A recent interview reveals Mark Zuckerberg should not be in control of Meta.
Remember the bezitted, bespectacled, algebra-loving, skinny, front-row-sitting, disheveled, geometry-loving, over-mommied, two-handed-set-shot-shooting, shoe-staring, baseball-whiffing, hand-raising, AP Physics-loving, football-dropping, chess-playing, girl-repelling, calculus-loving, coding-loving, inappropriately laughing nerdlord of your high school class?
The kid who knew every word in the textbooks but not a thing about life. The guy you asked — in a welter of summer-school-dreading desperation as you slow-walked in to take the final — “what the hell is a quadratic equation anyway?”, but would not be the guy you’d go to for advice about anything else in the entire world?
Mercifully, we deplorables lose track of them after they ace the SAT and bumble off to college. But where do nerdlords wind up?
Well, they go to America’s most prestigious universities where their heads are filled with the world’s worst ideas (settler colonialism, environmental justice, critical race theory, gender studies, etc.). Then — utilizing their one skill — they unquestioningly memorize the course materials and recite them back, chapter and verse, in elegant essays to their Che-loving professors who swoon and reward them with their one, true hearts’ desire: an A.
From there, most of them disappear into high-paying/low-influence white collar jobs. But a few, because of their aptitude with soulless computers, take their feather-filled heads into the most influential positions in world history: I give you billionaire tech titans Bill Gates, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Jack Dorsey, and Evan Spiegel. But, most of all, I give you one of the richest ($227.1 billion, and counting), and most clueless tech nerdlord of them all…Zuck!
Take Mark Zuckerberg, please. (Sorry). While still in high school, he took graduate level computer courses and, under the company name Intelligent Media Group, built a music player that utilized machine learning to learn the user’s listening habits, which received a 3 out of 5 from PC Magazine. The New Yorker said of him, “some kids played computer games. Mark created them.”
Inexorably, he went to Harvard.
During his sophomore year, he launched a new website, “Thefacebook”. Quickly realizing its enormous potential, he dropped out of Harvard to pursue it fulltime. Zuckerberg’s websites, now collectively known as Meta, have a current market capitalization of 1.71T.
Good for him! Horatio Alger and all that. There is one little problem though: Because Zuck controls the majority of Meta’s voting shares, the nerdlord is now — completely without adult supervision — ruling over the world’s public square: by Zuck’s own estimation, 3.5 billion people use one of his services every day.
And a wacky oversight it’s been. Since 2016, Meta has been involved in a number of fiascos: the platform censored the Hunter Biden laptop story, removed 18 million posts containing “misinformation” about COVID-19 and its origins, and on January 7, 2021, prohibited then- president, Donald Trump, from posting content on his Facebook page and Instagram account. The Media Research Center claims Facebook interfered in U.S. elections dozens of times over the last several cycles including banning political ads from running the week before the November 3, 2020 presidential election.
Citing the recent election as “a cultural tipping point” and desperate to claw back a modicum of credibility, on January 7th, Zuck announced a complete overhaul of Meta’s content policy. No longer would it rely on “fact-checkers.” Instead, it would move to a community-driven system similar to X’s Community Notes.
During a recent appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Zuck tried to explain his change of heart:
That’s basically the journey that I’ve been on. Started off very pro-free speech, free expression. And then over the last ten years there have been these two big episodes, the [2016] Trump election and the aftermath, where I feel like in retrospect, I deferred too much to the kind of critique of the media on what we should do.
Zuck went on to try and reassure the billions who had mistakenly relied on Meta’s services for unbiased information:
I’m sure I’m not done making mistakes in the world. But I think at this point we have a much more thorough understanding of what the space is. And I think our values and principles are likely going to be much more durable going forward. And I think that’s probably a good thing for the Internet.
On behalf of the many of us who use the Internet, I’d like to say:
Thanks, Zuck. We’re glad your journey has led you to a place where you’re beginning to discern the difference between right and wrong, as we did when we were six. However, as you continue your long journey from nerdlord to grownup, we’d really appreciate it if you didn’t drag American democracy along with you as you pursued that ever-elusive goal. Zuck, it’s time to give control of Meta to a board of directors comprised of responsible adults. That will free you up to start Cyberdyne Systems and build Skynet to control the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
Image: YouTube video screen grab.