Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook: The Inside Story
by Steven Levy
Published 25 Feb 2020

I’m very glad to be in Beijing: Vindu Goel, Austin Ramzy, and Paul Mozur, “Mark Zuckerberg, Speaking Mandarin, Tries to Win Over China for Facebook,” New York Times, October 23, 2014. he even asked China’s president Xi: Loulla-Mae Eleftheriou-Smith, “China’s President Xi Jinping ‘Turns Down Mark Zuckerberg’s Request to Name His Unborn Child’ at White House Dinner,” Independent, October 4, 2015. chose their own Chinese name for Maxima: Mark Zuckerberg announced it in the “Happy New Year!” video on Facebook in 2016. “Every year this trip”: Mark Zuckerberg posted his trip at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, on Facebook on October 28, 2017.

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“Several days ago”: VP & Deputy General Counsel of Facebook Paul Grewal, “Suspending Cambridge Analytica and SCL Group from Facebook,” Facebook Newsroom, March 16, 2018. “I think the feedback”: Nicholas Thompson, “Mark Zuckerberg Talks to WIRED About Facebook’s Privacy Problem,” Wired, March 21, 2018. scrutinizing his non-hoodie apparel: Vanessa Friedman, “Mark Zuckerberg’s I’m Sorry Suit,” New York Times, April 10, 2018. “Facebook is an idealistic”: The statement, and the complete transcript of Zuckerberg’s hearing, is available at “Transcript of Mark Zuckerberg’s Senate Hearing,” Washington Post, April 10, 2018. In front of him: Taylor Hatmaker, “Here Are Mark Zuckerberg’s Notes from Today’s Hearing,” TechCrunch, April 10, 2018. AP photographer Andrew Harnick had enterprisingly captured the notes when Zuckerberg left his seat and failed to cover his talking points.

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Other useful accounts of early Mark Zuckerberg include two New Yorker profiles: Jose Antonio Vargas, “The Face of Facebook,” The New Yorker, September 13, 2010; and Evan Osnos, “Can Mark Zuckerberg Fix Facebook Before It Breaks Democracy?” The New Yorker, September 10, 2018. Also, Lev Grossman, The Connector (TIME, 2010), ebook of Time magazine’s 2010 Person of the Year; and Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect. he did not object: Shaer, “The Zuckerbergs of Dobbs Ferry.” “My wife was a superwoman”: Ed Zuckerberg, WVOX radio interview. “Good Jewish mother”: Mark Zuckerberg at Y Combinator Startup School, 2011, Zuckerberg Transcripts, 76.

The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal
by Ben Mezrich
Published 13 Jul 2009

Or maybe Mark had never really changed at all; maybe Eduardo had just misread him from the start. Like the Winklevoss twins, Eduardo had projected his own thoughts onto that blankness, drawing in the features he most wanted to see. Maybe he’d never really known Mark Zuckerberg. He wondered if, deep down, Mark Zuckerberg even knew himself. And Sean Parker? Sean Parker probably thought he knew Mark Zuckerberg, too. But Eduardo was pretty sure that was going to be a short-lived pairing as well. In Eduardo’s mind, Sean Parker was like a jittery little comet tearing through the atmosphere; he’d already burned through two startups. The question wasn’t if he’d burn through Facebook as well, it was when.

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He hated being stalled, just watching as the rest of the world went by. Tyler shrugged. He didn’t want to get ahead of himself—but maybe they had read the kid wrong. Maybe Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t the entrepreneur Tyler had thought he was. Maybe Zuckerberg was just another computer geek without any real vision. “If that happens,” Tyler glumly responded, “we have to find ourselves a new programmer. One that understands the big picture.” Maybe Mark Zuckerberg didn’t get it at all. Eduardo had been standing in the empty hallway in Kirkland House a good twenty minutes before Mark finally burst out of the stairwell that led down toward the dining hall; Mark was moving fast, his flip-flops a blur beneath his feet, the hood of his yellow fleece hoody flapping behind his head like a halo in a hurricane.

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Every day, Tyler, Cameron, and Divya had to listen as classmates chatted on and on about thefacebook. And not just at Harvard; the damn thing was everywhere. In the dorm rooms down the hall, on the laptop in every bedroom. On the TV news, almost every week. In the newspapers, sometimes every morning. Mark Zuckerberg. Mark Zuckerberg. Mark fucking Zuckerberg. Okay, maybe Tyler was becoming a little obsessed. He knew from Mark’s point of view, he, Cameron, and Divya were just a blip in the history of thefacebook. In Mark’s mind, he had worked for a few hours for some jocky classmates, gotten bored, and moved on. There were no papers signed, no work agreements or nondisclosures or noncompetes.

An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination
by Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang
Published 12 Jul 2021

By the end of 2004, one million college students: Anne Sraders, “History of Facebook: Facts and What’s Happening,” TheStreet, October 11, 2018. 11. The board at the time: Allison Fass, “Peter Thiel Talks about the Day Mark Zuckerberg Turned down Yahoo’s $1 Billion,” Inc., March 12, 2013. 12. The investment and buyout offers kept coming in: Nicholas Carlson, “11 Companies that Tried to Buy Facebook Back When it Was a Startup,” Business Insider, May 13, 2010. 13. The Yahoo buyout offer: Fass, “Peter Thiel Talks about the Day Mark Zuckerberg Turned down Yahoo’s $1 Billion.” 14. “It was the first point where we had to look at the future”: Mark Zuckerberg’s August 16, 2016 interview with Sam Altman, “How to Build the Future,” can be viewed on YouTube. 15. he spent most of his time working on an idea: Stephen Levy, “Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s Lost Notebook,” Wired, February 12, 2020. 16.

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“Lawmakers seem confused about what Facebook does”: Emily Stewart, “Lawmakers Seem Confused about What Facebook Does—and How to Fix It,” Vox, April 10, 2018. 29. The hearings would become fodder: Laura Bradley, “Was Mark Zuckerberg’s Senate Hearing the ‘Worst Punishment of All?’,” Vanity Fair, April 11, 2018. 30. Over ten hours of testimony: Zach Wichter, “2 Days, 10 Hours, 600 Questions: What Happened When Mark Zuckerberg Went to Washington,” New York Times, April 12, 2018. 31. Zuckerberg had added three billion dollars: Natasha Bach, “Mark Zuckerberg’s Net Worth Skyrocketed $3 Billion during His Senate Testimony and Could Rise Again Today,” Fortune, April 11, 2018. Chapter 9: Think Before You Share 1.

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As Swisher grilled him about the controversy: Dan Nosowitz, “Mark Zuckerberg Gives Awkward, Sweaty Interview at D8: Touches on Privacy and Scandal,” Fast Company, June 3, 2010. 12. Alex Jones and his conspiracy-laden site: Hadley Freeman, “Sandy Hook Father Leonard Pozner on Death Threats: ‘I Never Imagined I’d Have to Fight for My Child’s Legacy,’” Guardian, May 2, 2017. 13. Swisher pressed Zuckerberg: Kara Swisher, “Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Recode Decode,” July 18, 2018, podcast interview and transcript can be accessed on the Vox website. 14. Zuckerberg tried to clarify his comments: Kara Swisher, “Mark Zuckerberg Clarifies: ‘I Personally Find Holocaust Denial Deply Offensive, and I Absolutely Didn’t Intend to Defend the Intent of People Who Deny That’,” Vox, July 18, 2018. 15.

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy
by Jonathan Taplin
Published 17 Apr 2017

I am a Facebook user, and in many ways I think it is a wonderful tool for communication. I also suspect you will find that Mark Zuckerberg, the brash young man who founded the company at the age of twenty, is growing up and becoming aware of the awesome responsibilities he has in running the world’s largest social network. The bratty kid portrayed in the movie The Social Network may have been changed by marriage and fatherhood. Larry Page, Peter Thiel, and Jeff Bezos are in their forties and fifties. Their libertarian ideals are fairly fixed, but watching the evolution of Mark Zuckerberg over the past ten years is to see a maturation process in both the man and his company.

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Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Random House, 2010). James Lardner, “The Instant Gratification Project,” Business 2.0, December 2001. Chapter Eight: The Social Media Revolution Harry McCracken, “Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s Bold Plan for the Future of Facebook, Fast Company, November 16, 2015, www.fastcompany.com/3052885/mark-zuckerberg-facebook. Daniel Hunt, “The Influence of Computer-Mediated Communication Apprehension on Motives for Facebook Use,” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, vol. 56, no. 2 (June 2012). David Kravets, “Facebook’s $9.5 Million Beacon Settlement Approved,” Wired, September 21, 2012, www.wired.com/2012/09/beacon-settlement-approved/.

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ISBN 978-0-316-27574-3 E3-20170222-JV-PC Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Epigraph Introduction Chapter One: The Great Disruption Chapter Two: Levon’s Story Chapter Three: Tech’s Counterculture Roots Chapter Four: The Libertarian Counterinsurgency Chapter Five: Digital Destruction Chapter Six: Monopoly in the Digital Age Chapter Seven: Google’s Regulatory Capture Chapter Eight: The Social Media Revolution Chapter Nine: Pirates of the Internet Chapter Ten: Libertarians and the 1 Percent Chapter Eleven: What It Means to Be Human Chapter Twelve: The Digital Renaissance Afterword Acknowledgments About the Author Also by Jonathan Taplin Notes Newsletters For Maggie Move fast and break things. Unless you are breaking stuff, you aren’t moving fast enough. —Mark Zuckerberg Introduction I thought I was going to write the story of a culture war. On one side were a few libertarian Internet billionaires—the people who brought you Google, Amazon, and Facebook—and on the other side were the musicians, journalists, photographers, authors, and filmmakers who were trying to figure out how to continue to make a living in the digital age.

The Facebook Effect
by David Kirkpatrick
Published 19 Nov 2010

There wasn’t any debate. Patterson was enthusiastic. So was Jim Breyer. But while, as usual, Parker had presented Thefacebook’s pitch, Breyer had made a critical discovery while watching the boys demonstrate Thefacebook’s site. “First page of the website,” Breyer wrote in a note to himself, “this is a Mark Zuckerberg company. Mark Zuckerberg is the guy.” Until that moment, it had not been clear to Accel—or to any of the company’s prospective investors aside from Don Graham—that Zuckerberg was the decisionmaker upon whose opinion a deal would rise or fall. Efrusy had barely met Zuckerberg. During the presentation Breyer had asked Zuckerberg to talk a bit about his background and his vision for the company, and Zuckerberg talked for only about two minutes.

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He was oblivious, immobilized, hands clasped behind his back, head down, lost in thought. There was a gravity in the man’s demeanor. My friend paused. Despite his family’s exhaustion, his instinct told him not to interrupt. He waited. After a minute or so, the pensive Mark Zuckerberg looked up and continued slowly down the sidewalk. Acknowledgments Thanks go first to Mark Zuckerberg. Had he not encouraged me to write this book and cooperated as I did so, it would likely not have happened. As I proceeded, I often said to myself and to others how much I liked writing a book about someone so committed to transparency. He tried hard to answer even questions that had embarrassing answers.

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“Even if they were just upset about a minor issue with the school.” People from the beginning intuitively realized that if this service was intended as a way for them to reflect online their genuine identity, then an element of that identity was their views and passions about the issues of the day. “The Colombia thing,” says Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, “is a very early indicator that governance is changing—[and of how] powerful political organizations can form. These things can really affect peoples’ liberties and freedom, which is kind of the point of government.…In fifteen years maybe there will be things like what happened in Colombia almost every day.”

System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot
by Rob Reich , Mehran Sahami and Jeremy M. Weinstein
Published 6 Sep 2021

When Gates was asked: Steven Levy, “Bill Gates on Covid: Most US Tests Are ‘Completely Garbage,’” Wired, August 7, 2020, https://www.wired.com/story/bill-gates-on-covid-most-us-tests-are-completely-garbage/. “putting power in people’s hands”: Mark Zuckerberg, “A Blueprint for Content Governance and Enforcement,” Facebook, November 15, 2018, https://www.facebook.com/notes/751449002072082/. Billions of pieces: Mark Zuckerberg, “Building Global Community,” Facebook, February 16, 2017, https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/building-global-community/10154544292806634/. “over 300 hours of video”: “YouTube Jobs,” YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/jobs/. more than 500 million tweets: Raffi Krikorian, “New Tweets per Second Record, and How!

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“If you sue us”: Jared Bennett, “Saving Face: Facebook Wants Access Without Limits,” Center for Public Integrity, July 31, 2017, https://publicintegrity.org/inequality-poverty-opportunity/saving-face-facebook-wants-access-without-limits/. “Mark will be in Washington”: Mike Allen, “Scoop: Mark Zuckerberg Returning to Capitol Hill,” Axios, September 18, 2019, https://www.axios.com/mark-zuckerberg-capitol-hill-f75ba9fa-ca5d-4bab-9d58-40bcec96ff87.html. Facebook and Amazon spent: Ryan Tracy, Chad Day, and Anthony DeBarros, “Facebook and Amazon Boosted Lobbying Spending in 2020,” Wall Street Journal, January 24, 2021, https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-and-amazon-boosted-lobbying-spending-in-2020-11611500400.

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“Most members of Congress don’t know”: Kim Zetter, “Of Course Congress Is Clueless About Tech—It Killed Its Tutor,” Wired, April 21, 2016, https://www.wired.com/2016/04/office-technology-assessment-congress-clueless-tech-killed-tutor/. spent part of his honeymoon in Rome: Evan Osnos, “Can Mark Zuckerberg Fix Facebook Before It Breaks Democracy?,” New Yorker, September 10, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/09/17/can-mark-zuckerberg-fix-facebook-before-it-breaks-democracy. employment in sweatshops doubled: “History of Sweatshops: 1880–1940,” National Museum of American History, https://americanhistory.si.edu/sweatshops/history-1880-1940. “broad discretion in the investigation”: Karen Bilodeau, “How the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire Changed Workers’ Rights,” Maine Bar Journal 26, no. 1 (Winter 2011): 43–44.

The History of the Future: Oculus, Facebook, and the Revolution That Swept Virtual Reality
by Blake J. Harris
Published 19 Feb 2019

THE BICYCLE ANALOGY LAWYER: If this jury finds that Oculus stole virtual reality technology from ZeniMax, improving upon that technology doesn’t make it yours, does it? MARK ZUCKERBERG: I don’t know . . . I disagree with the premise of your question so it’s kind of hard to get on top of that. LAWYER: Alright, let’s make it real simple: if you steal my bike and you paint it and put a bell on it, does that make it your bike? MARK ZUCKERBERG: No . . . [but] I think the analogy to a bike is extremely over-simplistic here. LAWYER: Probably. MARK ZUCKERBERG: This would be like someone— LAWYER: I agree with you. MARK ZUCKERBERG:—who created a piece of, like, a bar that might go on a bike and then someone built a spaceship out of it.

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I mean, it’ll probably still blow you away, but it’s just not as good as the Room.” Zuckerberg was intrigued . . . but still not enough to rearrange his schedule. “I’M GONNA FLY UP TO MENLO PARK AND GIVE A DEMO TO MARK ZUCKERBERG,” Iribe said. “Nice!” Luckey replied. “Any particular objective in mind? Or just because, you know, it’s Mark Zuckerberg? It was mostly because it was Mark Zuckerberg, but Iribe and Malamed had also started throwing around a crazy idea: What if a company like Facebook led our Series C? It wasn’t the type of thing Facebook had done before, but, hey, there’s a first time for everything, right?

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So on February 15, he and Ondrejka flew up to Stanford and visited Jeremy Bailenson’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab. Then later that day, Zuckerberg texted Amin Zoufonoun. MARK ZUCKERBERG: I just went to this VR lab at Stanford and it was totally awesome. MARK ZUCKERBERG: It also confirmed for me that Oculus is miles ahead of everyone else . . . AMIN ZOUFONOUN: any other interesting learnings about vr? i guess we can talk about it next time. MARK ZUCKERBERG: . . . It’s going to be hard to get Oculus done at lower than the amounts we’ve discussed. The markets are just willing to pay more for it right now independently.

No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram
by Sarah Frier
Published 13 Apr 2020

.”: Dan Rookwood, “The Many Stories of Instagram’s Billionaire Founder,” MR PORTER, accessed May 2019, https://www.mrporter.com/en-us/journal/the-interview/the-many-stories-of-instagrams-billionaire-founder/2695. He once lost to a friend’s teenage daughter: Osnos, “Can Mark Zuckerberg Fix Facebook?” “Carthago delenda est!”: Antonio García Martínez, “How Mark Zuckerberg Led Facebook’s War to Crush Google Plus,” Vanity Fair, June 3, 2016, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/06/how-mark-zuckerberg-led-facebooks-war-to-crush-google-plus. It was “an artistic choice,”: Colleen Taylor, “Instagram Launches 15-Second Video Sharing Feature, with 13 Filters and Editing,” TechCrunch, June 20, 2013, https://techcrunch.com/2013/06/20/facebook-instagram-video/.

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Ante, and Emily Glazer, “In Facebook Deal, Board Was All but Out of Picture,” Wall Street Journal, April 18, 2012, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304818404577350191931921290. started out by asking for $2 billion: Raice, Ante, and Glazer, “In Facebook Deal, Board Was All but Out of Picture.” The discussions continued at Zuckerberg’s: Mike Swift and Pete Carey, “Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg Buys House in Palo Alto,” Mercury News, May 4, 2011, https://www.mercurynews.com/2011/05/04/facebooks-mark-zuckerberg-buys-house-in-palo-alto/. But if it’s a bubble: Aileen Lee, “Welcome to the Unicorn Club, 2015: Learning from Billion-Dollar Companies,” TechCrunch, July 18, 2015, https://techcrunch.com/2015/07/18/welcome-to-the-unicorn-club-2015-learning-from-billion-dollar-companies/.

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selling to a South Korean company, Daum Kakao: Edwin Chan and Sarah Frier, “Morin Sells Chat App Path to South Korea’s Daum Kakao,” Bloomberg.com, May 29, 2015, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-29/path-s-david-morin-sells-chat-app-to-south-korea-s-daum-kakao. It was Facebook’s job to not let anyone: Evan Osnos, “Can Mark Zuckerberg Fix Facebook Before It Breaks Democracy?,” New Yorker, September 10, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/09/17/can-mark-zuckerberg-fix-facebook-before-it-breaks-democracy. Analysts would later say that approving: Kurt Wagner, “Facebook’s Acquisition of Instagram Was the Greatest Regulatory Failure of the Past Decade, Says Stratechery’s Ben Thompson,” Vox, June 2, 2018, https://www.vox.com/2018/6/2/17413786/ben-thompson-facebook-google-aggregator-platform-code-conference-2018.

The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--And How We Must Adapt
by Sinan Aral
Published 14 Sep 2020

Cambridge Analytica controversy: Carole Cadwalladr, “ ‘I Made Steve Bannon’s Psychological Warfare Tool’: Meet the Data War Whistleblower,” Guardian, March 18, 2018. Mark Zuckerberg to testify: Mark Zuckerberg, chairman and chief executive officer of Facebook, testimony at hearing before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary and Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, April 10, 2018, https://en.wikisource.org/​wiki/​Zuckerberg_Senate_Transcript_2018; Mark Zuckerberg, testimony at hearing before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce, April 11, 2018, https://docs.house.gov/​meetings/​IF/​IF00/​20180411/​108090/​HHRG-115-IF00-Transcript-20180411.pdf; Mark Zuckerberg, testimony at meeting of the Conference of Presidents of the European Parliament, Brussels, May 22, 2018, https://www.c-span.org/​video/​?

