Human life as terra nullius: socially blind engineering in Facebook’s foundational technologies

Critical platform scholars have long suggested, if indirectly, that social media power is somehow akin to social engineering. This article argues that the parallel is analytically productive, but for reasons that are more complex than has previously been appreciated. By examining Facebook’s foundational technologies, as described in patents that sought to protect the company’s early innovations, we argue that, unlike previous technocratic attempts to reconstruct society, the platform’s equally consequential rendering of social reality into a legible and controllable social graph involved no substantive vision of the social world at all. Rather, the company engaged in a form of socially blind engineering, misrecognizing the actual social world as a terra nullius, as if it had no inhabitants who needed to be taken into account, and so was a domain from which profit could be extracted with relative impunity. In so doing, we develop a conceptual vocabulary to understand the widely-criticised recklessness that, notwithstanding some more charitable recent readings, marked the early Facebook – and that might still influence the tech sector as a whole.