Social media made tech founders cultural heroes where utility software never did

Evidence

The real Zuckerberg complained about his portrayal being so jaded and girl-crazy: “They just can’t wrap their head around [the idea] that someone might build something because they like building things.” And the film did overdramatize the mundane truth of Facebook’s backstory. But Facebook ultimately benefited from the cinematic glow. Time named Zuckerberg Person of the Year for 2010. Tech company founders were becoming folk heroes. Zuckerberg’s Harvard dropout predecessor, Bill Gates, had made his fortune with utilitarian tools like DOS and Office—the ball bearings of the digital age with little cultural cachet. As Steve Jobs once quipped, “The only problem with Microsoft is that they just have no taste.” Zuckerberg himself wasn’t particularly cool, but Facebook was: The platform brought social dynamics online—party photos, dating prospects, stalking high school crushes—and introduced millions to the internet for the first time. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 275

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to reading purpose: this is evidence for the mechanism by which internet-native identity was authored by status-hungry outsiders rather than by users themselves. — connects to: Twitter’s ascendance made its founders cultural models of entrepreneurial success in the Bay Area — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 209
• ADDENDUM: Ties to the ‘death of the sellout’ mechanism thread of the book’s central argument about how taste got centrally manufactured.