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Facebook, Frankenstein, and the Problem with Giants
Cover illustration, "A Modern Monster" by Craig & Karl, 2018, Science , Vol. 359, Issue 6372 It’s been 200 years since Mary Shelley‘s Frankenstein was written, and the monster lives on in the form of Frankenbook. The mess we are in with Facebook right now is not unlike the mess we are in with so many things too big to fail: a hyper-speed confrontation between the forces of creation and destruction, and the misshapen Giants born from that union. Both Frankenstein and Facebook had a youthful aura of “protest” attending their birth, protest against perceived dehumanization, and protest against power structures through which information was available. Both were adolescent hedges against the abyss of non-being -- Frankenstein with his scavenged body parts, dead and yet vitalized for eternity, and Facebook with its one-eyed romantic notion of democratization of information and manifesto of open and limitless benign growth and connectivity. The parallel bet