Facebook is neither an altruistic social enterprise, nor ideologically neutral. It emerges from a very particular world view
Am I the only person in the world who is shocked and amazed at the ongoing flattery of �bergeek Mark Zuckerberg? Last week, Time magazine declared him "Person of the Year", and not a day goes by when the liberal press do not eulogise him and Facebook, the ad-based business of which he is the charmless and badly dressed CEO. Yesterday on Comment is free, Arianna Huffington named him her hero of 2010 for his philanthropic donations. Then of course there was the Facebook film, The Social Network. I suppose everyone wants to appear to be groovy, up-to-date and with-it, but this uncritical hyperbole demonstrates at best journalistic laziness or at worst complicity with a US world takeover bid.
Take the vague sycophancy that accompanied Time's announcement. The magazine enthused that Zuckerberg had won the award, for "connecting more than half a billion people and mapping the social relations among them, for creating a new system of exchanging information and for changing how we live our lives".
I suppose my real objection is that bits of drivel such as the above imply that Facebook is some sort of altruistic social enterprise, when the reality is that it is a very serious and very big American business whose purpose appears to be to open new markets for American products around the world, and of course, make huge profits for its directors. The bored and lonely consumers who find comfort in Facebook chit-chat are pawns in the enterprise, mere targets for commodities.
It is also true to say that Facebook is not ideologically neutral. In fact, it emerges from a very particular world view which we can trace back to Hobbes. I discovered this by examining the profile of Zuckerberg's fellow board members who, unlike him, are a very interesting bunch and, I suspect, the real power behind the poster boy.
The most fascinating is Peter Thiel. He is a libertarian hedge fund investor, hugely wealthy, and was behind the creation of PayPal, which itself was a libertarian experiment: can we invent some sort of global exchange system which uses the internet to circumvent national currency controls? Thiel was the first investor in Facebook, and appears briefly in the film. He believes that technology will free us from the restrictions of messy nature, and lead to a utopian paradise where we will all live to be 1,000 years old. He supports the work, for example of Aubrey de Grey, the Cambridge gerontologist who researches whether regenerative medicine can halt the ageing process. Other projects include the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence and the Seasteading Institute, the idea of building floating autonomous ocean colonies.
There are three more board members: Jim Breyer, Don Graham and Marc Andreessen. Between them this cabal of feudal overlords have got American capitalism pretty much sewn up. They are the Henry Fords of their day. Breyer works at venture capitalists Accel Partners and is also on the board of Wal-Mart. Graham is also CEO of the Washington Post Company which owns Newsweek. And Marc Andreessen also sits on the board of eBay. His venture capital firm invested in Twitter and has a large stake in Skype. His wife Laura Arrillaga is the daughter of Silicon Valley billionaire John Arrillaga. Such are the architects of our everyday lives.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/dec/23/mark-zuckerberg-facebook
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