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New users flocked to social platforms in droves, building armies of fresh profiles, wiring into what I call the “Hype Machine”—the real-time communications ecosystem created by social media. Describing their attempts to cope with the demand, Alex Schultz and Jay Parikh, Facebook’s heads of analytics and engineering, respectively, wrote, “Usage growth from COVID-19 is unprecedented across the industry, and we are experiencing new records in usage every day.” Mark Zuckerberg was blunter: “We’re just trying to keep the lights on over here,” he said. As the entire planet was denied physical contact for months on end, the coronavirus shocked our use and perception of social technologies in dramatic ways. Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and Instagram became indispensable sources of human connection, timely medical information, social support, outreach, pandemic fundraising, free impromptu concerts, collaborative art projects, and real-time updates about the spread of the virus.

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They care about the future of our planet. They’re wicked smart, and they’re committed to making the world a better place. But social media’s impact on the world is not determined by intention alone. As we all know, there have been many missteps in building the Hype Machine. Following the death of George Floyd, Mark Zuckerberg defended his decision to allow unaltered and unlabeled, divisive and inflammatory Facebook messages by President Trump that seemed to threaten violence in response to the protests and including the words “when the looting starts the shooting starts,” a phrase used by police chiefs and segregationist politicians during crackdowns against the civil rights movement.

The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World
by Max Fisher
Published 5 Sep 2022

Experimental Evidence on the Role of Common Knowledge,” Eric Arias, Political Science Research and Methods 7, no. 3, July 2019. 22 identifying which students were influential: Paluck et al., 2016. 23 “Now, in that case”: “Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook’s Hardest Year, and What Comes Next,” Ezra Klein, Vox, April 2, 2018. 24 “overreliance on third parties”: “Open Letter to Mark Zuckerberg,” Phandeeyar et al., April 5, 2018. 25 sent the groups an email apologizing: “Zuckerberg Was Called Out Over Myanmar Violence. Here’s His Apology,” Kevin Roose and Paul Mozur, New York Times, April 9, 2018. 26 formal report on the genocide: Report of Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, United Nations Human Rights Council, August 27, 2018. 27 “You can’t just snap”: “Can Mark Zuckerberg Fix Facebook Before It Breaks Democracy?”

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Adamic, Science 348, no. 6239, May 7, 2015. 28 “associated with adopting more extreme”: Ibid. 29 “Which of the big questions”: Exchange is from the comments field in “For the Next Hour I’ll Be Here Answering Your Questions on Facebook,” Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook.com, June 30, 2015. 30 “Every time you use Facebook”: “Inside Facebook’s AI Machine,” Steven Levy, Wired, February 2017. 31 “If they do these”: “News Feed: Getting Your Content to the Right People,” Adam Mosseri, presentation to Facebook F8 conference in San Francisco, April 21, 2016. 32 “When users spend more”: Doerr: 161. 33 Facebook engineers were automatically: “I was an eng leader on Facebook’s NewsFeed,” Krishna Gade, Twitter, February 11, 2021. Twitter.com/krishnagade/status/1359908897998315521 34 “You start thinking about”: “Can Mark Zuckerberg Fix Facebook Before It Breaks Democracy?”

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Far-Right,” Jonas Kaiser and Adrian Rauchfleisch, Data & Society, April 11, 2018. 41 confirmed the “radicalization pipeline”: “Auditing radicalization pathways on YouTube,” Manoel Horta Ribeiro et al., Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, January 2020. 42 combined 50 million views: “Untrue-Tube: Monetizing Misery and Disinformation,” Jonathan Albright, Medium.com, February 25, 2018. 43 policy team recommended: “YouTube Executives Ignored Warnings, Letting Toxic Videos Run Rampant,” Mark Bergen, Bloomberg, April 2, 2019. 44 “an almost inconceivable battle”: “An open letter to Mark Zuckerberg,” Leonard Pozner and Veronique De La Rosa, The Guardian, July 25, 2018. 45 “We created Facebook”: “Facebook Touts Fight on Fake News, but Struggles to Explain Why InfoWars Isn’t Banned,” Oliver Darcy, CNN, July 11, 2018. 46 “I’m Jewish, and”: “Zuckerberg: The Recode Interview,” Kara Swisher, Recode, October 8, 2018. 47 “We’re going to hold Jones”: Tweet by Jack Dorsey (@jack), August 7, 2018. twitter.com/jack/status/1026984245925793792 48 “I don’t believe that it is the right”: “Can Mark Zuckerberg Fix Facebook before It Breaks Democracy?”

Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A. I. To Google, Facebook, and the World
by Cade Metz
Published 15 Mar 2021

CHAPTER 17: IMPOTENCE “I really want to clear my life to make it”: Eugene Kim, “Here’s the Real Reason Mark Zuckerberg Wears the Same T-Shirt Every Day,” Business Insider, November 6, 2014, https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-same-t-shirt-2014-11. when he testified before Congress in April 2018: Vanessa Friedman, “Mark Zuckerberg’s I’m Sorry Suit,” New York Times, April 10, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/10/fashion/mark-zuckerberg-suit-congress.html. Some called it his “I’m sorry” suit: Ibid. Others said his haircut: Max Lakin, “The $300 T-Shirt Mark Zuckerberg Didn’t Wear in Congress Could Hold Facebook’s Future,” W magazine, April 12, 2018, https://www.wmagazine.com/story/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-brunello-cucinelli-t-shirt/.

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Others said his haircut: Max Lakin, “The $300 T-Shirt Mark Zuckerberg Didn’t Wear in Congress Could Hold Facebook’s Future,” W magazine, April 12, 2018, https://www.wmagazine.com/story/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-brunello-cucinelli-t-shirt/. reported that the British start-up Cambridge Analytica: Matthew Rosenberg, Nicholas Confessore, and Carole Cadwalladr, “How Trump Consultants Exploited the Facebook Data of Millions,” New York Times, March 17, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/17/us/politics/cambridge-analytica-trump-campaign.html. Zuckerberg endured ten hours of testimony over two days: Zach Wichter, “2 Days, 10 Hours, 600 Questions: What Happened When Mark Zuckerberg Went to Washington,” New York Times, April 12, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/12/technology/mark-zuckerberg-testimony.html.

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After about fifteen minutes with the code, Dean knew DeepMind would fit with Google. “It was clearly done by people who knew what they were doing,” he says. “I just felt like their culture would be compatible with our culture.” By this point, there was little doubt Google would acquire the London lab. Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook had recently joined Google, Microsoft, and Baidu in the race to acquire this kind of talent, and Google was intent on staying ahead. Though Hassabis had long promised his employees that DeepMind would stay independent, he now had no choice but to sell. If DeepMind didn’t sell, it would die.

Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies
by Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh
Published 14 Apr 2018

Product/Market Fit Facebook achieved product/market fit for its core consumer experience almost immediately, hence its rapid growth. However, part of what makes Facebook a great company and Mark Zuckerberg a great CEO is that Facebook has been able to achieve product/market fit in additional and less obvious areas at other points in the company’s history. Many people forget how Facebook struggled with the transition from desktop to mobile. Facebook’s initial mobile product provided a slow, suboptimal experience, and adoption of that product was accordingly slow. Fortunately for Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg saw that the market was going mobile and put a moratorium on new feature development in order to focus the entire team on building a new, far superior mobile product.

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But he and his team had spent eighteen seemingly fruitless months working on Airbnb before entering Y Combinator, racking up tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt. After all the blood, sweat, and tears, were they really willing to give up a quarter of their company? Ultimately, Brian decided not to buy Wimdu, swayed in part by the arguments of his key advisers. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg counseled him to fight. “Don’t buy them,” he said. “The best product will win.” YC’s Paul Graham gave similar feedback. “They’re mercenaries. You’re missionaries,” he told Brian. “They’re like people raising a baby they don’t actually want.” When Brian reached out to me for my advice on the situation, I too advised him not to buy Wimdu.

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The year-over-year revenue growth during its first few years of existence were 2,150 percent, 433 percent, and 219 percent, going from zero to $153 million in revenue in 2007. Then the company went through a key transition, and growth dropped into the double-digit range as Facebook struggled with both monetization and the shift from desktop to mobile. Fortunately, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg made two important moves: he personally led a shift from desktop-first to mobile-first, and he hired Sheryl Sandberg as the company’s COO, who in turn built Facebook into an advertising sales juggernaut. Growth rose back into the triple-digit range, and, by 2010, these moves had pushed Facebook’s revenues to over $2 billion.

Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral
by Ben Smith
Published 2 May 2023

Go to note reference in text It looked to many observers: Michael Sebastian, “Read Gawker’s Shocking Response to a Video of a Young Woman Possibly Being Raped,” Cosmopolitan, March 12, 2016, https://www.cosmopolitan.com/politics/news/a55146/gawker-editor-sex-tape-aj-daulerio/. Go to note reference in text And it applied particularly: Owen Thomas, “Mark Zuckerberg’s Double Life,” Gawker, July 9, 2007, https://www.gawker.com/276473/mark-zuckerbergs-double-life. Go to note reference in text But Tate concluded with trademark: Ryan Tate, “Mark Zuckerberg’s Age of Privacy Is Over,” Gawker, July 28, 2010, https://www.gawker.com/5597100/mark-zuckerbergs-age-of-privacy-is-over. Go to note reference in text “I’d like to reach into”: A.J. Daulerio, “Brett Favre’s Cellphone Seduction of Jenn Sterger (Update),” Deadspin, October 7, 2010, https://deadspin.com/brett-favres-cellphone-seduction-of-jenn-sterger-upda-5658206.

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Go to note reference in text “Marissa Mayer used to date”: “Editorial: Google’s Power Couple,” Valleywag, February 2, 2006, https://web.archive.org/web/20060207012737/http://www.valleywag.com/tech/marissa-mayer/editorial-googles-power-couple-152210.php. Go to note reference in text One particular target: Nick Douglas, “We Want to Know If You’re Single Mark Zuckerberg so We Can Contact You Maybe,” Gawker, September 8, 2006, https://www.gawker.com/199540%2Fwe-want-to-know-if-youre-single-mark-zuckerberg-so-we-can-contact-you-maybe. Go to note reference in text “Mark, get some shoes”: Nick Douglas, “Mark Zuckerberg, No One Wants to See Your Toes,” Gawker, November 10, 2006, https://www.gawker.com/214115%2Fmark-zuckerberg-no-one-wants-to-see-your-toes. Go to note reference in text A week later, right after: Nick Denton, “Smoking Sarah Lacy,” Gawker, November 14, 2006, https://gawker.com/214733/smoking-sarah-lacy.

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It was an incredible ride, Douglas remembered later. Once he walked up to Mayer at a party at Oracle founder Larry Ellison’s lavish mansion, and she literally ran away from him. For the young blogger, it was “a sick, undeserved rush of power.” One particular target was the young founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg. “We Want to Know If You’re Single Mark Zuckerberg so We Can Contact You Maybe,” read one headline soon after the blog’s launch. “Mark, get some shoes—bitch,” Douglas advised after Zuck turned up at a conference in November 2006 wearing sandals. But Douglas couldn’t quite get the hang of it. He wasn’t getting the quality of gossip that Nick Denton wanted, and he didn’t seem to have much grasp of the business story, the only reason anyone cared about the Valley anyway.

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power
by Max Chafkin
Published 14 Sep 2021

unwillingness to stop disinformation: Jeff Horwitz and Deepa Seetharaman, “Chenault Leaves Facebook Board after Disagreements with Zuckerberg,” The Wall Street Journal, March 13, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/chenault-leaves-facebook-board-after-disagreements-with-zuckerberg-11584140731. displayed copies of Xi’s book: Adam Taylor, “Why Would Mark Zuckerberg Want Facebook Employees to Read the Chinese President’s Book?” The Washington Post, December 8, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/12/08/why-does-mark-zuckerberg-want-facebook-employees-to-read-the-chinese-presidents-book/. honorary Chinese name: Emily Smith, “Chinese President Snubs Mark Zuckerberg’s Unborn Child,” The New York Post, October 2, 2015, https://pagesix.com/2015/10/02/chinese-president-snubs-mark-zuckerbergs-unborn-child/. disseminated pro-Trump hoaxes: Sheera Frenkel et al., “Delay, Deny, Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought through Crisis,” The New York Times, November 14, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/technology/facebook-data-russia-election-racism.html.

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whatever they wanted: Nicholas Thompson and Fred Vogelstein, “Inside the Two Years That Shook Facebook—and the World,” Wired, February 12, 2018, https://www.wired.com/story/inside-facebook-mark-zuckerberg-2-years-of-hell/. much of it in Trump’s favor: Craig Silverman, “This Analysis Shows How Viral Fake Election News Stories Outperformed Real News on Facebook,” BuzzFeed, November 16, 2016, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/viral-fake-election-news-outperformed-real-news-on-facebook. would eventually apologize: Siobhan Hughes, “Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook Made Mistakes on ‘Fake News,’ Privacy,” The Wall Street Journal, April 9, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/articles/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-made-mistakes-on-fake-news-privacy-1523289089.

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disseminated pro-Trump hoaxes: Sheera Frenkel et al., “Delay, Deny, Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought through Crisis,” The New York Times, November 14, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/technology/facebook-data-russia-election-racism.html. “This is fun”: Matt Weaver, “Video: Dale Jr. Turns Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg into a NASCAR Fan with Test Drive,” Autoweek, March 14, 2017, https://www.autoweek.com/racing/nascar/a1816901/video-dale-jr-turns-facebooks-mark-zuckerberg-nascar-fan-test-drive/. “adviser to the Trump Administration”: Mark Zuckerberg, filmed May 12, 2017, at North Carolina A&T State University, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyuoABPtDzc. told CNN that Facebook: Tom McKay, “Kamala Harris Says ‘We Have to Seriously Take a Look At’ Breaking Up Facebook, Gizmodo, May 12, 2019, https://gizmodo.com/kamala-harris-says-we-need-to-seriously-take-a-look-at-1834706259.

The Internet Is Not the Answer
by Andrew Keen
Published 5 Jan 2015

But for the unintentional and the unexpected, nothing beats the history of Facebook, the Internet’s dominant social network, which was created by a young man so socially awkward that many consider him autistic. In his aptly named Accidental Billionaires, the bestselling story of Facebook’s early years on the campus of Harvard University, and on which David Fincher’s Academy Award–nominated 2010 movie The Social Network movie is based, Ben Mezrich reveals that the twenty-year-old Mark Zuckerberg was seen as a total misfit by Harvard contemporaries. Eduardo Saverin, Zuckerberg’s cofounder of “Thefacebook.com,” which they launched together in February 2004, thought of his partner as the socially “uncomfortable” and “awkward kid in the class,” a “complete mystery” with whom communication “was like talking to a computer,” while other Harvard students saw him as a “weird” and “socially autistic” geek with a “dead fish handshake.”81 Even after Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard later in 2004 and, a decade later, built Facebook into the Internet’s dominant social network, he still hadn’t shaken off his image as a socially disabled loner suffering from what Wired dubs “the Geek Syndrome.”82 Facebook’s onetime head of engineering, Yishan Wong, claimed that Zuckerberg has a “touch of Asperger’s” and “zero empathy.”83 And other seasoned Zuckerberg watchers, like Nicholas Carlson, the chief business correspondent at Business Insider, agree, seeing both his “obvious brilliance” and “his inability to hold conversation” as a “symptom” of his autism.84 But, in spite of—or, perhaps, because of—his inability to fashion a conversation, Zuckerberg has created the greatest generator of conversation in history, a social computer network whose 1.3 billion users were, by the summer of 2014, posting 2,460,000 comments to one another every minute of every day.

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This was followed by Friendster in 2002 and then, in 2003, by the Los Angeles–based MySpace, a social network with a music and Hollywood focus that, at its 2008 peak, when it was acquired by News Corporation for $580 million, had 75.9 million members.86 But Facebook, which until September 2006 was exclusively made up of high school and university students, offered a less cluttered and more intuitive interface than MySpace. So, having opened its doors to the world outside of schools and universities, the so-called Mark Zuckerberg Production quickly became the Internet’s largest social network, amassing 100 million members by August 2008. And then the network effect, that positive feedback loop that makes the Internet such a classic winner-take-all market, kicked in. By February 2010, the Facebook community had grown to 400 million members, who spent 8 billion minutes each day on a network already operating in 75 different languages.87 Facebook had become the world’s second most popular Internet site after Google, a position that it’s maintained ever since.

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By the summer of 2014 Facebook had grown to rival China’s population—hosting more than 1.3 billion members, around 19% of the people in the world, with 50% of them accessing the social network at least six days a week.88 Like Google, Facebook is becoming ever more powerful. In 2014 it made the successful shift to mobile technology, its app being “far and away the most popular service” on both the iOS and Android platforms, with its users spending an astonishing 17% of all their smartphone time in it. Mark Zuckerberg’s ten-year-old Internet company is thus likely to remain, with archrival Google, the Internet’s dominant company over the second decade of its remarkable history. Like Google, Facebook’s goal is to establish itself as a platform rather than a single website—a strategy that distinguishes it from failed Web 1.0 “portal”-style networks like MySpace.

Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media
by Peter Warren Singer and Emerson T. Brooking
Published 15 Mar 2018

_r=1&mtrref=en.wikipedia.org. 46 more than a million active accounts: Ami Sedghi, “Facebook: 10 Years of Social Networking, in Numbers,” The Guardian, February 4, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2014/feb/04/facebook-in-numbers-statistics. 46 58 million users: Ibid. 46 “300 million stories a day”: Tom Loftus, “Mark Zuckerberg’s Best Quotes,” Digits (blog), Wall Street Journal, February 1, 2012, http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2012/02/01/mark-zuckerbergs-best-quotes/. 46 2 billion users: Kaya Yurieff, “Facebook Hits 2 Billion Monthly Users,” CNNMoney, June 27, 2017, http://money.cnn.com/2017/06/27/technology/facebook-2-billion-users/index.html. 46 He would show off: Sarah Perez, “Mark Zuckerberg Meets Pope Francis, Gives Him a Drone,” TechCrunch, August 29, 2016, https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/29/mark-zuckerberg-meets-pope-francis-gives-him-a-drone/. 46 arbitrate the pleas: Vitaly Shevchenko, “Ukrainians Petition Facebook Against ‘Russian Trolls,’” BBC News, May 13, 2015, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-32720965. 47 “Apple is reinventing”: Mic Wright, “The Original iPhone Announcement Annotated: Steve Jobs’ Genius Meets Genius,” The Next Web, September 9, 2015, https://thenextweb.com/apple/2015/09/09/genius-annotated-with-genius/. 47 $10,000: John F.

