By the time Zuckerberg began extolling the virtues of hacking, he had stripped the name of most of its original meaning and distilled it into a managerial philosophy that contains barely a hint of rebelliousness. Hackers, he told one interviewer, were âjust this group of computer scientists who were trying to quickly prototype and see what was possible. Thatâs what I try to encourage our engineers to do here.â To hack is to be a good worker, a responsible Facebook citizen â a microcosm of the way in which the company has taken the language of radical individualism and deployed it in the service of conformism.
Franklin Foer: Facebookâs war on free will