Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Logical Fantasies (the dislike club part V)

Episode Date: December 22, 2014

In the penultimate episode of our series, Kathy Sierra tells us how one tweak could fix everything and ToE’s Chris tells us the secret origin of Facebook. PLUS #marksbros (as in Zuckerberg)  #marxhegel (as in Groucho) ***ALERT*** the DISLIKE CLUB Finale was commissioned by RADIOTONIC from the ABC’s Creative Audio Unit. Download it here. Or subscribe to their podcast. Look for the Dec 21st episode called the Dislike Club – that is part VI (the finale).

You are listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. At Radiotopia, we now have a select group of amazing supporters that help us make all our shows possible. If you would like to have your company or product sponsor this podcast, then get in touch. Drop a line to sponsor at radiotopia.fm. Thanks. episode. Why is there something called influencer voice? What's the deal with the TikTok shop? What is posting disease and do you have it? Why can it be so scary and yet feel so great to block someone on social media? The Neverpost team wonders why the internet and the world because of the internet is the way it is. They talk to artists, lawyers, linguists, content creators, sociologists, historians, and more about our current tech and media moment. From PRX's Radiotopia, Never Post, a podcast for and about the Internet.

Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. You are listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called Logical Fantasies. I don't think you can fully understand what's going on with Facebook until you've visited the place. Wait, you're hanging out at Facebook now? Yeah. Why? I've been doing some consulting for this internet startup drone security firm, and we just took a site visit to facebook so what's it like there it's like

a cliche of a cliche of a cliche and it's you know kids riding scooters and playing games and there's food everywhere and they got those little razor scooters right And I'm just kind of overwhelmed by it. I'm just looking around at everything. And my group is going into the conference room for a meeting. And I'm like, hang on, I'll be in there in a second. I got to ride one of these Razor scooters around. And they're like, okay, we'll see you in there in a minute. So I get on the Razor scooter and I'm just kind of touring the place. And it's like a candy station at Whole Foods. You know, it's like a whole aisle of candy, right? There's pinball games and just, you know, all this kind of crap. And finally, at one point, I just like kind of crash into this desk

and I knock this bobblehead doll on the floor. And I pick it up and it's a mark zuckerberg bobblehead doll right who would have a mark zuckerberg bobblehead doll on their desk at facebook i know i was i'm thinking this exact thought and right then mark zuckerberg walks up and he says, uh, that's mine. And I'm just like, you know, this is kind of awkward. And I realize, right, all my team is in the conference room. So I say, you know, hi, Mr. Zuckerberg. I'm with the drone security group.

The rest of the team is in the conference room and I was just goofing around, riding around your office, taking a look around. But I suppose we should go ahead and head in there. And he says, no, no, this is great. I'd much rather talk to one person than the whole group. I don't really like formal meetings. Why don't you and I blow this meeting off and just the two of us go up to the roof and talk? So we go up on the roof and, you know, I start to explain about the drones and, you know,

the different options that they maybe want to look at. You know, you haven't explained the drone part yet. Oh, well, Facebook's buying some drones. Oh. Yeah, but as I'm explaining this stuff to him and I'm getting into the details, I can just tell I'm losing. He's kind of shuffling around.

He's staring up at the clouds. He's just kind of, you know, he's stretching. Finally, he just says, listen, I know this is important. I appreciate you telling me this stuff, but I think we're in good shape. The guys in the boardroom are going to work that out. I'm not concerned about that. Actually, I have something a little more important that I'd like to ask you about. I say, sure. Have you seen the social network? And I say, yeah.

Well, let me ask you this. You want to know the real story? And I'm like, yeah. So he looks around and he says, I didn't get the Facebook idea from the Winklevosses. I actually got it from Klaus Spargelszog. Who? According to Zuck, Klaus Spargelzeug was a German exchange student that lived on Zuckerberg's floor in the dorm. Klaus Spargelzeug? Klaus Spargelzeug was born and grew up in East Berlin. His dad was actually in the Stasi. And one of his earliest memories when he was five is that the wall came down in East Berlin.

