The story of technology in the 2010s is almost perfectly illustrated by the saga of Facebook. The Facebook that saw the birth of the decade was a fresh-faced hero, subject of fascination and praise. Naming founder Mark Zuckerberg its 2010 Person of the Year, Time described the company’s mission thusly: “… to populate the wilderness, tame the howling mob and turn the lonely, antisocial world of random chance into a friendly world, a serendipitous world.” The second Facebook is something of a villain, a platform focused on harvesting data for in pursuit of riches, of being a platform where misinformation spreads like wildfire, where foreign governments can act to subvert American democracy. The most memorable image of Zuckerberg these days is not his Time cover photo, but him sitting before a Congressional inquisition, fielding questions about the company’s mishandling of user data and its role in spreading “fake news.” At the start of the … [Read more...] about The decade in dystopia: Technological trends inching us closer to collapse