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Senator,” Reuters, September 7, 2017, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-twitter-propoganda/twitter-to-brief-congress-on-possible-russia-backed-ads-u-s-senator-idUSKCN1BI22R. 241 Zuckerberg apologized: Sam Levin, “Mark Zuckerberg: I Regret Ridiculing Fears over Facebook’s Effect on Election,” The Guardian, September 27, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/27/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-2016-election-fake-news. 241 “I don’t want anyone”: Kurt Wager, “Read Mark Zuckerberg’s Full Speech on How Facebook Is Fighting Back Against Russia’s Election Interference,” Recode, September 21, 2017, https://www.recode.net/2017/9/21/16347036/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-russia-election-interference-full-speech. 241 “the biggest risk we face”: Steve Huffman, “In Response to Recent Reports About the Integrity of Reddit, I’d Like to Share Our Thinking,” Reddit, March 5, 2018, https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/827zqc/in_response_to_recent_reports_about_the_integrity/. 241 $57 million: Melissa Eddy and Mark Scott, “Delete Hate Speech or Pay Up, Germany Tells Social Media Companies,” New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/30/business/germany-facebook-google-twitter.html. 242 Federal Election Commission disclosure rules: Heather Timmons, “The US Want to Regulate Political Advertising on Social Media,” World Economic Forum, October 19, 2017, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/10/the-us-want-to-regulate-political-advertising-on-social-media. 242 same exemptions as skywriting: Donie O’Sullivan, “Facebook Sought Exception from Political Ad Disclaimer Rules in 2011,” CNNMoney, September 27, 2017, CNN Money, http://money.cnn.com/2017/09/27/technology/business/facebook-political-ad-rules/index.html. 242 As Zuckerberg confessed: Kevin Roose and Sheera Frenkel, “Mark Zuckerberg’s Reckoning: ‘This Is a Major Trust Issue,’” New York Times, March 21, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/21/technology/mark-zuckerberg-q-and-a.html?

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No. 102–194, 105 Stat. 1594 (1991). 39 NSFNET formally closed: Ryan, A History of the Internet, loc. 2367. 39 reached 360 million: “Internet Users,” Internet Live Stats, accessed March 16, 2018, http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users/. 39 worth $3 billion: Adam Lashinsky, “Netscape IPO 20-Year Anniversary: Read Fortune’s 2005 Oral History of the Birth of the Web,” Fortune, http://fortune.com/2015/08/09/remembering-netscape/. 40 “Google” symbolized: “Our Story: From the Garage to the Googleplex,” Google, https://www.google.com/about/our-story/. 40 Twelve thousand soldiers: David Ronfeldt et al., The Zapatista Social Netwar in Mexico (monograph, RAND, 1998), 2, https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monograph_reports/1998/MR994.pdf. 41 more than 130 countries: Ibid., 117. 41 “a war on the internet”: Ibid., 4. 41 “rumor first reported”: “Scandalous Scoop Breaks Online,” BBC News, January 25, 1998, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/special_report/1998/clinton_scandal/50031.stm. 41 “comparable to”: Manuel Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, vol. 1, The Rise of the Networked Society, quoted in Paul DiMaggio et al., “Social Implications of the Internet,” Annual Review of Sociology 27 (2001): 309. 41 Bowie waxed philosophical: Matt Novak, “Watching David Bowie Argue with an Interviewer About the Future of the Internet Is Beautiful,” Paleofuture, January 10, 2017, https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/watching-david-bowie-argue-with-an-interviewer-about-th-1791017656. 42 “The goal wasn’t”: Mark Zuckerberg, “Facebook Interview,” YouTube video, 04:49, uploaded by Derek Franzese, March 26, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=—APdD6vejI. 42 had built ZuckNet: Phillip Tracy, “Before Facebook, There Was ‘ZuckNet,’ the Chat Service 12-Year-Old Mark Zuckerberg Built for His Family,” The Daily Dot, https://www.dailydot.com/debug/mark-zuckerberg-messaging-service-zucknet/. 42 a bold, crude proclamation: Bari Schwartz, “Hot or Not? Website Briefly Judges Looks,” Harvard Crimson, November 4, 2003, http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2003/11/4/hot-or-not-website-briefly-judges/?

App Kid: How a Child of Immigrants Grabbed a Piece of the American Dream
by Michael Sayman
Published 20 Sep 2021

I burst into tears right there in front of him. After a few embarrassing sobs, I wiped my nose on my sleeve, blinked, and in the bravest voice I could muster I said, “I can’t go to summer school. I have an offer from Mark Zuckerberg! To intern at Facebook!” Mr. Thanos pushed back his chair and stood up from his desk. “Mark Zuckerberg can wait.” So, that was that. Authority had spoken. I went straight home, called Mark Zuckerberg, and told him I couldn’t do the internship—summer school was more important. Ha ha. Hell no! Kidding, obviously. I ended up going to the school president and convincing him to let me walk in graduation—even though I wouldn’t be graduating, now or ever.

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Chapter 7 Big in Peru About a week after Zuckerberg saw my pajama video, I was sitting in my precalculus class, not listening to my teacher, when an email came in from Facebook, inviting me to apply for an internship. A second email arrived minutes after that: “Mark Zuckerberg would like to meet you, so we’d like to have you fly out.” My teacher’s voice grew even more distant. This couldn’t be real. I banged my forehead on my desk once to verify that I was actually awake. Yep, I was. “What happened?” whispered the kid sitting in the row next to me, poking me in the shoulder with his pencil. Speechless, I turned and handed him my iPad. He scanned the email, stood up, and blurted to the room, “Mark Zuckerberg wants to hire Michael!” My classmates started to freak out. The teacher marched over and took the iPad away.

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It was easier for me, in Miami with my fast Internet and good technology, than it will be for you. But if you are determined—súper determinada—you will succeed. I honestly believe that. And I believe in you! Love, Michael. Chapter 8 Meeting Mark Zuckerberg After Peru, things really took off. 4 Snaps had reached almost a million users in the United States, and a few larger companies seemed interested in acquiring it. Two weeks after my trip, I flew to California with my mom to meet Mark Zuckerberg, at his request. My mom had no idea who he was, even though she had a Facebook account for sharing pictures with family back in Peru. Days before the meeting, she’d quickly Googled Zuckerberg’s name; the only detail that stuck out to her was the fact that he was Jewish, like my father.

How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars: The Snapchat Story
by Billy Gallagher
Published 13 Feb 2018

An accompanying article promising “The Inside Story of Snapchat” ran on January 6, just three days after Primack said that Evan should be fired for the hack and refusing to apologize. The article began with an anecdote about Mark Zuckerberg emailing Evan to meet and Evan brashly responding “I’m happy to meet you … if you come to me.” Business Insider reporter Alyson Shontell tweeted her summary of the story with a caption, “If you didn’t think Spiegel was arrogant before, his email to Mark Zuckerberg will convince you.” Evan took to Twitter and replied with screenshots of his emails with Zuckerberg, showing that while he hadn’t agreed to rush right up to Facebook, he hadn’t played it quite as brashly as the Forbes story portrayed: Hey Evan, I’m a big fan of what you’re doing with Snapchat.

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Forbes, January 6, 2014. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jjcolao/2014/01/06/the-inside-story-of-snapchat-the-worlds-hottest-app-or-a-3-billion-disappearing-act/#3961325c67d2 Constine, Josh. “Facebook Launches Snapchat Competitor ‘Poke,’ an iOS App for Sending Expiring Text, Photos, and Videos.” TechCrunch, December 21, 2012. https://techcrunch.com/2012/12/21/facebook-poke-app/ ________. “Mark Zuckerberg Is the Voice Behind the ‘Poke’ Notification Sound and Wrote Code for the App.” TechCrunch, December 21, 2012. https://techcrunch.com/2012/12/21/mark-zuckerberg-voice-of-poke/ Gallagher, Billy. “Snapchat Co-Founder Evan Spiegel Responds to Poke: ‘Welcome, Facebook. Seriously.’” TechCrunch, December 21, 2102. http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/21/snapchat-co-founder-evan-spiegel-responds-to-poke-welcome-facebook-seriously/ ________.

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“Data Shows Online Buzz about Snapchat Is Skyrocketing after the Launch of Facebook Poke.” TechCrunch, December 28, 2012. https://techcrunch.com/2012/12/28/data-shows-online-buzz-about-snapchat-is-skyrocketing-after-the-launch-of-facebook-poke/ Wingfield, Nick, and Mike Isaac. “Mark Zuckerberg, in Suit, Testifies in Oculus Intellectual Property Trial.” New York Times, January 17, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/17/technology/mark-zuckerberg-oculus-trial-virtual-reality-facebook.html?_r=0 Chapter Twelve: Reggie’s Return Gallagher, Billy. “Snapchat Founders Face New Twist in Legal Battle as Alleged Co-Founder Files to Disqualify Their Lawyers.” TechCrunch, July 1, 2013. http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/01/ephemeral-representation/ ________.

How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age
by Andrew Keen
Published 1 Mar 2018

And, as Callahan points out in The Givers, Bill Gates and his Gates Foundation have become the model for “the disrupters”—a new generation of young tech super-citizens including Facebook billionaires like the company’s former president Sean Parker, its cofounder Dustin Moskovitz, and Mark Zuckerberg himself.13 So how should today’s tech billionaires be giving away their money? What makes a good Silicon Valley super-citizen in our new gilded age? It’s Complicated It’s certainly complicated. Just as whole books have been written about the morally complex philanthropy of the Stanfords, Carnegies, Rockefellers, and Vanderbilts, so a book should, and no doubt will, be written about Mark Zuckerberg’s much-publicized and highly controversial commitment to the public good. Yes, in 2015, the thirty-one-year-old Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, to great public fanfare, committed to donating a breathtaking 99 percent of their then $45 billion wealth to “charity.”

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And freedom, particularly online freedom, she continued, should involve what she called “the right to be forgotten,” making reference to an EU regulation that is part of an ambitious package to protect privacy. Not surprisingly, given much of the audience’s vested interest in a post-privacy economy, Vestager’s presentation was greeted with only a smattering of polite applause. All the questions after the speech were hostile too. One well-known American tech pundit, a friend of Mark Zuckerberg and the author of an evangelical book about Facebook’s power to unite the world, posed a particularly loaded question about the implications of Vestager’s critique of Silicon Valley’s core business model. “Aren’t you worried,” he remarked in the morally pinched tone of a disappointed American internationalist, “about the fragmentation of the internet?”

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In February 2017, Facebook began working with Correctiv, a Berlin based nonprofit media start-up that is developing fact-checking software for exposing fake news.40 Then, responding to an April 2017 Cleveland murder video that stayed up on Facebook for hours before being removed and a Facebook video of a Thai man killing his eleven-month-old daughter, the social media behemoth finally took measures to actively police its content. In May 2017, in response also to the announcement of the punitive new German law around online hate speech, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would hire three thousand more editors—supplementing the forty-five hundred gatekeepers already on this team—to review the user-generated content.41 Now all Facebook needs to do is pay these editors a fair wage for such an important and emotionally draining job. “We were underpaid and undervalued,” one Facebook editor complained about a job in which he was paid $15 an hour to, in his words, “turn on your computer and watch someone have their head cut off.

Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond
by Tamara Kneese
Published 14 Aug 2023

Heater, Brian. “Alexa Will Soon Be Able to Read Stories as Your Dead Grandma.” TechCrunch, June 22, 2022. techcrunch.com/2022/06/22/alexa-will-soon-be-able-to-read-stories-as-your-dead-grandma/. Heath, Olivia. “Mark Zuckerberg Builds Virtual Assistant Voiced by Morgan Freeman.” House Beautiful, December 21, 2016. www.housebeautiful.com/uk/renovate/smart-living/news/a1132/mark-zuckerberg-builds-artificial-intelligence-assistant-for-home. Helmond, Anne. “The Platformization of the Web: Making Web Data Platform Ready.” Social Media + Society 1, no. 2 (2015). doi.org/10.1177/2056305115603080. Hendren, Sara.

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Campus Technology, December 11, 2008. campustechnology.com/articles/2008/12/facebook-still-no-1-among-college-students.aspx. Scholz, Trebor. Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory. London: Routledge, 2012. Schwartz, Mattathias. “Mark Zuckerberg’s Dorm-Room Defense in Congress.” New Yorker, April 10, 2018. www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/mark-zuckerbergs-dorm-room-defense-in-congress. Sconce, Jeffrey. Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000. Senft, Theresa, and Cathy Young. “Hearing the Net: An Interview with Mia Lipner.”

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Others die without fame or recognition, and their families need to raise money for burials through crowdfunding campaigns on platforms like GoFundMe.22 Just as there are unmarked graves on New York’s Hart Island for the most marginalized in society and elaborate monuments to the wealthy and prominent dead, digital legacies do not look the same for everyone.23 Many platforms are designed by and for young and privileged white people in the Global North, so death is not typically a concern, let alone part of a platform’s initial features. For example, Facebook has shifted from being a social networking site for elite college students to a common space for mourning and memorialization, but this was an unintended consequence of its expansion and popularity. As a college student, Mark Zuckerberg started FaceMash in 2003 to rank women at Harvard according to their attractiveness. Today, the philanthropic Chan Zuckerberg Initiative seeks to actively shape humanity’s future, and Zuckerberg has a prominent San Francisco hospital named after him. He is also personally at the center of many debates about disinformation and digital threats to democracy.

Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom)
by Adam Fisher
Published 9 Jul 2018

I just met with this kid Mark Zuckerberg, who is very smart, and he’s the guy building Facebook, and they say they have a ‘secret feature’ that’s going to launch that’s going to change everything! But he won’t tell me what it is. It’s driving me crazy. I can’t figure out what it is. Do you know anything about this? Can you figure it out? What do you think it could be?” And so we spent a little time talking about it, and we couldn’t really figure out what their “secret feature” that was going to change everything was. We got kind of obsessed about it. Two months after meeting Sean Parker, Mark Zuckerberg moved to Silicon Valley with the idea of turning his dorm-room project into a real business.

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Imagine your freshman dorm running a business, that’s really what it felt like. Mark Zuckerberg: Most businesses aren’t like a bunch of kids living in a house, doing whatever they want, not waking up at a normal time, not going into an office, hiring people by, like, bringing them into your house and letting them chill with you for a while and party with you and smoke with you. Ezra Callahan: The living room was the office with all these monitors and workstations set up everywhere and just whiteboards as far as the eye can see. At the time Mark Zuckerberg was obsessed with file sharing, and the grand plan for his Silicon Valley summer was to resurrect Napster.

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Katie Geminder: That was very challenging for someone who was trying to actually live an adult life with like a husband. There was definitely a feeling that because you were older and married and had a life outside of work that you weren’t committed. Mark Zuckerberg: Why are most chess masters under thirty? Young people just have simpler lives. We may not own a car. We may not have family… I only own a mattress. Kate Geminder: Imagine being under thirty and hearing your boss say that! Mark Zuckerberg: Young people are just smarter. Ruchi Sanghvi: We were so young back then. We definitely had tons of energy and we could do it, but we weren’t necessarily the most efficient team by any means whatsoever.

Lurking: How a Person Became a User
by Joanne McNeil
Published 25 Feb 2020

In other examples, critics zeroed in on the personal deficiencies of various founders and let that stand for critique of the power of their companies and abuse of that power. David Fincher’s 2010 film, The Social Network, followed this line of attack, as it characterized Mark Zuckerberg as a spiteful backstabber and Facebook as a product in his image (auteur theory, but for Silicon Valley). This correlation without basis—bad man equals bad company—offered an easy gambit to neutralize the diatribe. Indeed, several months after the film was released, its message was subject to reappraisal. Aaron Sorkin apologized to Mark Zuckerberg at the Golden Globes, where he received an award for best screenplay. He was “wrong,” he said onstage at the Beverly Hilton Hotel.

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The JavaScript bookmarklet “Stalker List,” which scraped Facebook’s JSON file that calculated the “affinity scores,” was available on Thekeesh.com (“Who Does Facebook Think You Are Searching For?,” March 28, 2013). The podcast and transcript of Mark Zuckerberg’s interview with Kara Swisher is available on Recode (“Full Transcript: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Recode Decode,” July 18, 2018). I interviewed Kate Losse on March 31, 2018. Her comment “this person looks at another person’s page a lot” comes from a previous interview with Losse that took place in 2013. On the subject of Facebook-branded relationships, I was inspired by Anna Lauren Hoffmann’s observation that “information gathered on Facebook is, in fundamental ways, produced not by users, but by Facebook itself.

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While backing up files is an individual solution, Google’s deletion of information is a break in shared knowledge: blog readers looking to reread an old post that has been lost are left with only their faulty memories of it. Steven Levy’s 2011 book In the Plex details a baffling exchange with Sergey Brin, who couldn’t understand why he was writing a book about the company in the first place. “Why don’t you just write some articles?” Brin asked Levy. “Or release this a chapter at a time?” (Mark Zuckerberg had similar antipathy. On his own social network, in its early years, he responded to the profile topic “Favorite Books” with “I don’t read.”) Brin made similar comments to Ken Auletta, who relayed these quotes in his book Googled, published in 2009. “People don’t buy books,” Brin said to Auletta.

How to Stand Up to a Dictator
by Maria Ressa
Published 19 Oct 2022

Starting in 2016, we began highlighting impunity on two fronts: President Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war and Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook. Let me tell you why the rest of the world needs to pay attention to what happens in the Philippines: 2021 was the sixth year in a row that Filipinos—out of all global citizens—spent the most time on the internet and on social media.2 Despite slow internet speeds, Filipinos uploaded and downloaded the largest number of videos on YouTube in 2013. Four years later, 97 percent of our country’s citizens were on Facebook. When I told that statistic to Mark Zuckerberg in 2017, he was quiet for a beat. “Wait, Maria,” he finally responded, looking directly at me, “where are the other three percent?”

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“Free Basics Partner Stories: Rappler,” Facebook, April 12, 2016, https://developers.facebook.com/videos/f8-2016/free-basics-partner-stories-rappler/. 4.David Cohen, “Facebook Opens Philippines Office,” Adweek, April 22, 2018, https://www.adweek.com/performance-marketing/facebook-philippines/. 5.Mong Palatino, “Free Basics in Philippines,” Global Voices, March–April 2017, https://advox.globalvoices.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/PHILIPPINES.pdf. 6.Globe Telecom, Inc., “Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg: Philippines a Successful Test Bed for Internet.org Initiative with Globe Telecom Partnership,” Cision, February 24, 2014, https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/facebook-ceo-mark-zuckerberg-philippines-a-successful-test-bed-for-internetorg-initiative-with-globe-telecom-partnership-247184981.html. 7.Miguel R. Camus, “MVP Admits PLDT Losing to Globe in Market Share,” Inquirer.net, January 13, 2017, https://business.inquirer.net/222861/mvp-admits-pldt-losing-globe-market-share. 8.

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One of our first initiatives was experimenting with Facebook, which we had recognized at ABS-CBN in 2008 as an undeniable force for mobilization. We started posting our experiments on our Facebook page, Move.PH.3 If the search function on Facebook had worked better, perhaps we would never have launched our own website. In the beginning, we felt so much excitement, so much optimism, about what Facebook and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, might do for a country like the Philippines and our democratic future. We launched our first public event on social media: a four-hour workshop for five hundred students at the University of the Philippines in the cool northern city of Baguio, about a four-hour drive from Manila. The idea was to train those students in how to use social media for good; we focused on local environmental concerns and ways to use social media to address them.

World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech
by Franklin Foer
Published 31 Aug 2017

“How exciting is it to come to work if the best you can do”: Steven Levy, “Google’s Larry Page on Why Moon Shots Matter,” Wired, January 17, 2013. how Google will someday employ more than one million people: Levy, Wired, January 17, 2013. CHAPTER THREE: MARK ZUCKERBERG’S WAR ON FREE WILL But they were really small-minded paper-pushers: Steven Levy, Hackers (O’Reilly Media, 2010), 29, 96. a box that enabled free long-distance calls: Markoff, Dormouse, 272. In high school—using the nom de hack Zuck Fader: Patrick Gillespie, “Was Mark Zuckerberg an AOL Add-on Developer?,” patorjk.com, April 9, 2013. “One thing is certain,” he wrote on a blog: Ben Mezrich, The Accidental Billionaires (Anchor Books, 2009), 49.

