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An Inside Look at a Facebook Data Center - The Atlantic

Facebook is a sharing company, and as a technology company they are meticulous and incredibly capable. But Facebook as a brand has always struggled, and continues to struggle, with coming across as genuine, as authentic, as human, despite quite earnestly wanting to. Patchett and Towns are both completely genuine and clearly sincerely care about the work they’re doing. The same could probably be said for Mark Zuckerberg himself, although he has the misfortune of being so personally ingrained into Facebook’s origin story that it’s hard to differentiate him from the brand itself (and as Kate Losse documented in her memoir The Boy Kings, there actually may be no differentiation).

But Patchett and Towns aren’t Facebook and, despite the fact we’ve never seen the two of them in the same room, Mark Zuckerberg isn’t Facebook. Facebook is a corporation, and corporations are not so much people as a form of highly advanced artificial intelligence that people operate within. Maybe this is why some of the moments where conversation switched from the technical operations to Facebook-speak felt so awkward, but unintentionally so, like when Facebook’s algorithm decides to fill your Year in Review with pictures of an ex-boyfriend. It’s a brand that becomes harder and harder to empathize with the more it insists on trying to be empathetic, maybe because it’s not clear if there’s a distinction between an empathy engine and a branding engine or maybe because I am generationally disinclined to trust anything that’s too big to fail.