Zuckerberg and the value of accurate information

ONE of the simplest documents I’ve seen, one that sets a standard for me in terms of simplicity and overall plainness, was the Parish Bulletin that used to arrive into our house in Athlone.

I would read it, and at the end I would know things about the doings of the local church, the various charitable or other quasireligious activities in which it was engaged, the times of Masses and devotions and whist drives and so forth.

It was written with no style, as such. It had no merit, other than its basic factual accuracy. Nor was there much to savour in the way of presentation. It was a dreary looking piece of work. I thought of the old Parish Bulletin as I was watching Mark Zuckerberg being interrogated by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the US Congress last week, because next to Facebook that bulletin now looks like a thing of unimaginable sophistication. AOC was trying to establish if Facebook has any standards in terms of checking some of the loony right propaganda being pumped out via Facebook into the bloodstream of the internet — and so inept was the response of the great Zuck that it was clear that he could never hope to comprehend the levels of rigour and exactitude which the makers of the Parish Bulletin were bringing to the party.

Facebook, by comparison, is utterly primitive. It is a paradox of our time that some of the allegedly futuristic systems which dominate our culture — from Facebook to Wall Street — are governed by impulses which belong way back in human evolution.

Wall Street, we are told, hates uncertainty. So did Neanderthal Man, staring at the moon, but eventually he figured out a way to get over that. Likewise through many centuries of experience, as a species we came to accept that accurate information has a value, that there are ways of establishing if something is right or wrong, and there should at least be an aspiration to put out the right thing. Zuckerberg never got that memo. He still doesn’t get it.