And he remembers his father coming into his room and with tears in his eyes, dismantling all these spy devices. He's pulling microphones out of his toy wagon. He's pulling a camera out of the teddy bear. He had installed all of these spy devices to spy on his son and the whole rest of his family. And now that the wall was down, he didn't have to do that anymore. So Klaus Spargelshoig's dream, according to Zuck, is that he wanted to create basically by making everyone more open and essentially spying on themselves. What you're doing, where you're going, what you're wearing, who are you hanging out with, what were you listening to, what were you talking about? All of that information is just made available voluntarily by everyone.

So you're telling me that the idea behind Facebook was never some get-rich-quick money-making scheme, but rather idealism? German idealism? That some guy named Klaus Schlosselberg brought to Harvard? Klaus Schlosselberg. Yeah, that's right. But how come Klaus never sued? So I asked Mark that question, and he just kind of laughed and said, you know what was amazing?

That's the best part about it, is even though Klaus actually used the Facebook a bunch of the times, he was an early user of it, he never realized that I'd made it based on his idea. Klaus just never made the connection. Thank you. In order to quit Facebook, you must first click through an endless progression of images. Photos of your friends, family members, co-workers, and schoolmates. It's a guilt capture. Are you sure you don't want to watch Joey's daughter grow up?

Are you sure you don't want to find out what happens to Izzy after her chemotherapy? Are you sure you are ready to sever this final connection to your ex-girlfriend, Marketa? Are you truly ready to say goodbye final connection to your ex-girlfriend, Marketa, are you truly ready to say goodbye to your father? Eventually you come to a screen with a text box, and after you enter why you are leaving, Facebook finally allows you to click quit, Their one and only dislike button. This is what I wrote. I don't want to belong to any club

that would have me as a member. This is one of Groucho Marx's most famous jokes. Groucho scholars call it the resignation joke because Groucho supposedly included it in a letter of resignation that he sent to a club. But which club Groucho sent this letter to remains, to this day, a matter of contentious debate. In his 1959 memoir, Groucho and Me, the comedian himself claims that he sent it to the Delaney

Club. But Delaney is an alias he uses throughout the book for every entity he skewers. Most Groucho scholars believe the Delaney Club is the Hollywood Friars Club. And there is evidence to support this claim. On October 20, 1949, the Hollywood columnist Erskine Johnson published this bit in his paper. Groucho Marx's letter of resignation to the Friars Club. I don't want to belong to any club that would accept me as one of its members. What's troubling about this, though, is that no evidence of the original letter has turned up in any of the Friars Club's archives. According to the Groucho scholar Wilson Beekman, it's simply because when the Friars Club sold this piece of paper to a highly motivated buyer in the early 1970s, they included a clause in the contract forbidding public display.

But Ronald McMillan, a rising star in the field of Groucho studies, is convinced that if the document existed, we would have seen it by now on the Internet, because there were certainly no provisions against displaying the document electronically. The other day, I was perusing Tumblr, searching for images of Groucho, and I came across a photo tagged Marks Bros. It's a recent image of Mark Zuckerberg and a few of Facebook's executive vice presidents

at a holiday party. There's a blue and white banner hanging on the wall over the bar emblazoned with a version of Groucho's resignation joke. I don't want to like any club that would accept me as one of its members.

Everyone in the photo is wearing a toga and a Groucho mask. But still, I'm able to recognize two people in the photo, Mark Zuckerberg and this guy I recently met with. A couple of weeks ago, I got an email from this guy I recently met with. A couple of weeks ago, I got an email from this guy who claimed to work at Facebook. He said that he'd be in New York for a conference and that he wanted to meet with me to discuss how he could help me use Facebook to get the word out about the Dislike Club. Naturally, I was suspicious, but my curiosity got the better of me, and we met for coffee.

This guy claimed that he worked in the algorithm department, and he said that if I rejoined Facebook and set up a page for the Dislike Club, he would not only get me a year's worth of free promotion, but that he would also keep the algorithm machines from burying my Dislike Club status updates. Can't we do this without me joining Facebook?

I asked. Nope. He shook his head. It's the only way. I told him that I'd think about it and get back to him. But now, after coming across this photo, I'm kind of confused. Is this guy for real? Is he on the side of dislike? Or is he a diehard liker? Or even a double agent? Perhaps I'm making something out of nothing here.