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“One thing is certain,” he wrote on a blog: Ben Mezrich, The Accidental Billionaires (Anchor Books, 2009), 49. “We’ve got this whole ethos that we want to build a hacker culture”: Levy, Hackers, 475. “just this group of computer scientists who were trying to quickly prototype”: “Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on stumbles: ‘There’s always a next move,’” Today, February 4, 2014. “Move Fast and Break Things”: “Mark Zuckerberg’s Letter to Investors: ‘The Hacker Way,’” Wired, February 1, 2012. “It was always very important for our brand”: David Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect (Simon & Schuster, 2010), 144. “radical transparency” or “ultimate transparency”: Kirkpatrick, 209.

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Classification: LCC T14.5 (ebook) | LCC T14.5 .F63 2017 (print) | DDC 303.48/3—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017008656 Version_1 TO BERT FOER Ardent Trustbuster, Gentle Father “The glow of one warm thought is to me worth more than money.” Thomas Jefferson, 1773 CONTENTS Also by Franklin Foer Title Page Copyright Dedication Epigraph PROLOGUE SECTION I THE MONOPOLISTS OF MIND 1. THE VALLEY IS WHOLE, THE WORLD IS ONE 2. THE GOOGLE THEORY OF HISTORY 3. MARK ZUCKERBERG’S WAR ON FREE WILL 4. JEFF BEZOS DISRUPTS KNOWLEDGE 5. KEEPERS OF THE BIG GATE IN THE SKY 6. BIG TECH’S SMOKE-FILLED ROOM SECTION II WORLD WITHOUT MIND 7. THE VIRALITY VIRUS 8. DEATH OF THE AUTHOR SECTION III TAKE BACK THE MIND 9. IN SEARCH OF THE ANGEL OF DATA 10.

The Twittering Machine
by Richard Seymour
Published 20 Aug 2019

Hannah Kuchler, ‘Facebook launches journalism project’, Financial Times, 11 January 2017. 11. When Mark Zuckerberg writes . . . Jeff John Roberts, ‘Why Facebook Won’t Admit It’s a Media Company’, Fortune, 14 November 2016; Karissa Bell, ‘Facebook: We’re not a media company. Also Facebook: Watch our news shows’, Mashable, 8 June 2018. 12. Mark Zuckerberg’s extreme agnosticism . . . Kara Swisher, ‘Full transcript: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Recode Decode’, Recode (www.recode.net), 18 July 2018; Alex Hern, ‘Mark Zuckerberg’s remarks on Holocaust denial “irresponsible”’, Guardian, 19 July 2018. 13. Facebook’s old media competitors miss the mark . . .

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I shouldn’t have trusted Mark Zuckerberg’, Guardian, 17 April 2018. 6. He told a friend . . . Josh Halliday, ‘Facebook: Mark Zuckerberg college messages reveal steely ambition’, Guardian, 18 May 2012. 7. But one of Twitter’s early founders . . . Nick Bilton, Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal, Penguin: New York, 2013, p. 152. 8. As he told the university newspaper . . . Alan J. Tabak, ‘Hundreds Register for New Facebook Website’, The Harvard Crimson, 9 February 2004; see also Tom Huddleston Jr., ‘Here’s how 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg described “The Facebook” in his first TV interview’, CNBC, 17 April 2018. 9.

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Google has funded a UK start-up, Factmata, to develop tools for automatically checking facts – such as, say, economic growth figures, or the numbers of immigrants arriving in the USA last year. Twitter uses tools created by IBM Watson to target cyberbullying, while a Google project, Conversation AI, promises to detect aggressive users with sophisticated AI technology. And as depression and suicide become more common, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced new tools to combat depression, with Zuckerberg even claiming that AI could spot suicidal tendencies in a user before a friend would. But the social industry giants are increasingly caught out by a growing number of defectors, who have expressed regret over the tools they helped create.

Always Day One: How the Tech Titans Plan to Stay on Top Forever
by Alex Kantrowitz
Published 6 Apr 2020

“Growth at Any Cost: Top Facebook Executive Defended Data Collection in 2016 Memo—and Warned That Facebook Could Get People Killed.” BuzzFeed News. BuzzFeed News, March 29, 2018. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/growth-at-any-cost-top-facebook-executive-defended-data. his opening statement: Stewart, Emily. “What Mark Zuckerberg Will Tell Congress About the Facebook Scandals.” Vox. Vox, April 10, 2018. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/4/9/17215640/mark-zuckerberg-congress-testimony-facebook. Cameroon: McAllister, Edward. “Facebook’s Cameroon Problem: Stop Online Hate Stoking Conflict.” Reuters. Thomson Reuters, November 4, 2018. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-cameroon-insight/facebooks-cameroon-problem-stop-online-hate-stoking-conflict-idUSKCN1NA0GW.

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Medium, September 4, 2018. https://medium.com/square-corner-blog/a-silent-meeting-is-worth-a-thousand-words-2c7213b12fb6. a New York Times op-ed: Grant, Adam. “What Straight-A Students Get Wrong.” New York Times. New York Times, December 8, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/08/opinion/college-gpa-career-success.html?module=inline. Mark Zuckerberg donated $100 million: Hensley-Clancy, Molly. “What Happened to the $100 Million Mark Zuckerberg Gave to Newark Schools?” BuzzFeed News. BuzzFeed News, October 8, 2015. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/mollyhensleyclancy/what-happened-to-zuckerbergs-100-million. a 2017 AP investigation found: Flaccus, Gillian, and Geoff Mulvihill. “Amid Booming Economy, Homelessness Soars on US West Coast.”

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Atlantic Media Company, June 13, 2018. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/06/how-amazon-helped-kill-a-seattle-tax-on-business/562736. tens of billions: Honan, Mat, and Alex Kantrowitz. “Mark Zuckerberg Has Baby and Says He Will Give Away 99% of His Facebook Shares.” BuzzFeed News. BuzzFeed News, December 1, 2015. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/mathonan/mark-zuckerberg-has-baby-and-says-he-will-give-away-99-of-hi. Amazon AI tool gone bad: Dastin, Jeffrey. “Amazon Scraps Secret AI Recruiting Tool That Showed Bias Against Women.” Reuters. Thomson Reuters, October 9, 2018. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-jobs-automation-insight/amazon-scraps-secret-ai-recruiting-tool-that-showed-bias-against-women-idUSKCN1MK08G.

The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized America's Institutions Against Dissent
by Ben Shapiro
Published 26 Jul 2021

Scott Shackford, “Senator Feinstein’s Threat to ‘Do Something’ to Social Media Companies Is a Bigger Danger to Democracy Than Russia,” Reason.com, November 3, 2017, https://reason.com/2017/11/03/sen-feinsteins-threat-to-do-something-to/. 24. Kurt Wagner, “Mark Zuckerberg says it’s ‘crazy’ to think fake news stories got Trump elected,” Vox.com, November 11, 2016, https://www.vox.com/2016/11/11/13596792/facebook-fake-news-mark-zuckerberg-donald-trump. 25. Mark Zuckerberg, “Building Global Community,” Facebook.com, February 16, 2017, https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/building-global-community/10103508221158471/?pnref=story. 26. “Transcript of Mark Zuckerberg’s Senate hearing,” WashingtonPost.com, April 10, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/04/10/transcript-of-mark-zuckerbergs-senate-hearing/. 27.

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Kara Swisher of The New York Times spends her column space, day after day, attempting to pressure Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook to set restrictive content regulations in violation of free speech principles. “Mr. Zuckerberg,” Swisher wrote in June 2020, “has become—unwittingly or not—the digital equivalent of a supercharged enabler because of his enormous power over digital communications that affect billions of people.” And, Swisher added, Zuckerberg shouldn’t worry about free speech as a value—after all, the First Amendment doesn’t mention “Facebook, or any other company. And there’s no mention of Mark Zuckerberg, who certainly has the power to rein in speech that violates company rules.”

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Tony Romm, “Zuckerberg: Standing for Voice and Expression,” WashingtonPost.com, October 17, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/10/17/zuckerberg-standing-voice-free-expression/. 28. Alison Durkee, “Jack Dorsey Sees a ‘Major Gap and Flaw’ in Mark Zuckerberg’s Free Speech Argument,” VanityFair.com, October 25, 2019, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/10/jack-dorsey-mark-zuckerberg-free-speech-political-ads-facebook. 29. Sara Rimer, “Jack Dorsey, Twitter and Square Cofounder, Donates $10 Million to BU Center for Antiracist Research,” BU.edu, August 20, 2020, https://www.bu.edu/articles/2020/jack-dorsey-bu-center-for-antiracist-research-gift/. 30.

The Business of Platforms: Strategy in the Age of Digital Competition, Innovation, and Power
by Michael A. Cusumano , Annabelle Gawer and David B. Yoffie
Published 6 May 2019

utm_medium=organic&utm_source=google_rich_qa&utm_campaign=google_rich_qa (accessed May 21, 2018). 7.Yoffie and Cusumano, Strategy Rules, 114. 8.Mathew Rosenberg and Sheera Frenkel, “Facebook’s Role in Data Misuse Sets Off a Storm on Two Continents,” New York Times, March 18, 2018; and Katrin Benhold, “Germany Acts to Tame Facebook, Learning from Its Own History of Hate,” New York Times, May 19, 2018. 9.Politico Staff, “Full Text: Mark Zuckerberg’s Wednesday Testimony to Congress on Cambridge Analytica,” Politico, April 11, 2018, https://www.politico.com/story/2018/04/09/transcript-mark-zuckerberg-testimony-to-congress-on-cambridge-analytica-509978 (accessed May 15, 2018). 10.See “List of Unicorn Start-Up Companies,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unicorn_start-up_companies (accessed May 21, 2018). 11.Brian X.

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See also Jack Nicas, “Alex Jones and Infowars Content Is Removed from Apple, Facebook and YouTube,” New York Times, August 6, 2018. 17.Nicholas Thompson and Fred Vogelstein, “Inside the Two Years that Shook Facebook—and the World,” Wired, February 12, 2018. 18.Ibid. 19.John Reed, “Hate Speech, Atrocities, and Fake News: The Crisis of Democracy in Myanmar,” Financial Times, February 21, 2018; on Sri Lanka, see Amanda Taub and Max Fisher, “Where Countries Are Tinderboxes and Facebook Is a Match,” New York Times, April 21, 2018. 20.Thompson and Vogelstein, “Inside the Two Years.” 21.Ibid. 22.Rob Price, “Facebook Is Asking Users to Pick Which News Outlets Are ‘Trustworthy’—and Will Demote the Losers in Your Feed,” Business Insider, January 19, 2018. 23.Issie Lapowsky, “Facebook’s Election Safeguards Are Still a Work in Progress,” Wired, March 29, 2018. 24.Nicholas Thompson, “Mark Zuckerberg Talks to Wired about Facebook’s Privacy Problem,” Wired, March 21, 2018. 25.Reynolds, “When Digital Platforms Become Censors.” 26.Ibid. 27.“Top Facebook Executive Defended Data Collection in 2016 Memo—and Warned That Facebook Could Get People Killed,” BuzzFeed News, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/growth-at-any-cost-top-facebook-executive-defended-data#.iuq17wEa9 (accessed August 20, 2018). 28.Hannah Kuchler, “Inside Facebook’s Content Clean-up Operation,” Financial Times, April 24, 2018; and “Transcript of Mark Zuckerberg’s Senate Hearing,” Washington Post, April 10, 2018. 29.Jen Kirby, “9 Questions About Facebook and Data Sharing You Were Too Embarrassed to Ask,” Vox, April 10, 2018. 30.Kevin Roose, “How Facebook’s Data Sharing Went from a Feature to a Bug,” New York Times, March 19, 2018. 31.Thompson, “Mark Zuckerberg Talks.” 32.Reynolds, “When Digital Platforms Become Censors.” 33.Elaine Pofeldt, “Are We Ready for a Workforce That Is 50% Freelance?”

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Then the rising number of PC users using the same technology created demand for programmers to design increasing numbers of compatible software applications. Who won and who lost depended less on product quality or features and more on who could best bring multiple “sides” of the emerging market together and generate positive “feedback loops.” Fast-forward to April 2018. Mark Zuckerberg, cofounder and CEO of Facebook, was on the hot seat, testifying before the U.S. Congress. His company, established in 2004, started out by building a simple personal computer application accessed via the web. By 2018, Zuckerberg’s free software and services enabled more than 2.2 billion people to send messages, share news stories or digital content like photos and videos, organize groups, send money, and do a myriad of other activities with friends, relatives, and acquaintances, as well as business partners and customers.

Bitcoin Billionaires: A True Story of Genius, Betrayal, and Redemption
by Ben Mezrich
Published 20 May 2019

I could never have guessed that one day I would revisit two of the characters from that story—Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, the identical twins who challenged Mark Zuckerberg over the origins of what would soon be one of the most powerful companies on Earth. In the world The Accidental Billionaires was published into, Facebook was the revolution, and Mark Zuckerberg the revolutionary. He was attempting to change the social order—how society interacted and how people met, communicated, fell in love, and lived. The Winklevoss twins were his perfect foils: buttoned-down “Men of Harvard,” privileged jocks who, in many ways easy to see, appeared to represent the “Establishment.” Today things seem different. Mark Zuckerberg is a household name.

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“We sure are,” Cameron said. “Um, wow. Cool. I’m Dustin Moskovitz.” If Cameron didn’t know the face, he certainly knew the name. Moskovitz had cofounded Facebook with Mark Zuckerberg, and had been his number two until he’d left the company in 2008 to start his own business, Asana, a software-service company that helped teams work more efficiently. Forbes had named Moskovitz the youngest self-made billionaire in history, because he was eight days younger than Mark Zuckerberg and owned more than 2 percent of Facebook. They had attended Harvard together but had traveled in very different circles. Cameron had never met Moskovitz and wouldn’t have been able to pick him out of a lineup.

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If you see me going for his throat, do me a favor and aim for the blazer. It’s my brother’s.” Neither the lawyer nor the mediator cracked even the slightest of smiles. * * * Walking into the fishbowl forty minutes later was one of the most surreal moments in Cameron Winklevoss’s life. Mark Zuckerberg was already seated at the long, rectangular table in the center of the room. It seemed to Cameron that his five-foot-seven-inch frame was propped up on a thick extra cushion placed on his chair—a billionaire’s booster seat. Cameron felt vaguely self-conscious as he closed the glass door behind him; he could see Tyler and his lawyer taking seats directly behind him on the other side of the glass.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
by Shoshana Zuboff
Published 15 Jan 2019

“Facebook (FB) Mark Elliot Zuckerberg on Q1 2016 Results—Earnings Call Transcript,” Seeking Alpha, April 28, 2016, https://seekingalpha.com/article/3968783-facebook-fb-mark-elliot-zuckerberg-q1-2016-results-earnings-call-transcript. 14. Mark Zuckerberg, “Building Global Community,” Facebook, February 16, 2017, https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/building-global-community/10154544292806634. 15. Mark Zuckerberg, “Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s Keynote at F8 2017 Conference (Full Transcript),” April 19, 2017, https://singjupost.com/facebook-ceo-mark-zuckerbergs-keynote-at-f8-2017-conference-full-transcript. 16. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” German Stories at Virginia Commonwealth University, 1797, http://germanstories.vcu.edu/goethe/zauber_e4.html. 17.

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Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin, 2006), 99. 56. Mark Zuckerberg, “Building Global Community,” February 16, 2017, https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/building-global-community/10154544292806634. 57. Karissa Bell, “Zuckerberg Removed a Line About Monitoring Private Messages from His Facebook Manifesto,” Mashable, February 16, 2017, http://mashable.com/2017/02/16/mark-zuckerberg-manifesto-ai. 58. Heather Kelly, “Mark Zuckerberg Explains Why He Just Changed Facebook’s Mission,” CNNMoney, June 22, 2017, http://money.cnn.com/2017/06/22/technology/facebook-zuckerberg-interview/index.html. 59.

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Larry Page, “2013 Google I/O Keynote,” Google I/O, May 15, 2013, http://www.pcworld.com/article/2038841/hello-larry-googles-page-on-negativity-laws-and-competitors.html. 10. “Facebook’s (FB) CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Q4 2014 Results—Earnings Call Transcript,” Seeking Alpha, January 29, 2015, https://seekingalpha.com/article/2860966-facebooks-fb-ceo-mark-zuckerberg-on-q4-2014-results-earnings-call-transcript. 11. See Ashlee Vance, “Facebook: The Making of 1 Billion Users,” Bloomberg.com, October 4, 2012, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-10-04/face book-the-making-of-1-billion-users. 12. “Facebook’s (FB) CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Q4 2014 Results.” 13. “Facebook (FB) Mark Elliot Zuckerberg on Q1 2016 Results—Earnings Call Transcript,” Seeking Alpha, April 28, 2016, https://seekingalpha.com/article/3968783-facebook-fb-mark-elliot-zuckerberg-q1-2016-results-earnings-call-transcript. 14.

The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything
by Matthew Ball
Published 18 Jul 2022

Wired Staff, “May 26, 1995: Gates, Microsoft Jump on ‘Internet Tidal Wave,’ ” Wired, May 26, 2021, accessed January 5, 2022, https://www.wired.com/2010/05/0526bill-gates-internet-memo/. 14. CNBC, “Microsoft’s Ballmer Not Impressed with Apple iPhone,” January 17, 2007, accessed January 4, 2022, https://www.cnbc.com/id/16671712. 15. Drew Olanoff, “Mark Zuckerberg: Our Biggest Mistake Was Betting Too Much On HTML5,” TechCrunch, September 11, 2022, accessed January 5, 2022, https://techcrunch.com/2012/09/11/mark-zuckerberg-our-biggest-mistake-with-mobile-was-betting-too-much-on-html5/. 16. M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 155. Chapter 3 A Definition (Finally) 1.

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Throughout that summer, competing efforts from billionaires Richard Branson, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos were under way to bring civilian travel to lower orbit and usher in an era of space elevators and interplanetary colonization. However, it was another decades-old science fiction concept, the Metaverse, that seemed to indicate the future had truly arrived. In July 2021, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said: “In this next chapter of our company, I think we will effectively transition from people seeing us as primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company. And obviously, all of the work that we’re doing across the apps that people use today contribute directly to this vision.”1 Shortly thereafter, Zuckerberg publicly announced a division focused on the Metaverse and elevated the head of Facebook Reality Labs—a division that works on miscellaneous futuristic projects including Oculus VR (virtual reality), AR (augmented reality) glasses, and brain-to-machine interfaces—to chief technology officer.

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No surprise, Microsoft already had a “technology stack”2 which was a “natural fit” for the not-quite-here Metaverse and spanned the company’s operating system Windows, cloud computing offering Azure, communications platform Microsoft Teams, augmented reality headset HoloLens, gaming platform Xbox, professional network LinkedIn, and Microsoft’s own “Metaverses” including Minecraft, Microsoft Flight Simulator, and even the space-faring first-person shooter Halo.3 Mark Zuckerberg’s articulation focused on immersive virtual reality#x2021;‡ as well as social experiences that connect individuals who live far apart. Notably, Facebook’s Oculus division is the market leader in VR in both unit sales and investment, while its social network is the largest and most used globally.

Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley
by Emily Chang
Published 6 Feb 2018

“When I was a kid”: Will Drabold, “Read Peter Thiel’s Speech at the Republican National Convention,” Time, July 21, 2016, http://time.com/4417679/republican-convention-peter-thiel-transcript. “We care deeply about diversity”: Jeff John Roberts, “Mark Zuckerberg Says Trump Supporter Peter Thiel Still Has a Place on Facebook’s Board,” Fortune, Oct. 19, 2016, http://fortune.com/2016/10/19/zuckerberg-thiel. “I think you need”: Melanie Ehrenkranz, “Mark Zuckerberg’s Defense of Peter Thiel Reveals a Flawed Understanding of Diversity,” Mic, March 14, 2017, http://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerbergs-defense-of-peter-thiel-reveals-a-flawed-understanding-of-diversity-2017-3. “whole, you know, age of computer”: Jeremy Diamond, “Trump, the Computer and Email Skeptic-in-Chief,” CNN, Dec. 30, 2016, http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/29/politics/donald-trump-computers-internet-email/index.html.

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It matters that there aren’t enough women in engineering. It matters that there aren’t enough women CEOs. It matters that there aren’t enough women VCs. It matters that there isn’t enough of a track record of entrepreneurs to fund,” she told me. “Everyone is looking for the next Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg. There’s pattern matching that goes on there, and they don’t look like you and they don’t look like me.” The absence of women in tech has real effects. “The best technology and the best products are built by people who have really diverse perspectives,” Marissa Mayer, the former Yahoo CEO, told me.

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Silicon Valley was resurrected as the dream destination where entrepreneurs—who fit a certain stereotype—could become millionaires overnight and lower-level employees could get rich simply by picking the right company to join. Tales of enormous fortunes spread, igniting yet another California gold rush. In 2010, the movie The Social Network further glamorized start-up life and established Mark Zuckerberg as the exemplum of what a successful founder looked like. And the men flocking to the epicenter of technology continued to vastly outnumber women. Today, it’s estimated there are more than half a million unfilled tech jobs, a number that is expected to balloon to one million by 2020. The industry is facing a labor crisis much bigger than that of the 1960s, when Cannon and Perry canonized nerds as the ideal hires.

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World
by Clive Thompson
Published 26 Mar 2019

“just too creepy, too stalker-esque”: Brenton Thornicroft, “Something to Consider before You Complain about Facebook’s News Feed Updates,” Forbes, April 2, 2013, accessed August 18, 2018, https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2013/04/02/something-to-consider-before-you-complain-about-facebooks-news-feed-updates/#7154da847938. “you control of them”: Mark Zuckerberg, “An Open Letter from Mark Zuckerberg,” Facebook, September 8, 2006, accessed September 18, 2018, https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook/an-open-letter-from-mark-zuckerberg/2208562130/. for each American: Evan Asano, “How Much Time Do People Spend on Social Media?,” SocialMediaToday, January 4, 2017, accessed August 18, 2018, https://www.socialmediatoday.com/marketing/how-much-time-do-people-spend-social-media-infographic.

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v=64AaXC00bkQ; TechCrunch, TechFellow Awards: Ruchi Sanghvi, TechCrunch video, 4:40, March 4, 2012, https://techcrunch.com/video/techfellow-awards-ruchi-sanghvi/517287387/; FWDus2, Ruchi’s Story, YouTube, 1:24, May 10, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i86ibVt1OMM.; all videos accessed August 16, 2018. did a keg stand: Clare O’Connor, “Video: Mark Zuckerberg in 2005, Talking Facebook (While Dustin Moskovitz Does a Keg Stand),” Forbes, August 15, 2011, accessed October 7, 2018, https://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2011/08/15/video-mark-zuckerberg-in-2005-talking-facebook-while-dustin-moskovitz-does-a-keg-stand/#629cb86571a5. “anything you can find on the web”: Ruchi Sanghvi, “Facebook Gets a Facelift,” Facebook, September 5, 2006, accessed August 18, 2018, https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook/facebook-gets-a-facelift/2207967130/.

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what you already “liked”: Clive Thompson, “Social Networks Must Face Up to Their Political Impact,” Wired, February 5, 2017, accessed August 18, 2018, https://www.wired.com/2017/01/social-networks-must-face-political-impact. “divisiveness and isolation”: Mark Zuckerberg, “Building Global Community,” Facebook, February 16, 2017, accessed August 18, 2018, https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/building-global-community/10154544292806634/. “eating the world”: Marc Andreessen, “Why Software Is Eating the World,” Wall Street Journal, August 20, 2011, accessed August 18, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111903480904576512250915629460.

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class
by Joel Kotkin
Published 11 May 2020

Wagner, “Number of General Motors employees between FY 2010 and FY 2018,” Statista, February 2019, https://www.statista.com/statistics/239843/employees-of-general-motors/; Lockheed Martin, “About Lockheed Martin,” https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/who-we-are.html; Jan Conway, “Number of Employees Kroger 2014–2018,” Statista, April 2019, https://www.statista.com/statistics/717646/kroger-number-employees/; Home Depot, “About Home Depot,” https://corporate.homedepot.com/about. 9 Nikhil Swaminathan, “Inside the Growing Guest Worker Program Trapping Indian Students in Virtual Servitude,” Mother Jones, September/October 2017, http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/09/inside-the-growing-guest-worker-program-trapping-indian-students-in-virtual-servitude. 10 Annalee Newitz, “Mark Zuckerberg’s manifesto is a political trainwreck,” Ars Technica, February 18, 2017, https://arstechnica.com/staff/2017/02/op-ed-mark-zuckerbergs-manifesto-is-a-political-trainwreck/; Ezra Klein, “Mark Zuckerberg’s theory of human history,” Vox, February 18, 2017, http://www.vox.com/new-money/2017/2/18/14653542/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-manifesto-sapiens. 11 Gregory Ferenstein, “The Disrupters,” City Journal, Winter 2017, https://www.city-journal.org/html/disrupters-14950.html. 12 Gregory Ferenstein, “A Lot of Billionaires Are Giving to Democrats.

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Medium, February 26, 2016, https://medium.com/@ferenstein/a-lot-of-billionaires-are-giving-to-democrats-here-s-a-look-at-their-agenda-b5038c2ecb34. 13 Todd Haselton, “Mark Zuckerberg joins Silicon Valley bigwigs in calling for government to give everybody free money,” Yahoo, May 25, 2017, https://finance.yahoo.com/news/mark-zuckerberg-joins-silicon-valley-202800717.html; Patrick Gillespie, “Mark Zuckerberg supports universal basic income. What is it?” CNN, May 6, 2017, https://money.cnn.com/2017/05/26/news/economy/mark-zuckerberg-universal-basic-income/index.html; Chris Weller, “Elon Musk doubles down on universal basic income: ‘It’s going to be necessary,’” Business Insider, February 13, 2017, https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-universal-basic-income-2017-2; Patrick Caughill, “Another Silicon Valley Exec Joins the Ranks of Universal Basic Income Supporters,” Futurism, September 8, 2017, https://futurism.com/another-silicon-valley-exec-joins-the-ranks-of-universal-basic-income-supporters; Sam Altman, “Moving Forward on Basic Income,” Y Combinator, May 31, 2016, https://blog.ycombinator.com/moving-forward-on-basic-income/; Diane Francis, “The Beginning of the End of Work,” American Interest, March 19, 2018, https://www.the-american-interest.com/2018/03/19/beginning-end-work/. 14 “The YIMBY Guide to Bullying and Its Results: SB 827 Goes Down in Committee,” City Watch LA, April 19, 2018, https://www.citywatchla.com/index.php/los-angeles/15298-the-yimby-guide-to-bullying-and-its-results-sb-827-goes-down-in-committee; John Mirisch, “Tech Oligarchs and the California Housing Crisis,” California Political Review, April 15, 2018, http://www.capoliticalreview.com/top-stories/tech-Oligarchs-and-the-california-housing-crisis/; Joel Kotkin, “Giving Common Sense a Chance in California,” City Journal, April 26, 2018, https://www.city-journal.org/html/giving-common-sense-chance-california-15868.html. 15 Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans.

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Cities Have a Glut of High-Rises and Still Lack Affordable Housing,” New Geography, September 3, 2017, http://www.newgeography.com/content/005732-us-cities-have-a-glut-of-high-rises-and-still-lack-affordable-housing. 13 Erika Riggs, “Mark Zuckerberg spends $30 million on four homes to ensure privacy,” NBC News, October 12, 2013, https://www.nbcnews.com/business/real-estate/mark-zuckerberg-spends-30-million-four-homes-ensure-privacy-f8C11379396; Melia Robinson, “We scouted the homes of the top tech executives, and they all live in this San Francisco suburb for the1%,” Business Insider, October 7, 2017, https://www.businessinsider.com/homes-of-tech-ceos-in-atherton-silicon-valley-2017-10; Meredith Bauer, “8 Amazing Homes of Silicon Valley’s Tech Elite,” The Street, May 23, 2015, https://www.thestreet.com/story/13160991/1/8-amazing-homes-of-silicon-valleys-tech-elite.html#3. 14 Veena Dubal, “Google as a landlord?

The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You
by Eli Pariser
Published 11 May 2011

execbios. 178 “come to Google because they choose to”: Greg Jarboe, “A ‘Fireside Chat’ with Google’s Sergey Brin,” Search Engine Watch, Oct. 16, 2003, accessed Dec. 16,2010, http://searchenginewatch.com/3081081. 178 “the future will be personalized”: Gord Hotckiss, “Just Behave: Google’s Marissa Mayer on Personalized Search,” Searchengineland, Feb. 23, 2007, accessed Dec. 16, 2010, http://searchengineland.com/just-behave-googles-marissa-mayer-on-personalized-search-10592. 179 “It’s technology, not business or government”: David Kirpatrick, “With a Little Help from his Friends,” Vanity Fair (Oct. 2010), accessed Dec. 16, 2010, www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2010/10/sean-parker-201010. 179 “seventh kingdom of life”: Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants (New York: Viking, 2010). 180 “shirt or fleece that I own”: Mark Zuckerberg, remarks to Startup School Conference, XConomy, Oct. 18, 2010, accessed Feb. 8, 2010, www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2010/10/18/mark-zuckerberg-goes-to-startup-school-video//. 181 “ ‘the rest of the world is wrong’ ”: David A. Wise and Mark Malseed, The Google Story (New York: Random House, 2005), 42. 182 “tradeoffs with success in other domains”: Jeffrey M. O’Brien, “The PayPal Mafia,” Fortune, Nov. 14, 2007, accessed Dec. 16, 2010, http://money.cnn.com/2007/11/13/magazines/fortune/paypal_mafia.fortune/index2.htm. 183 sold to eBay for $1.5 billion: Troy Wolverton, “It’s official: eBay Weds PayPal,” CNET News, Oct. 3, 2002, accessed Dec. 16, 2010, http://news.cnet.com/Its-official-eBay-weds-PayPal/2100-1017_3-960658.html. 183 “impact and force change”: Peter Thie, “Education of a Libertarian,” Cato Unbound, Apr. 13, 2009, accessed Dec. 16, 2010, www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/the-education-of-a-libertarian. 183 “end the inevitability of death and taxes”: Chris Baker, “Live Free or Drown: Floating Utopias on the Cheap,” Wired, Jan. 19, 2009, accessed Dec. 16, 2010, www.wired.com/techbiz/startups/magazine/17-02/mf_seasteading?

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http://us.penguingroup.com To my grandfather, Ray Pariser, who taught me that scientific knowledge is best used in the pursuit of a better world. And to my community of family and friends, who fill my bubble with intelligence, humor, and love. INTRODUCTION A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa. —Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us. —Marshall McLuhan, media theorist Few people noticed the post that appeared on Google’s corporate blog on December 4, 2009. It didn’t beg for attention—no sweeping pronouncements, no Silicon Valley hype, just a few paragraphs of text sandwiched between a weekly roundup of top search terms and an update about Google’s finance software.

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For a quickly rising percentage of us, personalized news feeds like Facebook are becoming a primary news source—36 percent of Americans under thirty get their news through social networking sites. And Facebook’s popularity is skyrocketing worldwide, with nearly a million more people joining each day. As founder Mark Zuckerberg likes to brag, Facebook may be the biggest source of news in the world (at least for some definitions of “news”). And personalization is shaping how information flows far beyond Facebook, as Web sites from Yahoo News to the New York Times–funded startup News.me cater their headlines to our particular interests and desires.

Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections
by Mollie Hemingway
Published 11 Oct 2021

One billionaire in particular took a prominent and public role in the effort. And it was his money that enabled these far-left groups to embed within the voting system itself. That billionaire was Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. * * * “At Facebook, we took our responsibility to protect the integrity of this election very seriously.… We’ve built sophisticated systems to protect against election interference,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg told ABC News shortly after the election. He highlighted his censorship work, which he described as a fight against “misinformation.”90 Zuckerberg didn’t just help Democrats by censoring their political opponents.

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Sheera Frenkel, “Renegade Facebook Employees Form Task Force to Battle Fake News,” BuzzFeed, November 14, 2016, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/sheerafrenkel/renegade-facebook-employees-form-task-force-to-battle-fake-n. 6. Sam Levin, “Mark Zuckerberg: I Regret Ridiculing Fears over Facebook’s Effect on Election,” The Guardian, September 27, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/27/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-2016-election-fake-news. 7. Michael Nunez, “Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News,” Gizmodo, May 9, 2016, https://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely-suppressed-conser-1775461006. 8.

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Kirsten Grind and Keach Hagey, “Why Did Facebook Fire a Top Executive? Hint: It Had Something to Do with Trump,” Wall Street Journal, November 11, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-did-facebook-fire-a-top-executive-hint-it-had-something-to-do-with-trump-1541965245. 39. “Transcript of Mark Zuckerberg’s Senate Hearing,” Washington Post, April 10, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/04/10/transcript-of-mark-zuckerbergs-senate-hearing/. 40. Grind and Hagey, “Why Did Facebook.” 41. Dartunorro Clark, “Twitter Fact Checks Trump’s Tweets for the First Time, Calls Mail-In Voting Claim ‘Misleading,’ ” NBC News, May 26, 2020, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/twitter-fact-checks-trump-s-misleading-tweet-mail-voting-n1215151. 42.

Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media
by Tarleton Gillespie
Published 25 Jun 2018

After reposting the image and criticizing Facebook’s decision, Egeland was suspended twice, first for twenty-four hours, then for three additional days.1 Norway’s daily newspaper Aftenposten then reported on his suspensions and included the photo; Facebook moderators subsequently instructed the newspaper to remove or pixelate the photo, then went ahead and deleted it anyway.2 The editor in chief of Aftenposten took to the newspaper’s front page to express his outrage at Facebook’s decision, again publishing the photo along with a statement directed at Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Front page of the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten, September 8, 2016, including the “Terror of War” photograph (by Nick Ut / Associated Press) and editor in chief Espen Egil Hansen’s open letter to Mark Zuckerberg, critical of Facebook’s removal of Ut’s photo. Newspaper used with permission from Aftenposten; photo used with permission from Associated Press. In it he criticized both the decision and Facebook’s undue influence on news, calling Facebook “the world’s most powerful editor.”3 Many Norwegian readers, even the prime minister of Norway herself, reposted the photo to Facebook, only to have it quickly removed.4 More than a week after the image was first removed, after a great deal of global news coverage critical of the decision, Facebook reinstated the photo.

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NOTES CHAPTER 1 ALL PLATFORMS MODERATE 1Mark Scott and Mike Isaac, “Facebook Restores Iconic Vietnam War Photo It Censored for Nudity,” New York Times, September 9, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/10/technology/facebook-vietnam-war-photo-nudity.html. 2Olivia Blair, “The Iconic Picture Causing Huge Problems for Mark Zuckerberg,” Independent, September 9, 2016, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-accused-abusing-power-napalm-girl-vietnam-war-image-a7233431.html. 3Espen Egil Hansen, “Dear Mark. I Am Writing This to Inform You That I Shall Not Comply with Your Requirement to Remove This Picture,” Aftenposten, September 8, 2016, https://www.aftenposten.no/meninger/kommentar/Dear-Mark-I-am-writing-this-to-inform-you-that-I-shall-not-comply-with-your-requirement-to-remove-this-picture-604156b.html. 4Kelly Kiveash, “Censorship Row: Facebook Reinstates Iconic ‘Napalm Girl’ Photo,” Ars Technica, September 9, 2016, https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/09/facebook-napalm-girl-photo-censorship-norway/. 5Justin Osofsky, Facebook, September 9, 2016, https://www.facebook.com/josofsky/posts/10157347245570231. 6Hariman and Lucaites, “Public Identity and Collective Memory,” 41. 7A National Public Radio reporter claimed that the photo was not identified algorithmically, but I also saw reports that suggested that it was.

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In Yoree Koh and Reed Albergotti, “Twitter Faces Free-Speech Dilemma,” Wall Street Journal, August 21, 2014, http://www.wsj.com/articles/twitter-is-walking-a-fine-line-confronted-with-grisly-images-1408659519. 19Adrian Chen, “The Laborers Who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of Your Facebook Feed,” Wired, October 23, 2014, https://www.wired.com/2014/10/content-moderation/; Catherine Buni and Soraya Chemaly, “The Secret Rules of the Internet,” Verge, April 13, 2016, http://www.theverge.com/2016/4/13/11387934/internet-moderator-history-youtube-facebook-reddit-censorship-free-speech; Sarah Roberts, “Social Media’s Silent Filter,” Atlantic, March 8, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/03/commercial-content-moderation/518796/. 20Aarti Shahani, “From Hate Speech to Fake News: The Content Crisis Facing Mark Zuckerberg,” NPR All Tech Considered, November 17, 2016, http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/11/17/495827410/from-hate-speech-to-fake-news-the-content-crisis-facing-mark-zuckerberg. 21Adrian Chen, “The Human Toll of Protecting the Internet from the Worst of Humanity,” New Yorker, January 28, 2017, http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/the-human-toll-of-protecting-the-internet-from-the-worst-of-humanity. 22Julia Floretti and Yn Chee, “Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Microsoft Back EU Hate Speech Rules,” Reuters, May 31, 2016, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-facebook-twitter-hatecrime-idUSKCN0YM0VJ. 23Catherine Buni and Soraya Chemaly, “The Unsafety Net: How Social Media Turned against Women,” Atlantic, October 9, 2014, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/10/the-unsafety-net-how-social-media-turned-against-women/381261/. 24Mary Gray, “Your Job Is about to Get ‘Taskified,’” Los Angeles Times, January 8, 2016, http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0110-digital-turk-work-20160110-story.html. 25Adrian Chen, “The Laborers Who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of Your Facebook Feed,” Wired, October 23, 2014, https://www.wired.com/2014/10/content-moderation/; Quentin Hardy, “Spot Pornography on Facebook for a Quarter-Cent an Image,” New York Times, December 5, 2011, http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/05/spot-porn-on-facebook-for-a-quarter-cent-an-image/. 26Hope Reese and Nick Heath, “Inside Amazon’s Clickworker Platform: How Half a Million People Are Being Paid Pennies to Train AI,” TechRepublic, 2016, http://www.techrepublic.com/article/inside-amazons-clickworker-platform-how-half-a-million-people-are-training-ai-for-pennies-per-task/. 27Irani, “The Cultural Work of Microwork,” 726. 28Ibid., 725. 29Roberts, “Commercial Content Moderation.” 30Brad Stone, “Concern for Those Who Screen the Web for Barbarity,” New York Times, July 18, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/19/technology/19screen.html. 31Reyhan Harmanci, “Tech Confessional: The Googler Who Looked at the Worst of the Internet,” Buzzfeed, August 21, 2012, https://www.buzzfeed.com/reyhan/tech-confessional-the-googler-who-looks-at-the-wo. 32Adrian Chen, “Facebook Releases New Content Guidelines, Now Allows Bodily Fluids,” Gawker, February 16, 2012, http://gawker.com/5885836/. 33Gray, “Your Job Is about to Get ‘Taskified.’” 34Downey, “Making Media Work.” 35Roberts, “Content Moderation.” 36Roberts, “Commercial Content Moderation.” 37Postigo, “America Online Volunteers.” 38Dibbell, “A Rape in Cyberspace.” 39Dutton, “Network Rules of Order.” 40Bergstrom, “‘Don’t Feed the Troll’”; Lampe and Resnick, “Slash (Dot) and Burn”; Kerr and Kelleher, “The Recruitment of Passion and Community”; Shaw and Hill, “Laboratories of Oligarchy?”

