E-Matura | LiC | Multiple Choice | B2 | Facebook’s war on free will

All the values that Silicon Valley professes are the values of the 60s. The big tech companies present themselves as (0) spaceslobbiesplatformsareas for personal liberation.

Everyone has the right to speak their (1) judgementmindattitudesideas on social media, to fulfil their intellectual and democratic potential, to express their individuality. Where television had been a passive medium that rendered citizens inert, Facebook is participatory and empowering. It allows users to read widely, think for themselves and form their own opinions.

We can’t entirely dismiss this rhetoric. There are (2) sections ofthings inparts ofpeople in the world, even in the US, where Facebook emboldens citizens and enables them to organise themselves in opposition to power.

But we shouldn’t accept Facebook’s self-conception (3) sincerelyas likelylikewiseas sincere, either. Facebook is a carefully managed top-down system, not a robust public square. It mimics some of the patterns of conversation, but that’s a surface trait.

(4) In realityOn the contraryIn comparisonOn second thoughts, Facebook is a tangle of rules and procedures for sorting information,

, rules devised by the corporation for the (5) special rewardbig profitultimate benefithuge support of the corporation.

Facebook is always surveilling users, always auditing them, using them as lab rats in its behavioural experiments. (6) ProvidingWhileWhereasSuspecting it creates the impression that

it (7) offersdisplayspresentsshows choice, in truth Facebook paternalistically nudges users in the direction it deems best for them,

which also (8) links up withshould berelates tohappens to be the direction that gets them thoroughly addicted. It’s a phoniness that is most obvious in the compressed, historic career of Facebook’s mastermind.

Mark Zuckerberg is a good boy, but he (9) wanted towas used tohad towas asked to be bad, or maybe just a little bit naughty. The heroes of his adolescence were the original hackers. These weren’t malevolent data thieves or cyberterrorists. Zuckerberg’s hacker heroes were disrespectful of authority.

They were technically virtuosic, infinitely resourceful nerd cowboys, unbound by conventional (10) imaginationtechniquesapplicationsthinking. In the labs of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) during the 60s and 70s, they broke any rule that interfered with building the stuff of early computing, such marvels as the first video games and word processors.