On Aaron Greenspan, Facebook’s Revolution and Culture
The phrase, “I’m CEO, bitch,” will never get old so long as I am on Facebook.
By now, the words are synonymous with Mark Zuckerberg, the iconic “founder” of the hottest social network on the block. It’s funny, though, that the common Facebook user couldn’t care less about this statement or the supposed less-than-transparent ethics of the site’s fearless leader. (For what it’s worth, I didn’t really take an interest into the back-end of Facebook until two years ago when I started studying online communities and began noticing the shift to a more social web.) As Facebook matured into a social operating system, so too did its founder and directors. Google folk are starting to come on board, with financing rounds rolling in from overseas following outposts in key markets such as London. However, we know the site is at a tipping point: a leaked internal call raised discussion around unnecessary capital expenditures, the advertising question, peaking viral channels and IPO opportunities. But behind the code, behind the “poke” lay something that is more powerful that any individual or collective space on the Web: culture.
According to John B. Thompson, a sociologist at the University of Cambridge, culture employs a “pattern of meanings embodied in symbolic forms, including actions, utterances and meaningful objects of various kinds.” For Aaron Greenspan, these words couldn’t ring more true while at Harvard University developing the houseSYSTEM, the eventual precursor to Zuckerberg’s Facebook. As Greenspan explains in The Huffington Post:
“Whatever people may say, houseSYSTEM’s Facebook was on-line on September 19, 2003, several months before the domain name “thefacebook.com” was even registered. I wrote all of the code for houseSYSTEM myself. I invited Mark Zuckerberg to join the site, I had dinner with him, and he did end up joining. The purpose of the writing the book [Authoritas: One Student’s Harvard Admissions and the Founding of the Facebook Era] was for me to sort out how this strange series of events took place, and what I found in the process of writing was that Mark’s deceptive actions and Harvard’s twisted policies were actually quite related. If Mark stole something from someone else, too, that wouldn’t surprise me in the least.”
These “twisted policies” Greenspan describes stems from the broken system of higher education: “All around me I saw indications that many of the top young minds in the world were being trained, in essence, to study, but not to think. At best, they were strongly encouraged to build a good résumé and save the thinking for later. This mentality still exists at Harvard and elsewhere in higher education.” The actions, in this case, Zuckerberg’s deception toward Greenspan as well as the Facebook founder’s (which one?) movement to apply the code for future endeavors, is a byproduct of Harvard’s tangled administrative web, according to Greenspan. Facebook’s current iteration leaves a bad aftertaste from its humble beginnings in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Culture, therefore, manifests itself. On each side of the Facebook founder’s dilemma rests real and artificial embodiments, as expressed in Signal v. Noise. Can you guess which Face-book is “instant…[a] big bang, made of mission statements, declaration and rules” or “built over time [and] a result of action, reaction and truth”?
I’m not sure if I can.