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber
by Mike Isaac
Published 2 Sep 2019

What Kalanick was describing, without realizing it, was a proto-version of Napster, the iconic file-sharing network co-founded by Sean Parker, an internet entrepreneur and, later, an early advisor to Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook. Eventually, Kalanick joined six of his friends to build Scour.net, a Google-like search engine that gave users the ability to “scour” millions of files and then download them, like Napster. Kalanick later claimed to be a co-founder, though his friends disputed this status. Eventually, Kalanick was tasked with Scour’s sales and marketing efforts. By his senior year, Kalanick decided to drop out of UCLA to work on Scour full time, following the example of entrepreneurs like Bill Gates and, later, Mark Zuckerberg. It upset his parents, though they wouldn’t tell him as much until years later.

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Fast-rising rents pushed wage earners out of San Francisco, while landlords flipped those former apartments to new, wealthier tenants. The “gig economy” unleashed by companies like Uber, Instacart, TaskRabbit, and DoorDash spurred an entirely new class of workers—the blue-collar techno-laborer. With the rise of Facebook, Google, Instagram, and Snapchat, venture capitalists looked everywhere to fund the next Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, or Evan Spiegel—the newest brilliant mind who sought, in the words of Steve Jobs, to “make a dent in the universe.” And as more money flowed into the Valley from outside investors—from hedge funds and private equity firms, sovereign wealth funds and Hollywood celebrities—the balance of power shifted from those who held the purse strings to the founders who brought the bright ideas and willingness to execute them.

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Slashing interest rates to save the banks would have profound effects on technologists and entrepreneurs—particularly on a fifty-mile stretch of Route 101 in Northern California. In a way, the carnage of the dot-com bust had done the Valley more good than ill. The bust separated the dot-com poseurs from the actual valuable companies. Led by Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Mark Zuckerberg, a new generation of entrepreneurs seemed to understand intuitively how to harness the true power of the internet, and turn it into a profitable business. There were three important ingredients that fueled the new generation of entrepreneurs like Zuckerberg and Page. First, By 2008, more than 75 percent of American households owned computers, and unlike the 1990s and early 2000s, this mass population had access to broadband; more than half of American adults in 2008 purchased a high-speed internet connection for the home.

Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection
by Jacob Silverman
Published 17 Mar 2015

Nov. 10, 2010. mediabistro.com/alltwitter/twitter-is-not-to-be-a-triumph-of-technology-but-of-humanity-biz-stone_b169. 6 Apple profile: “Twitter. Triumph of Humanity.” Apple. apple.com/se/business/profiles/twitter. 6 connectivity is a human right: Tamar Weinberg. “SXSW: Mark Zuckerberg Keynote (the Edited Liveblogged Version).” Techipedia. March 11, 2008. techipedia.com/2008/mark-zuckerberg-sxsw-keynote. 6 “bringing your vision to the world”: Katherine Losse. The Boy Kings: A Journey into the Heart of the Social Network. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012, 201. 6 “we know what you like”: Alexia Tsotsis. “Eric Schmidt: ‘We Know Where You Are, We Know What You Like.’”

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March 28, 2014. valleywag.gawker.com/airbnb-is-suddenly-begging-newyork-city-to-tax-its-hos-1553889167. 244 “we literally stand on the brink”: Tom Slee. “Why the Sharing Economy Isn’t.” 245 Nandini Balial background and TaskRabbit experience: Author interviews with Nandini Balial. July and August 2014. 249 “a human right”: Queena Kim. “Mark Zuckerberg: Internet Connectivity Is a Human right.” Marketplace. Aug. 21, 2013. marketplace.org/topics/tech/mark-zuckerberg-internet-connectivity-human-right. 249 “Companies are transcending power”: Kevin Roose. “The Government Shutdown Has Revealed Silicon Valley’s Dysfunction Fetish.” New York. Oct 16, 2013. nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/10/silicon-valleys-dysfunction-fetish.html. 250 “the paper belt”: Nick Statt.

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Introduction The Ideology of Social Engineered to Like Pics or It Didn’t Happen The Viral Dream Churnalism and the Problem of Social News To Watch and Be Watched The War Against Identity The Reputation Racket Life and Work in the Sharing Economy Digital Serfdom; or, We All Work for Facebook The Myth of Privacy Big Data and the Informational Appetite Social-Media Rebellion Acknowledgments Notes Index About the Author Copyright About the Publisher Instant messages between Mark Zuckerberg and a friend after Facebook launched: Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard Zuck: Just ask. Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS [Redacted friend’s name]: What? How’d you manage that one? Zuck: People just submitted it. Zuck: I don’t know why. Zuck: They “trust me” Zuck: Dumb fucks.

The New Class Conflict
by Joel Kotkin
Published 31 Aug 2014

Romain Dillet, “Zuckerberg Now Owns 29.3 Percent of Facebook’s Class a Shares and This Stake Is worth $13.6 Billion,” TechCrunch, February 15, 2013, http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/15/zuckerberg-now-owns-29-3-percent-of-facebook-representing-18-billion; Kroll and Dolan, “The Forbes 400,” profile no. 20, “Mark Zuckerberg, Forbes, http://www.forbes.com/profile/mark-zuckerberg. 23. David Yanofsky, “All of These Companies Have More Cash Right Now than the U.S. Government,” Quartz, October 10, 2013, http://qz.com/134093/all-of-these-companies-have-more-cash-right-now-than-the-us-government. 24. Brian Solomon, “The World’s Youngest Billionaires: 29 Under 40,” Forbes, March 4, 2013, http://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2013/03/04/the-worlds-youngest-billionaires-23-under-40. 25.

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Blue Origin (website), http://www.blueorigin.com; Sheraz Sadiq, “Silicon Valley Goes to Space,” KQED Science (blog), November 18, 2013, http://blogs.kqed.org/science/video/silicon-valley-goes-to-space; Max Luke and Jenna Mukuno, “Boldly Going Where No Greens Have Gone Before,” Wall Street Journal, January 7, 2014. 80. Reid J. Epstein, “Mark Zuckerberg Immigration Group’s Status: Looking for Footing,” Politico, April 4, 2013, http://www.politico.com/story/2013/04/mark-zuckerberg-immigration-groups-status-stumbling-89652.html. 81. Drew FitzGerald and Spencer E. Ante, “Tech Firms Push to Control Web’s Pipes,” All Things Digital, December 17, 2013, http://allthingsd.com/20131217/tech-firms-push-to-control-webs-pipes; Drew FitzGerald and Daisuke Wakabayashi, “Apple Quietly Builds New Networks,” Wall Street Journal, February 3, 2014. 82.

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Fredreka Schouten, “’Dark Money’ of Non-Profit Political Groups Targeted,” USA Today, June 11, 2013; Matea Gold, “Seeking to Harness Obama’s Campaign Resources for a Second Term,” Los Angeles Times, January 17, 2013; Liz Bartolomeo, “The Political Spending of 501(c)(4) Nonprofits in the 2012 Election,” Sunlight Foundation, May 21, 2013, http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2013/05/21/the-political-spending-of-501c4-nonprofits-in-the-2012-election; Adrian Chen, “Mark Zuckerberg’s Self-Serving Immigration Crusade,” Gawker, April 30, 2013, http://gawker.com/mark-zuckerbergs-self-serving-immigration-crusade-484912430; Chrystia Freeland, “Plutocrats vs. Populists,” New York Times, November 3, 2013; Guy Sorman, “The Philanthropic Spectacle,” City Journal, Autumn 2013; OpenSecrets.org, “Non-profits, Foundations & Philanthropists,” http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?

The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It)
by Jamie Bartlett
Published 4 Apr 2018

The machinery of democracy was built during a time of nation-states, hierarchies, deference and industrialised economies. The fundamental features of digital tech are at odds with this model: non-geographical, decentralised, data-driven, subject to network effects and exponential growth. Put simply: democracy wasn’t designed for this. That’s not really anyone’s fault, not even Mark Zuckerberg’s. I’m hardly alone in thinking this, by the way. Many early digital pioneers saw how what they called ‘cyberspace’ was mismatched with the physical world, too. John Perry Barlow’s oft-quoted 1996 Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace sums up this tension rather well: ‘Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.

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Similarly, the introduction of a ‘like’ button in 2009 came from a much older subfield of – yes, this really exists – Liking Studies, which has long shown that likability is an advert’s most potent characteristic.8 (Apparently Facebook originally planned an ‘awesome’ button.)9 Sean Parker, Facebook’s first President, recently called the ‘like’ button ‘a social-validation feedback loop . . . exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology’. He said that he, Mark Zuckerberg and others understood this, ‘And we did it anyway’.10 Data The Holy Grail for the social media giants, just as it always has been for all ad men, is to understand you better than you understand yourself. To predict what you will do, say and even think. Facebook doesn’t collect data about you for fun; it does it to get inside your head.

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McLuhan remains a distant inspiration for Silicon Valley, one of the original thought leaders and intellectual rock stars of the tech revolution. His ‘global village’ still bounces around Palo Alto, Mountain View and Cupertino. Every time you hear talk of ‘global communities’ and ‘total connectivity’, it’s the ghost of McLuhan. ‘By enabling people from diverse backgrounds to easily connect and share their ideas,’ wrote Mark Zuckerberg back in the early days of his site, ‘we can decrease world conflict in the short-term and the long-term.’ McLuhan, the great prophet, was far too smart not to hedge his bets. He also said that conflict and disharmony was possible in a world where everyone was connected to everyone else, because information-at-all-times would be so discombobulating that it would spark a mass identity crisis.

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us
by Tim O'Reilly
Published 9 Oct 2017

Bharat’s article has many additional practical suggestions for how to algorithmically detect fake news in addition to some of those that I outline in this chapter. 215 “the overall logic is the same”: Bharat, “How to Detect Fake News in Real-Time.” 217 “to make it tolerate them”: Michael Marder, “Failure of U.S. Public Secondary Schools in Mathematics,” University of Texas UTeach, retrieved April 1, 2017, https://uteach.utexas.edu/sites/default/files/BrokenEducation2011. pdf, 3. 218 work together for the common good: Mark Zuckerberg, “Building Global Community,” Facebook, February 16, 2017, https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/building-global-community/10154544292806634/. 219 “They have become rich because they were civic”: Robert Putnam, “The Prosperous Community: Social Capital and Public Life,” American Prospect, Spring 1993, retrieved April 1, 2017, http://prospect.org/article/prosperous-com munity-social-capital-and-public-life. 219 “for inclusion of all”: Zuckerberg, “Building Global Community.” 220 his experience with the Egyptian revolution: Wael Ghonim, Revolution 2.0 (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2012). 221 “engage in rational discussion”: Colin Megill, “pol.is in Taiwan,” pol.is blog, May 25, 2016, https://blog.pol.is/pol-is-in-taiwan-da7570d372b5. 221 “love comedies and horror but hate documentaries”: Ibid. 222 you move accordingly: “Human Spectrogram,” Knowledge Sharing Tools and Method Toolkit, wiki retrieved April 1, 2017, http://www.kstoolkit.org/Human +Spectrogram. 222 “mandatory for riders on uberX private vehicles”: Audrey Tang, “Uber Responds to vTaiwan’s Coherent Blended Volition,” pol.is blog, May 23, 2016, https://blog. pol.is/uber-responds-to-vtaiwans-coherent-blended-volition-3e9b75102b9b. 223 points of agreement and disagreement: Ray Dalio, TED, April 24, 2017, https://ted2017.ted.com/program. 224 “‘figure out how to get around it’”: Josh Constine, “Facebook’s New Anti-Clickbait Algorithm Buries Bogus Headlines,” TechCrunch, August 4, 2016, https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/04/facebook-clickbait/. 226 half of digital ad spending: Greg Sterling, “Search Ads Generated 50 Percent of Digital Revenue in First Half of 2016,” Search Engine Land, November 1, 2016, http://searchengineland.com/search-ads-1h-generated-16-3-billion-50-percent-total-digital-revenue-262217. 226 “We need a new model”: Evan Williams, “Renewing Medium’s Focus,” Medium, January 4, 2017, https://blog. medium.com/renewing-mediums-focus-98f374a960be. 227 “To continue on this trajectory”: Ibid. 227 “In an experiment”: Adam D.

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Osborne, “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation,” Oxford Martin Institute, September 17, 2013, http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Future_of _Employment.pdf. 299 the age of growth is over: Robert Gordon, “The Death of Innovation, the End of Growth,” TED 2013, https://www.ted.com/talks/robert_gordon _the_death_of_innovation_the_end_of _growth. 301 something that had never been done before: Margot Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures (New York: William Morrow, 2016). 302 well-paid human jobs: Already, in the US, 43% of the electric power generation workforce is employed in solar technologies, versus 22% of electric power generation via fossil fuels. US Energy and Employment Report, Department of Energy, 2016, 28, https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2017/01/f34/2017%20US%20Energy%20and%20Jobs%20Report_0.pdf. 302 cure all disease within their children’s lifetimes: Mark Zuckerberg, “Can we cure all diseases in our children’s lifetime?,” Facebook post, September 21, 2016, https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/can-we-cure-all-diseases-in-our-childrens-lifetime/10154087783966634/. 303 “the leading edge of who is going to create that”: Jeff Immelt, in conversation with Tim O’Reilly, Next:Economy Summit, San Francisco, November 12, 2015, https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/ges-digital-transformation. 304 it has roughly hovered since: Max Roser, “Working Hours,” OurWorldInData.org, 2016, retrieved April 4, 2017, https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours/. 304 generosity is the robust strategy: Ryan Avent, The Wealth of Humans (New York: St.

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It was all about the joy of sharing our work, the rush of clicking on a link and connecting with another computer half the world away, and constructing similar destinations for our peers. We were all enthusiasts. Some of us were also entrepreneurs. To be sure, it is those entrepreneurs—people like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Michael Dell in the personal computer era; Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Mark Zuckerberg in the web era—who saw that this world driven by a passion for discovery and sharing could become the cradle of a new economy. They found financial backers, shaped the toy into a tool, and built the businesses that turned a movement into an industry. The lesson is clear: Treat curiosity and wonder as a guide to the future.

Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future
by Ben Tarnoff
Published 13 Jun 2022

Google remains the apex predator of this ecosystem, claiming 28.9 percent of the US digital ad market in 2020. The next-biggest player, which controls another 25.2 percent, is Facebook. Founded shortly after Google began its ad-fueled ascent, Facebook was part of a wave of startups that together came to define what we now know as “social media.” The first iteration of Mark Zuckerberg’s creation appeared in 2004, YouTube arrived in 2005 (and was purchased by Google the following year), and Twitter followed in 2006. What characterized these sites was a reliance on user- generated content. At the time, tech guru Tim O’Reilly hailed this aspect as one of the pillars of what he called “Web 2.0”: a new, more participatory web that emerged from the wreckage of the dot-com era.

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Republican politicians often accuse tech companies of censoring conservative views online. Given the visibility of the Right on social media, the accusation is clearly false, but it serves a useful purpose. By complaining about anti-conservative bias, Republicans can “work the ref” and bludgeon Facebook into being even more hospitable to right-wing propaganda. It’s effective: Mark Zuckerberg has gone out of his way to curry favor with Republican leaders, and to mold Facebook’s content policies to their liking. Joel Kaplan, a high-ranking Republican within Facebook who serves as the company’s vice president of global public policy, wields particularly broad power. Kaplan has repeatedly intervened to promote the circulation of right-wing content on the site, and to push for content moderation rules and algorithm tweaks that favor the Right.

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Immensely consequential decisions would be left in the hands of executives and investors, and these decisions would in turn be bound by the mandates of the market. Most people would have no say in the matters that centrally affect their lives. A privatized internet will always amount to the rule of the many by the few, and the rule of those few by an imperative that is hard-wired into capitalism: the imperative to accumulate. Mark Zuckerberg is probably the most powerful man online, thanks to a shareholder structure that preserves his control of Facebook. A social network of more than 2 billion users is more or less a personal dictatorship. But even Zuckerberg can’t defy the imperative to accumulate; shareholders would punish him in the form of a falling stock price, and, if it got bad enough, competitors would put him out of business.

The Geek Way: The Radical Mindset That Drives Extraordinary Results
by Andrew McAfee
Published 14 Nov 2023

Needleman, and Georgia Wells, “TikTok’s Stratospheric Rise: An Oral History,” Wall Street Journal, updated November 5, 2022, www.wsj.com/articles/tiktoks-stratospheric-rise-an-oral-history-11667599696. 3 “defining characteristic”: Mark Zuckerberg, “Founder’s Letter: Our Next Chapter,” About Facebook, October 28, 2021, https://about.fb.com/news/2021/10/founders-letter/. 4 investment was $15 billion: Martin Peers, “On Metaverse Spending, Zuckerberg Doesn’t Care What Critics Say,” The Information, October 26, 2022, www.theinformation.com/articles/on-metaverse-spending-zuckerberg-doesn-t-care-what-critics-say. 5 two hundred thousand users: Jeff Horwitz, Salvador Rodriguez, and Meghan Bobrowsky, “Company Documents Show Meta’s Flagship Metaverse Falling Short,” Wall Street Journal, October 15, 2022, www.wsj.com/articles/meta-metaverse-horizon-worlds-zuckerberg-facebook-internal-documents-11665778961. 6 “Why don’t we love the product”: Alex Heath, “Meta’s Flagship Metaverse App Is Too Buggy and Employees Are Barely Using It, Says Exec in Charge,” The Verge, October 6, 2022, www.theverge.com/2022/10/6/23391895/meta-facebook-horizon-worlds-vr-social-network-too-buggy-leaked-memo. 7 from Adi Robertson: Adi Robertson, “Meta Quest Pro Review: Get Me Out of Here,” The Verge, updated November 22, 2022, www.theverge.com/23451629/meta-quest-pro-vr-headset-horizon-review. 8 less than 60 percent: Mike Isaac and Cade Metz, “Skepticism, Confusion, Frustration: Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse Struggles,” New York Times, October 9, 2022, www.nytimes.com/2022/10/09/technology/meta-zuckerberg-metaverse.html. 9 an open letter: Meghan Bobrowsky, “Meta Investor Urges CEO Mark Zuckerberg to Slash Staff and Cut Costs,” Wall Street Journal, October 24, 2022, www.wsj.com/articles/meta-investor-urges-ceo-mark-zuckerberg-to-slash-staff-and-cut-costs-11666634172. 10 Zuckerberg holds: Katie Canales, “‘The Most Powerful Person Who’s Ever Walked the Face of the Earth’: How Mark Zuckerberg’s Stranglehold on Facebook Could Put the Company at Risk,” Business Insider, October 13, 2021, www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-control-facebook-whistleblower-key-man-risk-2021-10. 11 tried to back out: Jacob Kastrenakes, “Elon Musk Officially Tries to Bail on Buying Twitter,” The Verge, July 8, 2022, www.theverge.com/2022/7/8/23200961/elon-musk-files-back-out-twitter-deal-breach-of-contract. 12 carrying a sink: Elon Musk (@elonmusk), “Entering Twitter HQ—let that sink in!

