Taking on The Zuck
Like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of university to build what became a global internet-based commercial leviathan. Piggy-backing on the public investment and collective intelligence of the unsung inventors of the electronic highway, they and their generation created a new world, every bit as disruptive as the invention of electricity, the telegraph, refrigeration, railways, the internal combustion engine, the shipping container and the coming of the commercial airliner. However, unlike these earlier ways of reinventing time and bringing people into contact with each other, the Internet entrepreneurs have collapsed the private sphere of human existence. While often professing to seek benefits for human kind as the driving force behind their endeavours, they have quickly amassed massive personal fortunes based on locking in monopoly power and defending and extending their corporate control through aggressive takeover maneuvers and litigation. As one of the richest persons on earth, Zuckerberg personifies the simple adage defining the American dream, to whit that it only takes one good idea to make one’s fortune.
Zuckerberg’s career is not unique in capitalist America. There have been more than a few titans who grew from modest and unexpected beginnings. The robber barons of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries made their fortunes and flexed their political power in the fields of railways, oil and steel. Some entrepreneurs like Thomas Edison had many more than one good idea. No matter how many ideas, the giants of innovation had this in common – an unquenchable ambition to succeed and a fanatical will to win against all comers. Just as Edison pushed aside his onetime employee Nicola Tesla, Zuckerberg progressively saw off or bought off anyone who would claim a share in his invention. Ruthlessness is ever a condition for success in the business of innovation as in politics; so is a ferocious dedication to the project and a narcissistic self-belief in one’s mission. Emotional intelligence is not in the job specification.
The fact that I have not yet mentioned what it exactly is that Zuckerberg did will not have fooled the reader. One would need to have been sojourning in the Goby Desert or Antarctica for the last ten years not to know that he runs Facebook, a social media phenomenon that has more than two billion contributors. Even those who missed seeing the film The Social Network, loosely based on the birth of Facebook, can hardly have failed to be made aware of his and its existence and reach into the everyday lives of people around the world. I say “contributors’ and not members, customers or clients because everyone who opens their Facebook page and enters personal details and photos, while clicking ‘like’, co-produces the product Zuckerberg is selling – information, the most valuable commodity in today’s connected world. By aggregating and onselling to the miners of big data Facebook generates the cash flow that powers its soaring stock market value. Advertising revenue supplements its business model. Like a giant Ponzi scheme, Facebook must go on growing, deepening the commitment of existing users and widening its reach to draw in more and more of the missing five billion who do not yet ‘belong’. The last word is significant. If you are not on Facebook you are so last century, doomed to extinction even before you die. The Zuck’s rhetorical ambition is impressive, but if taken literally, implausible. If all seven million of us are signed up it means that the hundred million people under seven years of age will be busy clicking away, including babies who will be exchanging their rusks and rattles for i-phones. Authoritarian governments taking a less enthusiastic view of disruptive innovation also pose barriers for the kid wonder.
As always, there are spoilsports threatening to rain on the Zuck’s parade. It was soon pointed out that once your details are locked and loaded they are in the electronic ether forever. In a very real sense, your privacy has gone. The more information you upload, the smaller your personal sphere of life, the more constricted the space in which you exert some independent degree of control over what happens to you, your past and your future. Once in the ether, it stays forever. Someone – including government agencies – can always access snippets of your life in future. Now you will receive offers for products and information from people that you didn’t even know existed. Some of this will be welcome, much of it either unwelcome or a waste of time. In today’s speeded up world time is the scarcest resource of all. The unwary facer has her information extracted, rebadged and re-launched to be sold to those seeking a new identity. Identity theft is rarely used for benign purposes. Normally it helps criminals avoid the law or to break the law. The prospect of a law officer or tax official turning up on one’s doorstep is always in play.
Facebook fans stress the freedom the medium allows for people to keep connected and to develop their creativity. The downside is that it also licenses users to defame and demean others. Electronic stalking, anonymous hate mail and cyber-bullying are rife and particularly difficult to control. Facebook has become a platform for the dissemination of ‘alternative facts’, a megaphone for expanding the reach of ‘fake news’ and ‘nutter fare’ first launched on Internet websites and then posted and re-tweeted around your network. More worryingly for our democracies is the channel that Facebook provides for trolls and other state and non-state actors to systematically and strategically influence the outcome of general elections. Arguably, Donald Trump would not have been elected but for the intervention of Russian hackers in the 2017 US presidential election.
The business model of Facebook has a fatal flaw, though one that will take a long time to manifest. To be sustained it must expand its reach indefinitely. Like slavery in the American South, the business must extend – though Eastward in this case. Productivity in a slave economy is static, only scale of operation matters. It is not for nothing that Zuckerberg is focusing his attention on cracking the Asian market, big-time. China and India are the big nuts to crack. Each offers powerful resistance, for different reasons. China’s communist government is understandably wary of the unfettered global connectivity that Facebook would allow its citizens, and the potential leakage of foreign exchange from its economy – hence Facebook is banned in China. India’s chaotic economic and administrative infrastructure, massive inequality and culturally divergent population makes getting clear policy rules in place a huge challenge. However, unless Zuckerberg progresses on this front Facebook faces a future in which existing users begin to develop e-fatigue and/or look to newer media for their daily hit. To defend against disruption from below, Zuckerberg will need to continue his so-far successful policy of scaring away or taking over the new disrupters. The price of preeminence is eternal vigilance – and a top grade legal team.
