Chaos Monkeys by Antonio Garcia Martinez

Author:Antonio Garcia Martinez
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-05-14T04:00:00+00:00

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By itself, genius can produce original thoughts just as little as a woman by herself can bear children. Outward circumstances must come to fructify genius, and be, as it were, a father to its progeny.

—Arthur Schopenhauer, “On Genius,” The Art of Literature

JUNE 2011

Mark Zuckerberg is a genius.

Not in the Asperger’s, autistic way depicted in the very fictional movie The Social Network, the cognitive genius of exceptional ability. That’s a modern definition that reduces the original meaning.

Nor would I claim he was the Steve Jobsian product genius either. Anyone claiming as much will have to explain the crowded graveyard of forgotten Facebook product failures. Remember “Home,” the Facebook-enabled home screen for Android phones, launched with much fanfare in 2013, Zuck appearing alongside the CEO of the soon-to-be-disappointed smartphone maker HTC? Or Facebook’s misguided bet on HTML5 in 2012, which slowed the mobile app to a frustrating crawl? How about Facebook’s first version of search, available in English only, mostly useful for checking out your friends’ single female friends, and since discontinued?* The stand-alone mobile app Paper, which was a shameless rip-off of Flipboard?† Some unlaunched products I can’t name consumed considerable resources, dying internally after Zuck changed his mind and shut them down.

If he’s a product genius, then there’s lots of serendipity counterbalancing his divine madness.

No. I submit he was an old-school genius, the fiery force of nature possessed by a tutelary spirit of seemingly supernatural provenance that fuels and guides him, intoxicates his circle, and compels his retinue to be great as well. The Jefferson, the Napoleon, the Alexander . . . the Jim Jones, the L. Ron Hubbard, the Joseph Smith. Keeper of a messianic vision that, though mercurial and stinting on specifics, presents an overwhelming and all-consuming picture of a new and different world. Have a mad vision, and you’re a kook. Get a crowd to believe in it as well, and you’re a leader. By imprinting this vision on his disciples, he founded the church of a new religion. All the early Facebook employees have their story of the moment when they saw the light, and realized that Facebook wasn’t some measly social network like MySpace, but a dream of a different human experience. With all the fervor of recent converts, newly recruited followers attracted other committed, smart, and daring engineers and designers, themselves seduced by the echoes of the Zuckian vision in others.

Then there was the culture he created.

Many cool Valley companies have engineering-first cultures, but Facebook took it to a different level. The engineers ran the place, and so long as you shipped code and didn’t break anything (too often), you were golden. The spirit of subversive hackery guided everything. In the early days, a Georgia college kid named Chris Putnam created a virus that made your Facebook profile resemble MySpace, then the social media incumbent. It went rampant and started deleting user data as well. Instead of siccing the FBI dogs on Putnam, Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz invited him for an interview, and offered him a job.

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