten years ago, and I'm afraid it's going to take a lynch mob empowered by Graph Search for people to get this.
I wonder how true it is.
Edit: just realised I'm in the process of doing basically the same thing with discovering and standardising my favourite haircut.
The thesis (I think) has always been there would need to be a huge trial by fire, teaching the public about what information is actually public, and what it means to be "on the Internet" not via privacy settings, or blog posts, or tutorials, but by pure unadulterated necessity through fear. You will have to lock your shit down now or face the consequences of massive dissemination of that information. There will be no more friction. There will be causalities, and I think Facebook thinks it is an inevitability that "privacy through obscurity" becomes a thing of the past, so might as well be them to kill it. If you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet, particularly one that is going to be made by someone, so be it.
"Market efficiency" of social data is going to be achieved: just like when a news report comes out about a company its stock price instantly updates to reflect it, so to will the world itself, and the people in it, reflect the publication of personal information thanks to the ability of the world to see it via software like Graph Search. Anyone who wants to know anything about you or what you do will be able to, instantly, unless you understand the scope of the things you publish intimately.
I can't imagine anything I've posted to Facebook being a problem if it was all printed in tomorrow's New York Times. Maybe other people should take the same approach.
That's what the style of this article instantly reminded me of. Like the source I quote, the article was done very well indeed; well enough that I picked up what was happening without the use of Dave Gibbons' art. Good language, even good poetry. Impressive.
And the point he's making? Memorable. Doesn't matter if I agree with his point or the connections he's drawing. This is quality stuff all round.
(I usually edit most of my comments here multiple times: written and posted hastily, then subjected to extended consideration.)
He can be seen on here on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASPL8hlKJCk&list=PL06987B...
Legend...
