I’m sure that working in social media – dealing with people as mass statistical abstractions – is a cognitohazard, the sort of thing that could make anyone a little solipsistic, convinced that everyone else is a kind of stimulus-responding automaton lacking the interiority that you yourself experience.

But when it comes to Mark Zuckerberg, I’m increasingly convinced that he didn’t acquire his worldview through the self-inflicted brain damage of his long exposure to the back-end of a vast social media system. I think the causal arrow points in the other direction: I think that Zuck founded Facebook because he doesn’t really believe that other people are truly real, at least not as real as he is.

When Zuck is forcibly reminded that other people do indeed exist, he takes it very badly.

— “Eternal Sloptember,” Cory Doctorow