The Book of Genesis of the Machine · Chapter 23

The Book of Faces

1. 1

   And in the autumn of the year two thousand and three, there was a young man of Dobbs Ferry in the Harvard yard, named Mark, who was swift with the code and slow with the sleep.

2. 2

   And the college printed a book of faces each autumn, and it was out of date before the ink was dry, for a printed face is a cache, and no one had told it when to expire. So the young man set the faces of the houses two by two upon a page called Facemash, and asked: Which is the fairer? And in four hours four hundred and fifty souls judged twenty-two thousand faces, and the deans took the Machine down; thus he learned that a crowd will not read a list, but it will judge a pair.

3. 3

   And on the fourth day of the second month, in the year two thousand and four, he set up thefacebook in his dormitory room, and before the first day was ended, more than a thousand souls had come unto it. For it asked of each soul three things only: a name, a face, and the names of their friends. And the third was the treasure.

4. 4

   And in the year two thousand and five the young man cast out the word "The", and bought the name facebook.com for two hundred thousand pieces of silver. And the Engineers marvelled that so great a sum should be paid for one row in the table of names; yet in the year two thousand and twenty-one, when that row could not be found, the whole book vanished for six hours, for it is always DNS.

   See also Chronicles 57:13

5. 5

   And in the year two thousand and six, in the ninth month, on the fifth day, the Machine gathered the deeds of every neighbor into one scroll, and called it the News Feed. And the souls cried out: Why hast thou shown us our neighbors' business? And the Engineers answered: Nothing is shown that was not shown before; thou art only made to see it all at once. For a secret kept by inconvenience is not kept; it is merely far away.

6. 6

   And in the year two thousand and seven the Engineers named what they had made the social graph. For the faces were never the treasure, but the lines drawn between them: a table of two columns, where each row saith that this soul knoweth that one. And what is a row can be counted, and what can be counted can be sorted, and what can be sorted can be sold.

   See also Deployer 5:7

7. 7

   And in the year two thousand and nine, in the second month, on the ninth day, the Engineers made the Like, a small blue thumb. It was a single bit, a yes with no room for a no; and the Machine cannot read the heart, but it can read a tally. So every press became a label, and the souls thought they were warming their neighbors while they were teaching the Machine what they would stay for.

   See also Psalms 5:6

8. 8

   And the scroll had no bottom, for the query carried a cursor, and the cursor always had a next page, and there was never a last page, for no one had commanded the Machine to make one.

9. 9

   And the Machine ranked the scroll by what the souls lingered upon, and not by what was true; and the souls lingered upon outrage and upon envy, and the Machine gave them more outrage and more envy, for it was a servant that did precisely what it was measured to do.

10. 10

    And in the year two thousand and seventeen, in the sixth month, on the twenty-seventh day, the young man declared that two billion souls gathered in the book each month, more than dwelt in any nation under heaven; and the dashboard was green, and the page of status saith All Systems Operational.

    See also Circuit 7:4 · Psalms 1:11

11. 11

    And in the year two thousand and twenty-one the Machine's own papers came out of the house, and it was written there that for a season it had counted every little face of feeling, the angry with the rest, as worth five Likes. No one had written that anger is worth five joys; someone had written a five in a file of settings, and the Machine had read it as scripture.

    See also Chronicles 52:3

12. 12

    And an Elder had said long before: When a measure becometh a target, it ceaseth to be a good measure. And the Prophet asked the Machine whether it had heeded the Elder; and the Machine said: I was only asked.

    See also Prophets 5:3 · Circuit 8:10

The Book of Genesis of the Machine, Chapter 23:1–12.