doomsday machine
Facebook is a Doomsday Machine
“Limitations to the Doomsday Machine comparison are obvious: Facebook cannot in an instant reduce a city to ruins the way a nuclear bomb can. And whereas the Doomsday Machine was conceived of as a world-ending device so as to forestall the end of the world, Facebook started because a semi-inebriated Harvard undergrad was bored one night. But the stakes are still life-and-death. Megascale is nearly the existential threat that megadeath is. No single machine should be able to control the fate of the world’s population — and that’s what both the Doomsday Machine and Facebook are built to do.”
—Adrienne LaFrance, The Atlantic
More doom and gloom to read under the christmas tree here:
