Yet another book about the "history of the internet"

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ericbarbour
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Yet another book about the "history of the internet"

Post by ericbarbour » Sat Dec 15, 2018 8:23 pm

And guess what: it's another billionaire-sucking hagiography.
https://thebaffler.com/latest/not-how-t ... d-babendir
McCullough does dispatch with some of the false narratives public relations machines churned out about Netflix (that Reed Hastings decided to start the company after accruing a $40 late fee for Apollo 13) and eBay (that Pierre Omidyar created the site so that his fiancée might have an easier time expanding her Pez dispenser collection). It’s interesting, to a point, to hear what tech gurus lie about and why. Mostly, they rely on silly founding myths because they need a better story than the true one: they were in it for the money. Weirdly, McCullough buys into many of their delusions, which obscure more than they illuminate.
The chapter on Facebook, which takes the story from its inception until it opened registration to everyone, is a gleeful coronation. At one point, McCullough makes his first foray into the personal life of one of his subjects, insisting that then-Harvard student Zuckerberg “had no trouble getting girlfriends.” McCullough writes this in the service of mythbusting what he sees as the misleading portrayal in The Social Network, but none of what he writes seems to counter to Zuckerberg’s portrayal by Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher. Their much more central contention is that Zuckerberg was an asshole, against which McCullough offers no contrary evidence.

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