In the courtyard of Facebook’s 57-acre campus at One Hacker Way, Menlo Park, California, the single word HACK is laid out in 12-metre letters in the stone. HACK is a big word at Facebook: Mark Zuckerberg recently explained to potential investors: “Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it—often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo.”
The courtyard embodies the contradictions of Silicon Valley: self-consciously rebellious, yet flush with material wealth and political influence. In a few years, the spotlight will move elsewhere and weeds will grow in this courtyard; but while Facebook itself may be transitory, it is an actor in a central story of our times—the collision between the material world and a burgeoning digital space.
Tom Slee has worked in the software industry for 20 years. He writes about the intersections of technology, politics and economics and is the author of No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart: The Surprising Deceptions of Individual Choice (Between the Lines, 2006).
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