Mark Zuckerberg has spent most of his adult life apologizing, but he hasn’t managed to improve much. Ever since he was caught scraping faces from Harvard’s intranet for Facemash, his viral hot-girl-comparison Web site, in 2003, he has been explaining how he never wanted it to turn out this way, that he is taking steps to make sure that it never happens again, that his tech idealism remains pure.
In anticipation of his appearance before the Senate on Tuesday (watch a live stream here), to discuss the Cambridge Analytica fiasco, Zuckerberg hired a team of experts for “a crash course in humility and charm,” according to the Times. One of the foremost ironies of the past decade has been how the inventor of the greatest vehicle of interpersonal communication in our time cannot manage the most basic P.R. On social media, the Fake Mark Zuckerberg Facebook Post meme is predicated on the idea that Zuckerberg is only pretending to be human, that he’s either a robot or some kind of lizard alien. He gives an inhuman impression no matter what he does. When he’s silent, the world wonders what he’s hiding. When he speaks up and defends his company, he seems callow. When he admits error, he appears irresponsible.
Still, it’s an odd face to despise—milquetoast, banal, unthreatening. The ambient dislike for Zuckerberg demonstrates just how deeply the early decades of the twenty-first century have fostered hostility toward tech executives. For decades, innovation has been treated, by the public and the government alike, as a benefit in and of itself. And for good reason. In the post-war era, innovation created jobs and led to growth that benefitted the middle class. Technological change is by no means a universal benefit anymore. Its primary economic effect has been an explosion of income inequality. Its primary social effect is a shredding of the fabric that sustains human community. Facebook is an enormous addiction machine that creates depression and spreads disinformation.
Ford and Edison and the other masters of industry made themselves rich and incidentally created the middle class, which in turn undergirded America’s democratic institutions. The new overlords of tech made themselves rich and incidentally annihilated the middle class, while weakening democracy. They seem to be throwing themselves into their new role as villains with great commitment and vision, whether it’s the caricature of Peter Thiel and his blood transfusions or the widespread purchase of post-apocalyptic villas. All of these antics would be nothing more than random personal eccentricities if we were collectively sure of the value of the products that the eccentrics were creating. The best and the brightest have been heading to Silicon Valley because they want to build the future. But what if the future is lousy? Knowing what we know now, why would any brilliant young person want to work at Facebook any more than he or she would want to work at a big tobacco company?
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At least the robber barons had a measure of honesty about what they were doing in the world. On his deathbed, the great steel magnate Andrew Carnegie asked for a meeting with his former partner Henry Clay Frick. “Tell him I’ll see him in Hell, where we both are going,” Frick responded. In Zuckerberg’s released statement to Congress, his opening comment reflects no such self-awareness: “Facebook is an idealistic and optimistic company. For most of our existence, we focused on all the good that connecting people brings.” It’s amazing how, for Zuckerberg, the growing of his own personal fortune is indistinguishable from the improvement of the public good. It’s a particularly destructive form of convenient blindness.
We’ve known the dangers of Facebook for years. We certainly knew of them before social media, with and without Cambridge Analytica, twisted and fractured the political information that ultimately led to the election of Donald Trump. And that is why the Zuckerberg apology rings so hollow. The reason that Zuckerberg will apologize so fulsomely is that he wants to insist that the power remains his, even though it’s obvious that he can’t wield it responsibly. It doesn’t matter what he says or even what he does. It matters what we do, what the users do, what the governments of the world do. I mean, I don’t want to be that guy, but, for the cover of The Atlantic six years ago, I wrote about how Facebook is making us lonely. The research about the negative effects of Facebook use, even then, was quite clear. Zeynep Tufekci was writing about the platform’s political consequences way before anyone ever dreamed of Trump winning high office. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me? What do you say when a guy’s been fooling you for fifteen years? It’s not like we weren’t told that using Facebook could have serious consequences for our digital privacy. They wrote on the wall at Facebook that they were going to break things. What did we think they were going to do?
The dream of a world of total connection has resulted in unprecedented alienation. The dream of a world of instantly accessible knowledge has drifted into stupidity and lies. We blame Zuckerberg because we can’t stand to blame ourselves. The truth is that we made a deal with Facebook; we gave up our information for free. Unable to bear our own responsibility for the world we have chosen, we have turned the technologists into monsters we can blame.
“Render unto man the things which are man’s and unto the computer the things which are the computer’s,” Norbert Wiener, the father of cybernetics, wrote in “God & Golem, Inc.,” in 1964. “This would seem the intelligent policy to adopt when we employ men and computers together in common undertakings. It is a policy as far removed from that of the gadget worshiper as it is from the man who sees only blasphemy and degradation of man in the use of any mechanical adjuvants whatever to thoughts.” But who in Congress can comprehend that distinction? Who among them can even understand what Zuckerberg is apologizing for, never mind figure out a sensible national strategy for regulating social media? Zuckerberg spent his life periodically abasing himself, more or less without consequences. People are still using Facebook, right? I am. This story will be posted on Facebook. How could it not be? Can you imagine a world where this story wouldn’t be posted on Facebook? I can remember one, but I cannot imagine another.
There’s a certain look that Zuckerberg gets when he’s apologizing, one that’s particularly infuriating. It’s not exactly a hangdog look. It’s not red-faced shame, either. It is a blankness that somehow conveys simply that he’s sad that things have turned out the way they have. His innocence is infuriating, and interchangeable with the infuriating innocence of the word “tech” itself, which has morphed into a kind of business camouflage. “Tech” implies an intellectual practice in which engineers build neat things to improve the world. The major tech companies are businesses. That’s all they are. They innovate how to make money.
But the innocence that’s so infuriating in Zuckerberg is the mirror of our own irresponsibility—both personal and political. The loathing of Mark Zuckerberg ultimately amounts to an indictment of ourselves; it’s the consequence of a deep disquiet about the world we are building.
