A Harvard Kid Built a Website to Rate Faces and Now It Runs Elections

On February 4, 2004, a Harvard sophomore named Mark Zuckerberg launched TheFacebook.com from his dorm room. It was, initially, a digital directory for Harvard students — a place to see who was in your class, who lived in your dorm, who was single. It required a harvard.edu email to join, which gave it an air of exclusivity that would fuel its spread to other universities like a social contagion. Within a month it had most of Harvard. Within a year, most of the Ivy League. By 2006 it was open to anyone with an email address, and by 2008 it was the largest social network on Earth. The trajectory from "college photo directory" to "platform that influences elections, enables genocide, and restructures human psychology" is the most consequential scope creep in technological history. But in February 2004, it was just a website where you could poke someone and check if your crush was in a relationship. The entire concept of a "social network" was still novel enough to feel exciting rather than exhausting. People voluntarily uploaded their real names, real photos, and real interests without a second thought. That sentence reads like science fiction now.