Way back in 1999, Larry Lessig taught us that "code is law." By encoding these restrictions into the feed, Friendster's programmers were putting limits on the kinds of relationships that could be formed using the service. But Lessig's law (code?) is often overidden by an even older principle: William Gibson's 1982 maxim that "the street finds its own uses for things."

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Friendster told its users how to be friends with one another, and Friendster's users treated Friendster's management as damage and routed around it. They created accounts with names like "New York City" and whenever anyone friended that account, it friended them back. Users hacked their own way to form "illegitimate" friendships based on affinity into the system:

zephoria.org/thoughts/archives…

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As social media turned into a billion- (and then trillion-) dollar affair, the urgency of the struggle between how social bosses demanded that we socialize and how we wanted to socialize grew sharper. Mark Zuckerberg doubtless thought he was covering all his bases when he tossed a casual "It's complicated" to the pulldown menu for defining your relationship status, but that's because he doesn't understand how complicated *all* our relationships are:

phillymag.com/news/2013/07/10/…

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Now My Relationship With Facebook Is Complicated

Two days ago, Facebook changed "it's complicated" to "in a complicated relationship," and I was stunned. I am?, I thought. Wait, with who?

^{Liz Spikol (Philadelphia Magazine)}

For Zuck, crisply defined relationships were things that he could do simple math on in order to target ads, make recommendations, and sort users into categories. When you need to treat relationships as elements in a series of discrete mathematical operations, the fact that relationships are intrinsically, irreducibly qualitative is a serious bug.

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So Zuck did what computer scientists usually do when they want to do math on qualitative variables: he incinerated all the qualitative elements by quantizing them, and then did math on the dubious residue that remained:

locusmag.com/feature/cory-doct…

Zuck's biggest problem isn't the ambiguity of your social connections, though - it's that they exist at all.

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Cory Doctorow: Qualia

Last summer, the pandemic was in its first wave and the nation was in chaos. A lack of federal leadership left each state to figure out how to interpret the science, and many states punted public h…

^{Locus Online}

Think about it: Mark Zuckerberg *personally* makes or loses *billions* of dollars based on how much you socialize with your friends on his platforms. If your friends engage with you in ways that are low intensity and easily concluded ("How'd you sleep?" "Just fine." "That's nice."), then he loses. If, on the other hand, you and your friends get into protracted, intense interactions, he gets to show you *so many* ads and make *so much* money.

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Your friends are a problem for Mark Zuckerberg to solve, and (to his undying chagrin), you and your friends stubbornly refuse to organize your relationships around Zuck's financial imperatives. You just wanna hang out in the rhythms that are part of any friendship - sometimes intense, sometimes casual, often sporadic. I mean, honestly, if you're going to insist on just having *normal* friendships, how the hell can Mark Zuckerberg post the kind of growth his shareholders expect?

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This explains much of the drive to transform Facebook from a platform that shows you the things your friends post to a platform that mostly shows you things that "content creators" post. Your friends aren't motivated by the dangling possibility of viral dollars if they get you to "engage" with their posts, but for content creators, your engagement buys the groceries and pays the rent.

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By swapping out your friends and replacing them with people who are highly motivated to "engage" with you, Zuck gets a lever he can yank to get his users to arrange their conduct in ways that goose his growth.

In other words, Zuck lured you in with the promise of having pleasurable online conversations that matter to you; and now that he's trapped you, he wants you to break up with your friends so you have more time to watch his community access cable station.

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It also explains Zuck's passion for filling his platform with botshit, and his plan to solve the loneliness epidemic by giving you chatbots instead of friends:

fortune.com/2025/06/26/mark-zu…

For Mark Zuckerberg, all people are just shitty chatbots - chatbots that won't follow orders.

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Mark Zuckerberg’s dream for AI chatbots to become your friend is as unhealthful as ‘junk food,’ Hinge CEO says

Justin McLeod warns against certain AI use cases for dating apps.

^{Sydney Lake (Fortune)}

He wants to be able to point us at one another in the hopes that we will simply prompt one another into endless chatter, with endless scrolling, and endless ad insertions. This works great with chatbots, not so well with people:

youtube.com/watch?v=EtNagNezo8…

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After all, Zuck doesn't really believe most other people exist. Read *Careless People*, Sarah Wynn-Williams's tell-all whistleblower memoir about her years at Facebook and you'll quickly realize that for Zuck, people are statistical artifacts, not co-equal beings worthy of moral consideration:

pluralistic.net/2025/04/23/zuc…

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Billionaires are plagued by solipsism. Not believing other people exist is a great aid to billionairedom, because it lets you amass your fortune without scrupling over the population-scale misery you're inflicting on the way:

pluralistic.net/2025/08/18/see…

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For Zuck, AI is the most exciting technology in history (even more exciting than the Metaverse, if you can believe it!) because it might give him the world he dreams of: a world without people, or, at very least, a social media network without any socializing:

pluralistic.net/2026/01/05/fis…

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I'm coming to Colorado! Catch me in #Denver on Jan 22 at The Tattered Cover:

eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow…

And in #ColoradoSprings from Jan 23-25, where I'm the Guest of Honor at COSine:

firstfridayfandom.org/cosine/

Then I'll be in #Ottawa on Jan 28 at Perfect Books:

instagram.com/p/DS2nGiHiNUh/

And in #Toronto with Tim Wu on Jan 30:

nowtoronto.com/event/cory-doct…

eof/

Perfect Books on Instagram: "❗BIG ANNOUNCEMENT TIME❗ We are SO excited to present author and activist Cory Doctorow as part of what we are now calling The Perfect Books Lecture Series. This event is presented in partnership with The Other Hill. We hope

Cory Doctorow, renowned science fiction author, activist, and journalist, will present his latest book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, at The Perfect Books Lecture Series.

^Instagram