Exponential: Order and Chaos in an Age of Accelerating Technology

by Azeem Azhar

What is now Facebook started as FaceMash, the result of a teenage college student’s peccadillo. Mark Zuckerberg and some of his friends built a website to judge the attractiveness of female students. It soon morphed into TheFacebook, an embryonic social network that played up to the dating-and-mating culture of American colleges. Naturally, the early developers decided that it was important to ask for someone’s relationship status during registration – and that one of those relationship statuses would be ‘It’s complicated’. Both of those decisions, small in themselves, made sense in TheFacebook’s early context. But as Facebook became more successful, this dorm-room thinking became the global standard. If you wanted to enjoy what Facebook offered, you had to subscribe to that standard. And Facebook exported these particular sociocultural qualities to societies where such questions were inappropriate, or meaningless. People like my mother, then a septuagenarian of Muslim heritage, were offered the choice of an ‘It’s complicated’ relationship. In her context, and doubtless the contexts of hundreds of millions of other people, it was a nonsensical, perhaps even offensive, question. But the code had become law.