Zuckerberg should retire or at least be packing a go bag
If I were Mark Zuckerberg — newfound defender-tothe- death of liberal free expression even if it includes outright lying, side-gig education reformer, immigration crusader, quirky dad, fifth wealthiest person in the world, hobnobber to pundits and politicians and allaround do-gooder digital hegemon who is also now vying to run the world’s money supply, I mean my God, Mark, where does all this end? — I’d be packing a go bag right about now.
Instead of dealing with annual congressional grillings, I’d retreat to a nice island out of the limelight. I’d emulate Bill Gates, who pulled back from Microsoft and transformed from corporate villain into philanthropic patron saint of billionaires.
Or I’d pull a Larry Page and Sergey Brin and just ghost society. Page and Brin are cofounders of Google, the biggest advertising company in the world. But several years ago, Page appointed managers to run his vast empire, and both he and Brin reportedly have since disengaged from Google’s many upheavals.
Perhaps you can admire Zuckerberg for his commitment to publicly taking on the biggest issues of the day. Yet as a messenger for his own ideas, Zuckerberg is constantly muddled about the complexities of the problems Facebook faces. And he has a terrible tendency to conflate what’s good for Facebook with what’s good for America.
No wonder, as Vox’s Teddy Schleifer points out, Zuckerberg has become the Democratic Party’s newest political villain. Elizabeth Warren has made him her go-to billionaire. Alexandria OcasioCortez name-checked him in her endorsement of
Bernie Sanders.
It’s not just Democrats who don’t like Zuckerberg. Even though his company’s platforms are crucial to the distribution of global right-wing thought, the American right — from opportunistic senators to Tucker Carlson — have accused him of liberal bias. And he concedes their premise and allows them to lie in their ads.
There is something slightly unfair about this. Zuckerberg isn’t an evil business mastermind. He doesn’t run private prisons, his product doesn’t kill thousands of people every year, and he isn’t destroying the environment. He epitomizes the American dream: He turned a privileged upbringing into a life of superextra-Bond-villain power and privilege by building a better version of a thing many other people had already thought of. Then he bought up every competitor he could and copied the ones he couldn’t.
Now he possesses more power to shape commerce, democracy and the human psyche than anyone ever thought possible — at least according to his sometimes hyperbolic critics in media and politics, who also have a lot to lose in his rise.
But it’s Zuckerberg’s very wealth and power that’s becoming a cross to bear. And when critics point out his power, his instinct is to disclaim it.
This has been Facebook’s whole message recently: Look, we’re trying! We never asked to be this powerful! It just sort of happened!
That’s a correct position. No one can defend your wealth and power, Mark Zuckerberg, not even you.
But this is exactly why Zuckerberg makes a perfect political target for this moment. As a leader of what Zuckerberg recently called a “Fifth Estate alongside the other power structures of society,” he possesses a new and unusual kind of leverage in the world, and none of us — not lawmakers, not the traditional media, not academics or tech companies — have figured out the best way to curb it.
There’s one thing everyone agrees on, Zuckerberg included: He’s the epitome of having too much. To quote Kanye West, no one man should have all that power.