2009. It was the year when Facebook launched a piece of code that changed the world. It was the “like” button, the brainchild of Leah Pearlman, Justin Rosenstein, and several other programmers and designers. They thought that the users of the social media website would be too busy to leave comments on their friends’ posts. If there was a simple button to express affirmations, however, then that would make everything better.
“Friends could validate each other with that much more frequency and ease,” as Pearlman later said.
It worked—maybe a little too well. By making “like” a frictionless gesture, by 2012 we’d mashed it more than 1 trillion times, and it really did unlock a flood of validation. But it had unsettling side effects, too. We’d post a photo, then sit there refreshing the page anxiously, waiting for the “likes” to increase. We’d wonder why someone else was getting more likes. So we began amping up the voltage in our daily online behavior: trying to be funnier, more caustic, more glamorous, more extreme.
Code shapes our lives. As the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has written, “software is eating the world,” though at this point it’s probably more accurate to say software is digesting it.
The Facebook like isn’t the only piece of code that had a lasting impact around the world. Check out the other pieces of code over at Slate.
(Image Credit: Comfreak/ Pixabay)
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