Perhaps this is merely a coincidence absurdum. But I'm telling you, there's just no way I'm rejoining Facebook now. These Marx Bros are just going to have to find another butt for their dumb big joke. Personally, I'm convinced that the first club to receive Groucho Marx's resignation joke was the Beverly Hills German Philosophy Book Club. Groucho was a voracious reader, and he was always joining book clubs, partly for the discovery, but mostly to prove his intelligence. He dropped out of school at an early age in order to provide for his family. He always felt bad about that. In 1944, when he joined the Beverly Hills German Philosophy Book Club,

they were reading Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit and the Science of Logic. But in 1946, the club voted to turn its attention to Martin Heidegger. This is when Julius Henry Marx resigned. Obviously, in this context, Groucho's resignation letter is a cutting reference to Heidegger's Nazi past, but I believe that in this letter Groucho is also flaunting his comprehension of Hegel's concept of absolute negation. In the science of logic, Hegel defines basic or abstract negation as simply what being is not. But when a determined being is no longer dependent on what it is not for its own determination,

well then, it becomes being within itself. And this negation of the negation is what Hegel calls absolute negation. With his resignation, Groucho becomes a determinate being no longer dependent on what he is not, a member of the club, for his own determination. With this resignation joke, Groucho Marx transcends the very limitation of his being. And through this resignation, Groucho becomes a being within itself. If you watch any of Groucho's movies from this period,

like Coca-Cabana from 1947, it's obvious. You can see that he is determined to go beyond the struggle between being and unbeing. Coca-Cabana is also the first film in which he appears without his brothers, Chico and Harpo. And it's also the film where Groucho sits in the audience and watches himself perform a version of the song Go West, a thinly veiled proclamation that we must all go beyond. Groucho sings, go out and till the soil there. Dig for gold and you'll find oil there. As the crow flies, when the snow flies, go, there's no no. No. Thank you. I am optimistic. I do still think that there's something that we can do. Of all the people I met working on this series, the person who had the most to dislike about the Internet

turned out to also be the person who was most optimistic. Kathy Sierra. She's got this crazy idea that one simple tweak can change everything. One of the things that I noticed most, having been in the tech industry for 25 years, is that everyone seems to have stopped caring about logical fallacies. And I think once you have an acceptance of that,

and you tolerate that, you tolerate it from your friends, from the people that you interact with, then we have nothing else. The problem is we're very quick to attack the people who are attacking us but then we let it slide when our friends do it and we do it. We have to police ourselves. I mean look we have we have memes on Twitter, right? We have Follow Friday and, you know, Catter Day and whatever those things are.

Throwback Thursday, right? Why not, you know, No Fallacy Friday? If everyone just had one day, a day without logical fallacies, I mean, it doesn't take long to actually shift a culture in some small way if you still enable people to have all the things they still care about,

which is the ability to still be an asshole, the ability to still be angry, you know, the ability to say basically whatever they want, but just... Wait.

No logical fallacies. Really? You think that will solve everything? It's not actually that hard. The whole point of this fantasy world is that it's an escape from stuff like logic. No, I don't. I think, you know, in the future we're going to see more people getting called out IRL for, you know, like not following the internet script.

I can't believe you think this would work. I'm not saying that this has a good chance. I'm saying it's the only possible thing I can think of that has any hope at all. You have been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called Logical Fantasies. finale right now. All you have to do is google the word Radiotonic or type Radiotonic into iTunes or whatever podcasting platform you use. Radiotonic's a show from the Australian Public Broadcasting's RN Creative Audio Unit, and they commissioned the finale of The Dislike Club. Look for The

Dislike Club. That's the name of the episode, and it aired December 21st. I can't wait for you to hear it, because, spoiler alert, I found the actual Dislike Club. And you'll learn how social media drove one of the Internet's most hated people to the edge, the edge of the Manhattan Bridge, where he tried to kill himself. I'm not going to say any more. Just know this, that if you're on a bus or in a dead zone, you can always get the show later. All you have to do is remember one word, radiotonic. This episode, part five, featured

Kathy Sierra and TOE's special correspondent, Chris. The program is produced by myself, Benjamin Walker, with help with the sound from Bill Bowen. The Theory of Everything is a founding member of Radiotopia, the world's best storytelling, listener-funded podcast network. Radiotopia from PRX.