Bix dot Blog

Many early social-media entrepreneurs went to college to study computer science or business, receiving a respect for free-speech principles via cultural osmosis. Others didn’t finish college at all. One of the few who has read widely in the humanities is Chris Hughes, who was Mark Zuckerberg’s roommate at Harvard before becoming one of Facebook’s first employees. “There was a strong sense back then—certainly you heard it from Mark and the people around him—that wiring the world was good in and of itself,” Hughes said recently. “There was a widespread belief in the inevitable forward march of history. I don’t know that that came from books, or from anywhere in particular—I think it was just understood.” Most people in Silicon Valley wanted to “change the world.” They didn’t bother specifying that they wanted to change it for the better—that part was implied, and, besides, it was supposed to happen more or less automatically. “I remember a ton of conversations in which the introduction of our tools was compared to the advent of the hammer, or the light bulb,” Hughes went on. “We could have compared it to a weapon, too, I suppose, but nobody did.”

—Andrew Marantz, in “The Dark Side of Techno-Utopianism”