Facebook’s former chief security officer compares company to ‘The Matrix.’ Whoa.

A system designed to keep us docile while extracting value from every aspect of our dulled existence is both an extremely rough plot summary of the 1999 film The Matrix and a description of Facebook.  

Just ask the company’s former chief security officer, Alex Stamos, who in a Twitter thread detailing a possible cause of Facebook’s March 13 mega outage managed to draw a pretty clear line between his one-time employer’s social media platform and the machine-run simulation of The Matrix films. That’s right, in Stamos’s thread, Facebook plays the part of AI villain. 

Stamos, who reportedly left Facebook in August of last year following disagreements on how the company should respond to governmental misuse of the platform, started the March 14 Twitter thread with a disclaimer that he has no special knowledge of what knocked the system offline for so long. That, however, does not mean he doesn’t have thoughts. 

“Several reporters are asking me for insight on the FB outage,” he tweeted. “I have none, other than that outages on massive distributed systems can sometimes follow this pattern:”

That’s when thinks took a turn for the interesting. With a series of Matrix GIFs acting as visual aides, Stamos walked curious readers through what he believes might have gone down. Essentially, he speculates, it boiled down to a small error cascading into something much larger. 

It’s kind of interesting, if you’re into that sort of thing. Where it gets really fascinating, however, is the final tweet in the thread. 

“Humans win, but after paying a significant cost,” he writes. “The system, now rebooted into its new incarnation, is safe for now. But how long can the peace between man and machine hold?”

Accompanying this last tweet is a screenshot from the final scene of The Matrix Revolutions, the third movie in the trilogy.  

Stamos is clearly, if perhaps unintentionally, equating the oppressive machine-driven simulation in The Matrix with the Facebook platform itself. And yeah, now that it’s up and running again, we can all go back to mindlessly feeding our data into the machine — granting it power in the process. 

Time will tell how long the peace holds.