Should we reject the Facebook future?

APC’s editor wonders if the high-tech future that Silicon Valley dreams of is worth the trade-offs.

Tech billionaires looking to change the world has become a theme in today’s Silicon Valley culture; Telsa’s Elon Musk wants to solve South Australia’s (and the rest of the world’s) power problems and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Musk are facing off with their pet space-travel projects. Google even has a division dedicated to ‘moonshots’ — big ideas that probably won’t pay off, but could be huge if they did. And as Western governments’ appetites (and budgets) for forward-looking projects have shrunk, it’s mildly reassuring that someone has taken up the mantle of imagining a brighter future.

There’s a trade-off in shifting this power away from governments and onto corporations, however. That’s something that recently hit home for me when Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, published a 6,000-word manifesto titled ‘Building Global Community’, covering a wide range of topics about where he sees the social networking going next. The one theme that runs through it all, though, is that it hands more power over to Facebook. Zuckerberg envisions a world where Facebook is the solution to many of our modern ills, be that crushing fake news, encouraging people to get together in the real world or even bringing about direct democracies, where citizens can vote on important political issues via (of course) Facebook.

Coming from a company that’s repeatedly show a disregard for its users, that’s terrifying. Over its 12year existence, Facebook’s repeatedly been flayed by the public and media about its handling of users’ privacy, it runs tests on some users including deliberately creating a buggy, crashing version of its Android app to see how many times people would open it before they gave up, and its 2013 attempt to introduce a free internet scheme in India was rejected once the country figured out it could actually help to give the social giant an unfair or even monopolistic hold on the local market.

There’s a reason that, in the West, we’ve entrusted our governments with holding the kind of powers that Zuckerberg seemingly wants to wield via Facebook — governments can at least be held to account.

If Zuckerberg really wants to change the world, he should follow Bill Gates’ example — hand the reigns of running Facebook over and devote himself solely to philanthropy. Because, honestly, it’s hard to be truely altruistic when you’re always looking out for numero uno first.