The benign rhetoric of ubiquitous connectivity obscures the historically confirmed fact that every new means of human communication is driven by and entrenches the interests and actions of powerful elites or classes. Starting with the first cities in Mesopotamia five and a half thousand years ago, the urban organization of life created multiple means of face-to-face connections that ordered the everyday productive, consumptive and creative actions of citizens. Enhanced productivity generated by cooperative labour created a growing social surplus that was unequally appropriated by the new urban classes. The dominant class and its priestly caste turned the surplus to building the city’s infrastructure, funding its defenses and maintaining social control. New cultural forms emerged, along with breakthroughs in technology and mathematics. Long-distance trade flourished feeding back into a growing surplus that fueled further advances, and so on. A similar narrative can be told for the later quantum leaps in communications media, flowing from the coming of steam, oil and electric power which with the transfer of the mathematics of sailing ships to the air changed our lives for ever.
What distinguishes the Facebook world from previously created ones is its essentially non-productive payoff in cascading future useful innovations. Facebook users are consciously consuming each other’s lives, vicariously, while unconsciously producing profits for faceless shareholders in the company and, of course, mostly for the face of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg. The lauded connectivity of users has not to date sparked any significant technological, economic or cultural advances. It hasn’t hastened finding the cure for cancer or solved world poverty. It may well have diverted attention and human resources away from these and other important challenges. Just look around the railway carriage next time you travel. Almost everyone will be busily consulting his or her electronic devices, many slavishly perusing and updating their Facebook page. A similar pattern can be observed in other public places, once the arena of lively person-to-person interaction. In restaurants people flick away as they wait for their meals. In Parliament politicians do likewise as the speeches drone on unheard. Around the family dinner table the same pattern unfolds. Other means of communication and human conviviality are ‘crowded out’. Of course, it would be unfair to tar Facebook as the sole cause of the new public silence. Email, twitter, instagram, what’s app and e-books contribute as well. But it is Facebook that has increasingly come to represent and in some cases takeover the other uses of the Internet and it is Facebook that has the least obvious productive return to the community. Any return is purely personal, indeed narcissistic, like satisfying one’s curiosity about what a childhood friend is doing or projecting a preferred image of coolness and success. An obsessive focus on Facebook shows the characteristic signs of addiction.
Beyond the essential triviality of the uses to which Facebook is put and the opportunity cost of time spent perusing the content, criticisms have been leveled at the dubious uses to which the information content has been put. Most seriously, Facebook like other Internet companies has been implicated in PRISM, the code name for the program of the US National Security Agency that covertly collects and stores massive amounts of Internet data on US and other citizens, ostensibly as part of its anti-terror responsibilities. Thanks to the Snowden leaks, the full extent of this surveillance operation is now apparent. Facebook joins a host of social media that collectively define the emergence of what is termed ‘the internet of things’, a medley of technologies that monitor, collect, and interrogate the actions of individuals. Together with legislation that chips away at the civil liberties of citizens in the name of protecting them, the Internet of things increases the ability of corporate and governing elites to control the masses, without their full awareness. When a chip is lodged in every niche and corner of the physical environment, the sphere of private external space shrinks to a singularity. Coupled with developments in artificial intelligence and neuroscience, the sphere of internal space collapses and society faces the possibility of the techno-dystopian world of the total security state long envisaged by novelists like Yevgeny Zamyatin, George Orwell and Margaret Atwell.
Of course, it’s fanciful to place this nightmare scenario at Zuckerberg’s feet. He is just another chancer out to make a buck. His wide-eyed conceit that Facebook will realize the neocon’s tragic mission to democratize the world in the image of American capitalism can be dismissed as either evidence of an untutored mind or the gloss of a talented marketing genius. Like other über-billionaires Zuckerberg is a generous and well-publicized donor to charities and supports a number of progressive causes like marriage equality and the rights of Muslims and undocumented immigrants. However, he has also been criticized by progressive causes for supporting policies like oil drilling in Alaska and opposing Obamacare. His lobbying connections and activities are obscure and he is part of the US business elite's untiring efforts to minimize the tax they pay. Zuckerberg’s political connections are, unsurprisingly for a very wealthy man, conservative; the exceptions relate to identity issues not basic economic or financial ones that would threaten his corporate aims and interests. Zuckerberg and his wife have followed Bill and Melinda Gates and others in signing ‘the giving pledge’. However, rather than doing so through the normal mechanism of a charitable trust he and his wife have chosen to create a limited liability company as the vehicle. They have also made the pledge to give virtually all their wealth over a distant and unspecified time period. Both these choices have raised doubts as to the true extent of their charitable intent.
Mark Zuckerberg has soared from the obscurity of a Harvard dorm room to global power and immense personal wealth in the brief period of a little over a decade. His native computing talents and single-minded devotion to success cannot be denied. Whether his creation will continue to prosper or burn out like a roman candle is yet to be determined. He may gradually fade into history, like the inventor of the hula-hoop, or he may like Rupert Murdoch continually reinvent himself to stay a major player in the world of mass media. However, from the vantage point of today, he is very definitely one of the people who have helped define the spirit of our age.
The Spirit of the Age: Biographical Sketches can be purchased at:
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