Working at Facebook Sounds Like Joining a Cult (gizmodo.com)

Vanity Fair has run some excerpts from an upcoming book by a former employee that gives insight on how things work at the social network. The chapter, among other things, details Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's actions when Google launched its own social networking service Google Plus. The extract finds Zuckerberg's behaviour so intense that it calls it "bordered on the psychopathic." It reads: [...] hit Facebook like a bomb. Google Plus was the great enemy's sally into our own hemisphere, and it gripped Zuck like nothing else. He declared "Lockdown," the first and only one during my time there. As was duly explained to the more recent employees, Lockdown was a state of war that dated to Facebook's earliest days, when no one could leave the building while the company confronted some threat, either competitive or technical.â [...] Rounding off another beaded string of platitudes, he changed gears and erupted with a burst of rhetoric referencing one of the ancient classics he had studied at Harvard and before. "You know, one of my favorite Roman orators ended every speech with the phrase Carthago delenda est. 'Carthage must be destroyed.' For some reason I think of that now."

Comments

Summery of a summery?

[houstonbofh]

A slashdot summery of a Gizmodo summery of a Vanity Fair article? Is the source really that are to link to when it is the first line of the Gizmodo summery? http://www.vanityfair.com/news...

Pseudo-intellectuals.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Carthago delenda est."? Why even revert to Latin if you don't even know your quotes? Where is this from, Asterix? I mean, Cato the Elder's stock ending was famous enough that its start "Ceterum censeo" is almost better known than the rest: "Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam." Without the "Ceterum censeo", a Classic Latin speaker would drop the redundant "est" anyway and just state "Delenda Carthago.". Actually, I think the latter is the Asterix version so Goscinny still beats Zuckerberg, Harvard be damned.

Re:Pseudo-intellectuals.

[AthanasiusKircher]

"Carthago delenda est."? Why even revert to Latin if you don't even know your quotes? Where is this from, Asterix? I mean, Cato the Elder's stock ending was famous enough that its start "Ceterum censeo" is almost better known than the rest: "Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam."

Before you go on a rant about how someone else misuses an ancient language, you might bother to make sure you know what you're talking about.

As even the Wikipedia article explains, the phrase was actually never quoted in an ancient source directly in the TWO forms it is generally quoted in today. (If you want to see many of the various paraphrases of the form actually found in ancient sources, Wikipedia has some of them.) One form being your longer indirect speech version, and the other generally being "Carthago delenda est."

This isn't an "Asterix" version -- it's a well-known version of the phrase that has been commonly cited by English-language scholars for the past couple centuries. Just to show you how long people have been quoting the phrase as "Carthago delenda est" -- The form was common enough to even be parodied in the well-known account of a Harvard professor opposed to academic music study in the 1870s who supposedly ended faculty meetings after the first appointment of a music professor with the phrase "musica delenda est" (i.e., music must be destroyed).

It's true in other modern languages that the "ceterum censeo..." version is perhaps more common, but English-language scholars very frequently cite the phrase as "Carthago delenda est," which is as close to the actual ancient quotations as any.

Without the "Ceterum censeo", a Classic Latin speaker would drop the redundant "est" anyway and just state "Delenda Carthago."

Actually, wrong again. "Delenda" is a gerundive and by itself is only a passive participle. Saying "Delenda Carthago" could mean something more like "Carthage is to be destroyed." Adding a form of the Latin verb esse (i.e., to be) turns the construction from a naked gerundive into a passive periphrastic, which connotes an element of necessity. That is, it alters the meaning from "Carthage [is] to be destroyed" to "Carthage MUST be destroyed."

The gerundive itself can carry that connotation a bit informally, but if Cato were speaking formally and wanted to emphasize his feeling that it MUST happen, he likely would have added a form of "esse" (as you can see is found in multiple actual quotations and references from Latin sources as seen in the Wikipedia article).

Actually, I think the latter is the Asterix version so Goscinny still beats Zuckerberg, Harvard be damned.

Yes, I believe Asterix actually uses the form you mention, which is abbreviated and less formal. And I really can't believe I'm actually defending Zuckerberg here... but his version was perfectly acceptable.

Re:Read between the lines

[Anonymous Coward]

what if they're both controlled by the same person?

Maybe they are both controlled by Emmanuel Goldstein.

Re: Read between the lines

[Anonymous Coward]

Working for any large company is like joining a cult. Try working for nike sometime...