Fresh off of announcing that he wants to cure every disease in the world for a relatively small amount of money, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants to show the world some of the other technical challenges he’s helping surmount.
In a post on his own social network Sept. 28, Zuckerberg shared an album of photos of the company’s data center in Luleå, Sweden. His post showed how the company is using the Arctic air in the very Northern town to keep the servers in the massive building cool at all times. According to Zuckerberg, the data center, about the size of six American football fields, is “10% more efficient and uses almost 40% less power than traditional data centers.”
Obviously proud of this technical feat, Zuckerberg chose to post some very well-composed photos from the data center of Facebook. He also said that he’ll be featuring other lesser-known Facebook efforts on his page in the coming months. But what the pictures seem to show, whether intentionally or not, is a rather brutal, sparse, and somewhat joyless vision of Facebook—a company that once compared itself to chairs and is headquartered at “1 Hacker Way” in Menlo Park, California. In the photos Zuckerberg posted, the massive data center is dark and empty, and not a single employee is really smiling.
Here’s a few choice photos from Zuckerberg’s post:
When Zuckerberg says it looks like a “sci-fi movie,” which one does he mean? The Matrix? Perhaps the Death Star from Star Wars, or the Captiol from The Hunger Games? Usually the cold, metallic vision of the future in sci-fi films is meant to be interpreted as dystopian, and not exactly something humanity should aspire towards.
Cozy.
I think Blade Runner was filmed here.
Are the innovations inside also angular and dramatic?
Profiling a contracted, unsmiling, security officer does give a sense that Facebook wants its users to know that their data is safe. But it also feels like you’re looking at one of the henchmen from a Bond villain’s secret headquarters where they plan to destroy the world.
Spiderman told the world that “with great power comes great responsibility,” but Max just doesn’t seem too phased.
“As our are spirits.”
This is probably the closest any of the employees profiled in Zuckerberg’s photos comes to smiling.
I’m not convinced that this isn’t a still from a Terry Gilliam movie.