Wednesday, September 07, 2011

Mark Zuckerberg and Julian Assange, more alike than you might think

I am finally reading "The Facebook Effect" for my thesis way later than I should have done. In it I find the interesting claim that Mark Zuckerberg is indeed trying to change the world. He believes a more "transparent" world (to use his term) is a much better one, and Facebook in part is a way of bringing this transparent world into existence. The book (admittedly written by a rather sympathetic writer) claims that he isn't really interested in profit and was rather grudging about initial attempts to fund thefacebook (as it was originally known) through advertising. The goal of making money is secondary to the goal of pushing his goal of "radical transparency"

If I had more time, it might be interesting to compare and contrast this philosophy with the revolutionary philosophy of radical openness promoted by one Julian Assange. The rockstar CEO of Facebook and the gadfly leader of Wikileaks seem to have some views about access that might overlap more than a little

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