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Prkachin, “Social Modeling Influences on Sensory Decision-Theory and Psychophysiological Indexes of Pain,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 36, no. 8 (1978), 805–15. 53 cultural evolution can be very fast: Joseph Patrick Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 219–20. 54 “It’s our collective brains”: Henrich, The Secret of Our Success, 212. 55 “Move Fast and Break Things”: Henry Blodget, “Mark Zuckerberg on Innovation,” BusinessInsider, October 1, 2009, https://web.archive.org/web/20210209195313/www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-innovation-2009-10?r=US&IR=T. 56 “I’ve researched and consulted on megaprojects”: Bent Flyvbjerg, “Make Megaprojects More Modular,” Harvard Business Review, November–December 2021, https://hbr.org/2021/11/make-megaprojects-more-modular. 57 Copenhagen’s City Circle Line: Flyvbjerg, “Make Megaprojects More Modular.” 58 partially opened in 2017: Nick Paumgarten, “The Second Avenue Subway Is Here!

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utm_source=pocket_saves. 21 “History suggests”: Joseph Patrick Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), loc. 3353, Kindle. 22 wrote a blog post: Brian Armstrong, “Coinbase Is a Mission Focused Company,” Coinbase (blog), September 29, 2018, www.coinbase.com/blog/coinbase-is-a-mission-focused-company. 23 More than one-third: Casey Newton, “Inside the All-Hands Meeting That Led to a Third of Basecamp Employees Quitting,” The Verge, May 3, 2021, www.theverge.com/2021/5/3/22418208/basecamp-all-hands-meeting-employee-resignations-buyouts-implosion. 24 made the right decision: Brian Armstrong (@brian_armstrong), “1/ Wanted to share some thoughts on the recent Coinbase story around our mission,” Twitter, 8:01 p.m., September 30, 2021, https://twitter.com/brian_armstrong/status/1443727729476530178. 25 “lumbering bureaucracy”: Kevin Roose, “The Metaverse Is Mark Zuckerberg’s Escape Hatch,” New York Times, October 29, 2021, www.nytimes.com/2021/10/29/technology/meta-facebook-zuckerberg.html. 26 a quarter of its workforce: Clare Duffy, “Meta’s Business Groups Cut in Latest Round of Layoffs,” CNN, May 24, 2023, https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/24/tech/meta-layoffs-business-groups/index.html. 27 “ways to be scrappier”: Naomi Nix, “Mark Zuckerberg Unveils ‘Scrappier’ Future at Meta After Layoffs,” Washington Post, May 25, 2023, www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/05/25/meta-layoffs-future-facebook-instagram-company/. 28 “As we add different groups”: Mark Zuckerberg, “Update on Meta’s Year of Efficiency,” About Facebook, March 14, 2023, https://about.fb.com/news/2023/03/mark-zuckerberg-meta-year-of-efficiency/. 29 “war against the bureaucracy”: Brad Stone, Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2022), 264. 30 advertising business: Mark Di Stefano and Jessica Toonkel, “Amazon’s Ad Staffers Flee amid Complaints of Bloat, Bureaucracy,” The Information, June 24, 2022, www.theinformation.com/articles/amazons-ad-staffers-flee-amid-complaints-of-bloat-bureaucracy. 31 at AWS: Kevin McLaughlin, “AWS’ New CEO Faces a Fresh Challenge: Bureaucracy,” The Information, July 12, 2021, www.theinformation.com/articles/aws-new-ceo-faces-a-fresh-challenge-bureaucracy. 32 “aging professional athletes”: Graham Averill, “The Secret to Athletic Longevity Is Surprisingly Simple,” Outside Online, May 17, 2018, www.outsideonline.com/health/training-performance/athletic-longevity-secrets-play-on-book/.

Television Is the New Television: The Unexpected Triumph of Old Media in the Digital Age
by Michael Wolff
Published 22 Jun 2015

While everywhere there was the belief, near absolute, that the future of media lay with some ever-transforming technology, twenty years into this revolution, the value of traditional media, even with big losses in print and music, dramatically grew, with an Ernst & Young study in 2014 finding traditional media and entertainment companies increasing “their lead as one of the most profitable industries,” with television margins as high as almost 50 percent. And yet, at the same time, there was the unquestioned certainty that technology had fundamentally altered media behavior and scale—Mark Zuckerberg would say in late 2014 that you can’t really build a business with fewer than a billion users—and hence the nature of media leadership and economics. In fact, Matt Stone’s South Park, continuing its remarkable seventeen-year run on Comedy Central, recently made a $30 million yearly digital deal with Hulu, while Funny or Die languished.

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Or, it might be because at an ultimate level of media, of strategic business decisions about it, and perhaps particularly among people in the technology business—that is, people decidedly not in the media business—it is hardly understood that there is a fundamental distinction or choice, or, more important, relationship, between fiction and nonfiction, between news and narrative, between storytelling and holding the public’s attention. Who wants to bet that such a balance, such an internal sort of algorithm, has ever crossed Mark Zuckerberg’s mind? Digital media defaulted to the belief that information was the currency: after all, the new medium could provide information faster, cheaper, and with greater individual specificity; the functional dream from the early Web and then in essence put into mass practice by Facebook and Twitter was a newspaper just for you.

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Her frequent presentations at sales meetings and industry events about the Facebook experience and the Facebook environment and the Facebook uniqueness, all in the kind of language that media companies use to sell and describe themselves, is peculiarly out of kilter with how Facebook itself, at its highest levels, describes itself and with what it seems to want to be. Mark Zuckerberg is a technology-focused multibillionaire who believes his company offers a central piece of functionality in everybody’s life. He seems at best impatient with if not contemptuous of media. From the beginning of his career and the earliest days of Facebook he has made sour pronouncements about advertising, seeing it, apparently, as a transitional revenue phase for the company.

Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire
by Bruce Nussbaum
Published 5 Mar 2013

Gigaom, April 25, 2012, accessed September 5, 2012, http://gigaom.com/2012/04/25/ can-you-learn-to-be-as-charismatic-as-steve-jobs/. 214 I saw Mark Zuckerberg: author’s notes, World Economic Forum in Davos, 2009. 214 Mark Zuckerberg was once: Nicholas Carlson, “The Facebook Movie Is an Act of Cold-Blooded Revenge—New Unpublished IMs Tell the Real Story,” Business Insider, September 21, 2010, accessed September 5, 2012, http://www.businessinsider.com/ facebook-movie-zuckerberg-ims#. 214 Zuckerberg is a master at finding: Henry Blodget, “The Maturation of the Billionaire Boy-Man,” New York magazine, May 6, 2012, accessed September 5, 2012, http://nymag.com/news/ features/mark-zuckerberg-2012-5/. 218 In her classic book: Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way (New York: Jeremy P.

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Wright Mills (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946). 211 When Facebook “went public”: http://stream.wsj.com/story/ facebook-ipo/SS-2-9640/, accessed September 5, 2012. 211 But in all the conversation: http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/ 1326801/000119312512034517/d287954ds1.htm#toc287954_10, accessed September 5, 2012. 211 In his IPO letter: Ibid. 211 To ensure that sentiment: Michael Hiltzik, “Facebook Shareholders Are Wedded to the Whims of Mark Zuckerberg,” Los Angeles Times, May 20, 2012, accessed September 5, 2012—http://arti cles.latimes.com/ 2012/may/20/business/la-fi-hiltzik-20120517. 211 Of course, the subsequent IPO: Roben Farzad, “Facebook: The Stock That Keeps on Dropping,” BusinessWeek, August 2, 2012, accessed October 15, 2012, http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-08-02/ facebook-the-stock-that-keeps-on-dropping; Jessica Guynn, “Facebook: Mark Zuckerberg Won’t Sell Stock for at Least One Year,” Los Angeles Times, September 4, 2012, accessed October 15, 2012, http://articles.latimes.com/2012/sep/04/ business/la-fi-tn-facebook-ceo-mark-zuckerberg-wont-sell-stock-for-at-least-one-year-20120904. 212 From the 1920s through much: Rakesh Khurana, interviews with author; Roger Martin, conversations with author; Rakesh Khurana, From Higher Aims to Hired Hands (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). 212 Back in 2004, when Sergey: http://investor.google.com/corporate/ 2004/ipo-founders-letter.html, accessed September 5, 2012. 212 “Sergey and I founded Google”: Ibid. 213 Though Steve Jobs is now: Olivia Fox Cabane, “Can You Learn to Be as Charismatic as Steve Jobs?”

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That’s where immersion comes in. IMMERSION It would be a fool’s errand to attempt to embody the dreams and aspirations of every culture. But not all of us want to remain in the culture we were born into. We want to explore new places, meet new people, and try out new ways of life. For every Mark Zuckerberg who built a new company upon the values of his generation, there are creative individuals who left their worlds behind in order to gain new skills in new areas. Howard Schultz was not born in an Italian coffee culture but traveled to Italy to learn what made it so special and then brought it back to the United States and built the coffee experience into what we know it to be today.

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US
by Rana Foroohar
Published 5 Nov 2019

Collins added, “We believe that in its evidence to the Committee Facebook has often deliberately sought to frustrate our work, by giving incomplete, disingenuous and at times misleading answers to our questions….Even if Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t believe he is accountable to the UK Parliament, he is to the billions of Facebook users across the world. Evidence uncovered by my Committee shows he still has questions to answer yet he’s continued to duck them, refusing to respond to our invitations directly or sending representatives who don’t have the right information. Mark Zuckerberg continually fails to show the levels of leadership and personal responsibility that should be expected from someone who sits at the top of one of the world’s biggest companies

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“For the first time,” says McNamee, “I realized that Facebook’s algorithms might favour incendiary messages over neutral ones.”11 What’s more, it was becoming clear that those algorithms might be leading to a more dangerous and polarized world, not to mention a less democratic one. He decided to do something about it. In October 2016, several days before the presidential election, McNamee reached out to Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg. These were people that he counted as friends, and he had every reason to believe they would listen to his concerns. He was, after all, the one who had advised Mark Zuckerberg to turn down Yahoo’s $1 billion offer to buy the company early on (a smart move given its current value); he’d also been the one to suggest that Zuck hire Google ad whiz Sheryl Sandberg to be COO of the company.

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Kreiss and McGregor, “Technology Firms Shape Political Communication.” 4. Ibid., 415. 5. Evan Osnos, “Can Mark Zuckerberg Fix Facebook Before It Breaks Democracy?” The New Yorker, September 17, 2018. 6. Joshua Green and Sasha Issenberg, “Inside the Trump Bunker, With 12 Days to Go,” Bloomberg, October 27, 2016. 7. Mueller, Robert S., III, “Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election,” Homeland Security Digital Library, March 2019, https://www.hsdl.org/​?abstract&did=824221. 8. Osnos, “Can Mark Zuckerberg Fix Facebook Before It Breaks Democracy?” 9. McNamee, Zucked, 7–8. 10.

The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America
by Margaret O'Mara
Published 8 Jul 2019

In those early months the site’s server space was paid for by a wealthy roommate and, at one particularly cash-strapped point, by Zuckerberg’s parents. It seemed unlikely to become the next world-changing tech company.19 That was, of course, before Mark Zuckerberg and his roommates moved to Palo Alto, secured money and mentorship, and became the runaway start-up success story of the decade, fodder for countless magazine cover stories, books, and one big-studio Hollywood film. Tech investors (and tech journalists) were perpetually seeking the next Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg fit the bill—extraordinarily driven, far-seeing, his technologist’s eyes on the prize even before he reached the legal drinking age.

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Rusli, “In Flip-Flops and Jeans, An Unconventional Venture Capitalist,” DealBook blog, The New York Times, October 6, 2011, https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/10/06/in-flip-flops-and-jeans-the-unconventional-venture-capitalist/, archived at https://perma.cc/C7X7-KWJ2; Eugene Kim, “Early Facebook Executive on Mark Zuckerberg,” Business Insider, November 23, 2014, https://www.businessinsider.com.au/chamath-palihapitiya-on-mark-zuckerberg-2014-11, archived at https://perma.cc/9CLK-S8RS [inactive]. 25. Caroline McCarthy, “Facebook f8: One Graph to Rule them All,” CNET, April 21, 2010, https://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-f8-one-graph-to-rule-them-all/, archived at https://perma.cc/W4T5-49CM.

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As Facebook’s user base skyrocketed and “like” buttons metastasized around the Web, the company attracted the attention of the FTC, which required Facebook to adopt stricter and more transparent privacy standards (Federal Trade Commission, Decision and Order in the Matter of Facebook, Inc., Docket No. C-4365, August 10, 2012). 26. Nick Bilton, “A Walk in the Woods with Mark Zuckerberg,” The New York Times, July 7, 2011, https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/07/a-walk-in-the-woods-with-mark-zuckerberg/, archived at https://perma.cc/86DU-LAWF. 27. Heather Brown, Emily Guskin, and Amy Mitchell, “The Role of Social Media in the Arab Uprisings,” Pew Research Center, November 28, 2012; Benjamin Gleason, “#Occupy Wall Street: Exploring Informal Learning About a Social Movement on Twitter,” American Behavioral Scientist 57, no. 7 (2013): 966–82; André Brock, “From the Blackhand Side: Twitter as a Cultural Conversation,” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 56, no. 4 (2012): 529–49; Russell Rickford, “Black Lives Matter: Toward a Modern Practice of Mass Struggle,” New Labor Forum 25, no. 1 (2016): 34–42. 28.

Attention Factory: The Story of TikTok and China's ByteDance
by Matthew Brennan
Published 9 Oct 2020

2018-09-05 https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/vine-and-musical-ly-transformed-the-music-industry-then-they-disappeared-will-history-repeat-itself/ Musical.ly has lots of users, not much ad traction 2017-09-05 https://digiday.com/marketing/musical-ly-starts-selling-ads/ Decoding the Global Rise of TikTok 2020-02-23 https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/decoding-global-rise-tiktok-ruonan-deng/ 对话 Musical.ly投资人：曾有人出价 15亿美金，但头条变现体系强 2017-11-19 http://tech.sina.com.cn/roll/2017-11-19/doc-ifynwnty4928120.shtml Visiting Musical.ly HQ in Shanghai | Shanghai Vlog 2017-10-17 https://youtu.be/F9EPQD9Zikg?t=352 Chapter 8: CRINGE!!! Evan Spiegel interview at DLD Conference Munich 20 2020-01-20 https://youtu.be/rW8mDQYrOnw?t=1877 Transcript of Mark Zuckerberg’s leaked internal Facebook meetings 2019-10-01 https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/1/20892354/mark-zuckerberg-full-transcript-leaked-facebook-meetings TikTok’s Growing Pains In The West: Attack of the Memes 2018-10-16 https://medium.com/@NateyBakes/tiktoks-growing-pains-in-the-west-attack-of-the-memes-b96e26593649 TikTok is cringy and that’s fine 2018-10-25 https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/10/what-tiktok-is-cringey-and-thats-fine/573871/ This Is What TikTok Users Think About The Internet Hating Them 2018-10-09 https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/krishrach/tiktok-twitter-thread-weird TikTok surges past 6M downloads in the US as celebrities join the app 2018-11-15 https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/15/18095446/tiktok-jimmy-fallon-tony-hawk-downloads-revenue The NFL joins TikTok in multi-year partnership 2019-09-03 https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/03/the-nfl-joins-tiktok-in-multi-year-partnership/ I can’t believe this happened at a TikTok meetup 2020-01-08 https://www.youtube.com/watch?

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The global landscape Applying this framework of internet informational distribution to look at the global market shortly after the founding of ByteDance reveals companies like Facebook were already embracing recommendation. “We want to give everyone in the world the best personalized newspaper in the world.” 89 were the words of Mark Zuckerberg in 2013, announcing a significant set of changes to the Facebook newsfeed. The American giant saw the adoption of machine learning as central to remaining competitive. The Facebook newsfeed was already adopting sophisticated technology to recommend an optimal mix of posts from friends and family, news media, adverts, and branded content.

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In contrast, Alibaba CEO Jack Ma, Tencent CEO Pony Ma, Baidu CEO Robin Li, and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman stand centrally and directly behind Chinese leader Xi Jinping. 116 Yiming learned to take greater care of his appearance. Previously staff had noted, “some strands (of his hair) would stick out sometimes because of a bad sleeping posture.” 117 At one point in his earlier career, inspired by Mark Zuckerberg’s well documented, efficient dress habits, he had bought 99 identical T-Shirts of the Chinese clothing brand Vanke and worn them one after another, for 99 days. 118 Now he was clean-cut and better dressed, occasionally even wearing a suit in public. Traveling to the United States to participate in an internet industry forum Yiming was pictured sat next to Microsoft’s Bill Gates, looking at ease.

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 7 Sep 2022

Why Nietzsche Is Misunderstood,” Guardian , October 6, 2018, https:// www .theguardian .com /books /2018 /oct /06 /exploding -nietzsche -myths -need -dynamiting.   78   übermensch wannabes : Alex Ross, “Nietzsche’s Eternal Return,” New Yorker , October 4, 2019, https:// www .newyorker .com /magazine /2019 /10 /14 /nietzsches -eternal -return.   78   “I no longer believe” : Ross, “Nietzsche’s Eternal Return.”   79   “it’s hard to find actual examples” : Steven Levy, “Google’s Larry Page on Why Moon Shots Matter,” Wired , January 17, 2013, https:// www .wired .com /2013 /01 /ff -qa -larry -page /.   80   Zuckerberg told The New Yorker : Evan Osnos, “Can Mark Zuckerberg Fix Facebook before It Breaks Democracy?,” New Yorker , September 10, 2018, https:// www .newyorker .com /magazine /2018 /09 /17 /can -mark -zuckerberg -fix -facebook -before -it -breaks -democracy.   81   “I don’t expect” : Rick Merritt, “Moore’s Law Dead by 2022, Expert Says,” EE Times , August 27, 2013, https:// www .eetimes .com /moores -law -dead -by -2022 -expert -says /.

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As Shoshana Zuboff chronicled in her book Surveillance Capitalism , instead of simply continuing to deliver search results to users, Google got into the even more profitable business of delivering user data to its real customers—the market researchers seeking to target users and manipulate their behavior. Likewise, Mark Zuckerberg left college to pursue his (probably borrowed ) dream of building an online social network for college students to make friends and get dates. After taking capital from Peter Thiel and others, however, his business model shifted from serving ads to selling data. The longer and more emotionally engaged we are with the platform, the more Facebook can learn about us.

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He creates a new world, brings his followers through a great exodus—or exit strategy—to salvation, while the rest of humanity is left behind. For all the claim to originality, many of these tech titans model themselves after historical figures they heard about before drop ping out of school. Mark Zuckerberg is famously obsessed with Roman emperor Augustus Caesar, who is often credited with developing the network of roads and the courier system through which Rome administered its imperial expansion over several centuries. “Basically, through a really harsh approach, he established two hundred years of world peace,” Zuckerberg told The New Yorker .

Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts
by Jill Abramson
Published 5 Feb 2019

Graham later told me: Donald Graham, interviewed by Jill Abramson, Washington, D.C., May 4, 2017. Zuckerberg, according to a history: David Kirkpatrick, “Mark Zuckerberg: The Temptation of Facebook’s CEO,” CNN Money, May 6, 2010, https://money.cnn.com/2010/05/06/technology/facebook_excerpt_full.fortune/index.htm. Eventually Graham offered $6 million: Ibid. According to an account: Ibid. They and Zuckerberg went to: Sarah Ellison, “Ghosts in the Newsroom,” Vanity Fair, March 7, 2012, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2012/04/washington-post-watergate. The man persuaded: David Kirkpatrick, “Mark Zuckerberg: The Temptation of Facebook’s CEO,” CNN Money, May 6, 2010, https://money.cnn.com/2010/05/06/technology/facebook_excerpt_full.fortune/index.htm.

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He would explain this watershed moment: Jonah Peretti, presentation to the University of Florida, March 2014, https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2014/may/12/buzzfeed-founder-quality-religions-dont-just-go-vi/. This was a welcome departure: Fred Vogelstein, “The Wired Interview: Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg,” Wired, June 29, 2009, https://www.wired.com/2009/06/mark-zuckerberg-speaks/. “If I had to guess: John Cassidy, “Me Media,” New Yorker, May 15, 2006, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/05/15/me-media. Five years after its public launch: Smriti Bhagat et al., “Three and a Half Degrees of Separation,” Facebook Research, February 4, 2016, https://research.fb.com/three-and-a-half-degrees-of-separation/.

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Then That Became a Liability,” Washington Post, January 22, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/inside-facebooks-year-of-reckoning/2018/01/22/cfd7307c-f4c3-11e7-beb6-c8d48830c54d_story.html?utm_term=.f7d8e787ed34; Max Read, “Does Even Mark Zuckerberg Know What Facebook Is?,” New York, October 1, 2017, http://nymag.com/selectall/2017/10/does-even-mark-zuckerberg-know-what-facebook-is.html. When the network welcomed: John Lanchester, “You Are the Product,” London Review of Books 39, no. 16 (August 17, 2017), https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n16/john-lanchester/you-are-the-product. Sixty-two percent of Americans: Elisa Shearer and Jeffrey Gottfried, “News Use across Social Media Platforms 2017,” Pew Research Center/Journalism.org, September 7, 2017, http://www.journalism.org/2017/09/07/news-use-across-social-media-platforms-2017/.

Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy
by Alex Moazed and Nicholas L. Johnson
Published 30 May 2016

The answer here is not to limit the market power of these platform businesses—a move that would likely diminish overall consumer welfare—but rather to address the behavior of these businesses in specific areas of concern. 5 Designing a Billion-Dollar Company How the Core Transaction Explains Tinder’s Success The trick isn’t adding stuff. It’s taking away. —Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook Now that you understand what makes a platform tick, it’s time to look at how to build one. When it comes to business model design, linear businesses have it easy. Not only is the design process much simpler, but there are established frameworks you can work within.

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Another of Facebook’s early competitors was houseSYSTEM, a social network created by a Harvard senior in September 2003, a few months before Facebook was founded. HouseSYSTEM allowed Harvard students to buy and sell books and review courses, among other features. It also allowed them to upload photos to what it called a “Universal Face Book.” Sam Lessin, a classmate of Mark Zuckerberg’s who would later go on to become head of product at Facebook, remembered using houseSYSTEM. He called it “a huge sprawling system that could do all sorts of things.” A few hundred students signed up, but houseSYSTEM never got much traction. After Facebook launched, houseSYSTEM’s creator, Aaron Greenspan, met with Zuckerberg at Harvard and invited Zuckerberg to incorporate houseSYSTEM into Facebook, but Zuckerberg declined.

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“Our job is to create incentives and disincentives to produce the best behavior, the best outcome, from a bunch of people you’ll never meet.” In effect, he was creating public policy for Twitter’s developer community. This attitude is surprisingly common among those who have spent time leading platforms. In fact, it was a key reason that Mark Zuckerberg hired Sheryl Sandberg as Facebook’s chief operating officer. “We spent a lot of time talking about her experience in government,” Zuckerberg said. “In a lot of ways, Facebook is more like a government than a traditional company. We have this large community of people, and more than other technology companies, we’re really setting policies.”11 Sarver agrees.

The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion
by Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell
Published 19 Jul 2021

Adam Neumann became friends with Richards, a handsome, charismatic film buff who often stayed in the couple’s apartment. The two men spent nights downing bottles of Don Julio 1942 tequila—which retailed for more than $125 apiece—at the Waverly Inn, the scene-y West Village spot owned by Vanity Fair’s editor, Graydon Carter. Richards, in turn, introduced Neumann to Sean Parker, the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s mentor and early investor who was played by Justin Timberlake in the 2010 movie The Social Network. Neumann loved the movie. While many critics dwelled on the withering portrait of a narcissistic Zuckerberg and the cutthroat tactics he and Parker used to build Facebook—Neumann came away with a different impression.

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By 2010, the herd had begun to question the traditional wisdom, influenced by a few data points that were impossible to ignore. Amazon was booming, having been led since its inception by Jeff Bezos, who had transformed the company from the plucky bookselling firm started in his garage to the world’s dominant e-commerce company. Mark Zuckerberg stayed firmly in control of Facebook, by far the most successful new tech company started in the twenty-first century. Then there was Apple’s co-founder Steve Jobs, who had a cultlike following in the Valley and was in the midst of making Apple the country’s most valuable corporation. What these startups-turned-juggernauts had in common was not lost on venture capitalists: driven founders with a gift for salesmanship.

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Benchmark backed both Snapchat and Uber, two companies in which the CEOs had enhanced voting power that gave them a firm grip on their companies. Amid the influx of money from mutual funds and others, the balance of power had shifted in Silicon Valley. Founders who looked and acted the part—decisive leadership, expansive vision—had plenty of sway over investors eager to place bets on the next Steve Jobs. Mark Zuckerberg had secured his control over Facebook by selling shares to Russian investors years before the IPO, in exchange for the ability to vote those shares. He also had shares with ten times the votes of a standard share. Travis Kalanick of Uber and Evan Spiegel of Snapchat struck similar arrangements.

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power
by Jacob Helberg
Published 11 Oct 2021

sequence=5&isAllowed=y. 6 Craig Silverman and Lawrence Alexander, “How Teens in the Balkans Are Duping Trump Supporters With Fake News,” BuzzFeed News, November 3, 2016, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became-a-global-hub-for-pro-trump-misinfo#.fu2okXaeKo. 7 Kurt Wagner, “Mark Zuckerberg says it’s ‘crazy’ to think fake news stories got Donald Trump elected,” Recode, November 11, 2016, https://www.vox.com/2016/11/11/13596792/facebook-fake-news-mark-zuckerberg-donald-trump. 8 Amit Singhal, “ ‘Revenge porn’ and Search,” Google Public Policy Blog, June 19, 2015, https://publicpolicy.googleblog.com/2015/06/revenge-porn-and-search.html. 9 P. W. Singer and Emerson T.

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Perry, “Only 52 US companies have been on the Fortune 500 since 1955, thanks to the creative destruction that fuels economic prosperity,” American Enterprise Institute, May 22, 2019, https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/only-52-us-companies-have-been-on-the-fortune-500-since-1955-thanks-to-the-creative-destruction-that-fuels-economic-prosperity/. 86 Kia Kokalitcheva, “This is the latest $1 billion tech company to IPO,” Fortune, May 20, 2015, https://fortune.com/2015/05/20/shopify-ipo-pricing/. 87 Y Charts, Shopify Market Cap, https://ycharts.com/companies/SHOP/market_cap. 88 “Mark Zuckerberg Opening Statement Transcript Antitrust Hearing July 29,” Rev, July 29, 2020, https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/mark-zuckerberg-opening-statement-transcript-antitrust-hearing-july-29. 89 Tom Wheeler, “Digital competition with China starts with competition at home,” Brookings Institution, April 2020, https://www.brookings.edu/research/digital-competition-with-china-starts-with-competition-at-home/. 90 “US Venture Capital Investment Surpasses $130 Billion in 2019 for Second Consecutive Year,” PitchBook, January 14, 2020, https://pitchbook.com/media/press-releases/us-venture-capital-investment-surpasses-130-billion-in-2019-for-second-consecutive-year. 91 “2020 Global Startup Outlook,” Silicon Valley Bank, https://www.svb.com/globalassets/library/uploadedfiles/content/trends_and_insights/reports/startup_outlook_report/suo_global_report_2020-final.pdf. 92 Mark Zuckerberg, “Hearing Before the United States House of Representatives,” Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law, July 29, 2020, https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU05/20200729/110883/HHRG-116-JU05-Wstate-ZuckerbergM-20200729.pdf. 93 Jeff Desjardins, “China’s home-grown tech giants are dominating their US competitors,” Business Insider, February 7, 2018, https://www.businessinsider.com/chinas-home-grown-tech-giants-are-dominating-their-us-competitors-2018-2. 94 Tugba Sabanoglu, “Global market share of Amazon 2020, by region,” Statista, December 1, 2020, https://www.statista.com/statistics/1183515/amazon-market-share-region-worldwide/. 95 Arjun Kharpal, “China’s Tencent is now bigger than Facebook after adding around $200 billion to its value this year,” CNBC, July 29, 2020, https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/29/tencent-is-now-bigger-than-facebook-after-shares-surged-this-year.html. 96 Ganesh Sitaraman, “Too Big to Prevail: The National Security Case for Breaking Up Big Tech,” Foreign Affairs, March 2020, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2020-02-10/too-big-prevail. 97 “Asymmetric Competition: A Strategy for China & Technology,” China Strategy Group, https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/20463382/final-memo-china-strategy-group-axios-1.pdf. 98 “IREX Ukraine public service announcement for the Citizen Media Literacy Project (Ukrainian),” YouTube, February 26, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?

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The gold rush of 1849 had triggered the population influx that made California a state. In the early 2010s, Silicon Valley felt like a modern-day gold rush. Discoveries were bursting forth, and companies were hiring left and right. Engineers living off ramen noodles and Soylent became millionaires in a matter of months. In 2010, Time magazine named Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg its Person of the Year.7 A couple of years later, the cover of Forbes featured Twitter and Square founder Jack Dorsey under the headline “America’s Best Entrepreneurs.”8 When I arrived in the Bay in the summer of 2014, Airbnb, which had started six years earlier as an air mattress in its founders’ San Francisco living room, had recently closed a $475 million funding round.9 Uber had just launched Uber Pool.10 Within a year, Fitbit had IPOed.11 Palantir, the data analytics company, was valued at $20 billion.12 The term “unicorn” had originally been coined to describe the rarity of billion-dollar start-ups; by mid-2015, there were over 130 unicorns.13 By the middle of the decade, 62 percent of adult Americans were on Zuckerberg’s Facebook.14 Sleek Apple Watches started appearing on the wrists of the well connected, and Amazon Echos began dotting living rooms around the United States.

The New Kingmakers
by Stephen O'Grady
Published 14 Mar 2013

Steve Jobs believed that an elite talent was 25 times more valuable to Apple than an average alternative. For Jobs, this was critical to Apple’s resurgence: That’s probably…certainly the secret to my success. It’s that we’ve gone to exceptional lengths to hire the best people. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg agrees, saying in a 2010 interview: Someone who is exceptional in their role is not just a little better than someone who is pretty good. They are 100 times better. For Bill Gates, the number was 10,000 times better. If any of these assertions are even approximately correct, the cost of an elite chef or a few kegs of beer pales next to the expected return from the technical talent that these perks could potentially attract.

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And when the technology is included in the transaction, it is frequently released as open source post-acquisition. The people, by contrast, are the real asset. Facebook’s 2008 acquisition of FriendFeed, for example, cost the company $50 million dollars. How did Facebook justify the acquisition? “We really wanted to get Bret [Taylor],” said Mark Zuckerberg of the man who is now Facebook’s CTO. Joe Hewitt, meanwhile, who came in the Parakey acquisition, wrote Facebook’s first iPhone application. And Gowalla’s Josh Williams is now the product manager for locations and events at Facebook. In spite of the premiums and the obvious inefficiency of practices like acqhiring, there is no evidence that the labor market will equalize in the near term.

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Besides being illegal, this practice is perhaps the best indication yet of the value attached to technologists, as companies are in effect saying: “developers are so valuable we will act illegally to retain them.” The non-hiring pact seems to suggest that companies like Apple, Google, and Intel agree with the high valuation Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg place on the most skilled developers, but what about the world outside of Silicon Valley? There, too, the valuation of developers is at an all-time high. In New York City, for example, traditional financial services employers are competing with industries like advertising, healthcare, and even defense over developers with strong quantitative analysis skills.

The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age
by David E. Sanger
Published 18 Jun 2018

Google, meanwhile, tried a different approach: The YouTube Team, “Bringing New Redirect Method Features to YouTube,” Official YouTube Blog, July 20, 2017, youtube.googleblog.com/2017/07/bringing-new-redirect-method-features.html. “Personally I think the idea that fake news on Facebook”: Mark Zuckerberg, interview by David Kirkpatrick, “In Conversation with Mark Zuckerberg,” Techonomy, November 17, 2016, techonomy.com/conf/te16/videos-conversations-with-2/in-conversation-with-mark-zuckerberg/. The president took him into a private room: Adam Entous, Elizabeth Dwoskin, and Craig Timberg, “Obama Tried to Give Zuckerberg a Wake-Up Call over Fake News on Facebook,” Washington Post, September 24, 2017, www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/obama-tried-to-give-zuckerberg-a-wake-up-call-over-fake-news-on-facebook/2017/09/24/15d19b12-ddac-4ad5-ac6e-ef909e1c1284_story.html?

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the existence of the NSA program: Barton Gellman and Laura Poitras, “U.S., British Intelligence Mining Data from Nine U.S. Internet Companies in Broad Secret Program,” Washington Post, June 7, 2016, www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-intelligence-mining-data-from-nine-us-internet-companies-in-broad-secret-program/2013/06/06/3a0c0da8-cebf-11e2-8845-d970ccb04497_story.html. Mark Zuckerberg posted a heated defense: Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook post, June 7, 2013, www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10100828955847631. a long history of cooperation: Julia Angwin, Charlie Savage, Jeff Larson, Henrik Moltke, Laura Poitras, James Risen, “AT&T Helped U.S. Spy on Internet on a Vast Scale,” New York Times, August 16, 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/us/politics/att-helped-nsa-spy-on-an-array-of-internet-traffic.html.

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Sanger, and Scott Shane, “The Perfect Weapon: How Russian Cyberpower Invaded the U.S.,” New York Times, December 13, 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/us/politics/russia-hack-election-dnc.html. CHAPTER XI: THREE CRISES IN THE VALLEY “If you had asked me”: Kevin Roose and Sheera Frenkel, “Mark Zuckerberg’s Reckoning: ‘This Is a Major Trust Issue,’ ” New York Times, March 22, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/03/21/technology/mark-zuckerberg-q-and-a.html. Twenty minutes after: “Paris Attacks: What Happened on the Night,” BBC News, December 9, 2015, www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-34818994. “be unforgiving with the barbarians from Daesh”: Adam Nossiter, Aurelien Breeden, and Katrin Bennhold, “Three Teams of Coordinated Attackers Carried Out Assault on Paris, Officials Say; Hollande Blames ISIS,” New York Times, November 15, 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/11/15/world/europe/paris-terrorist-attacks.html.

Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead
by Sheryl Sandberg
Published 11 Mar 2013

Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever, Ask for It: How Women Can Use the Power of Negotiation to Get What They Really Want (New York: Bantam Dell, 2008), 253. 23. For more information and advice about how to be “relentlessly pleasant,” see ibid., 251–66. 24. E. B. Boyd, “Where Is the Female Mark Zuckerberg?,” San Francisco, December 2011, http://​www.​modern​luxury.​com/​san-​francisco/​story/​where-​the-​female-​mark-​zuckerberg. 25. Jessica Valenti, “Sad White Babies with Mean Feminist Mommies,” Jessica Valenti blog, June 19, 2012, http://​jessi​cavalenti.​tumblr.​com/​post/​254655​02300/​sad-​white-​babies-​with-​mean-​feminist-​mommies-​the. 4. IT’S A JUNGLE GYM, NOT A LADDER 1.

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Both male and female colleagues often resist working with a woman who has negotiated for a higher salary because she’s seen as more demanding than a woman who refrained from negotiating.17 Even when a woman negotiates successfully for herself, she can pay a longer-term cost in goodwill and future advancement.18 Regrettably, all women are Heidi. Try as we might, we just can’t be Howard. When I was negotiating with Facebook’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg for my compensation, he made me an offer that I thought was fair. We had been having dinner several nights a week for more than a month and a half, discussing Facebook’s mission and his vision for the future. I was ready to accept the job. No, I was dying to accept the job. My husband, Dave, kept telling me to negotiate, but I was afraid of doing anything that might botch the deal.

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We all want a job or role that truly excites and engages us. This search requires both focus and flexibility, so I recommend adopting two concurrent goals: a long-term dream and an eighteen-month plan. I could never have connected the dots from where I started to where I am today. For one thing, Mark Zuckerberg was only seven years old when I graduated from college. Also, back then, technology and I did not exactly have a great relationship. I used Harvard’s computer system only once as an undergraduate, to run regressions for my senior thesis on the economics of spousal abuse. The data was stored on large, heavy magnetic tapes that I had to lug in big boxes across campus, cursing the entire way and arriving in a sweaty mess at the sole computer center, which was populated exclusively with male students.

I Hate the Internet: A Novel
by Jarett Kobek
Published 3 Nov 2016

by Zadie Smith, a British writer with a lot of eumelanin in the basale stratum of her epidermis. Zadie Smith’s essay pointed out that the questions Facebook asked of its users appeared to have been written by a twelve year old. But these questions weren’t written by a twelve year old. They were written by Mark Zuckerberg. Mark Zuckerberg was a billionaire. Mark Zuckerberg was such a billionaire that he was the boss of other billionaires. He was Sheryl Sandberg’s boss. J. Karacehennem thought that he knew something about Facebook that Zadie Smith, in her decency, hadn’t imagined. “The thing is,” said J. Karacehennem, whose last name was Turkish for Black Hell, “that we’ve spent like, what, two or three hundred years wrestling with existentialism, which really is just a way of asking, Why are we on this planet?

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Facebook made its money through an Internet web and mobile platform which advertised cellphones, feminine hygiene products and breakfast cereals. This web and mobile platform was also a place where hundreds of millions of people offered up too much information about their personal lives. Facebook was invented by Mark Zuckerberg, who didn’t have much eumelanin in the basale stratum of his epidermis. What is your gender? asked Facebook. What is your relationship status? asked Facebook. What is your current city? asked Facebook. What is your name? asked Facebook. What are your favorite movies? asked Facebook. What is your favorite music?

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Facebook is amazing because finally we understand why we have hometowns and why we get into relationships and why we eat our stupid dinners and why we have names and why we own idiotic cars and why we try to impress our friends. Why are we here, why do we do all of these things? At last we can offer a solution. We are on Earth to make Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg richer. There is an actual, measurable point to our striving. I guess what I’m saying, really, is that there’s always hope.” chapter four Having worked in the belly of the beast, Jeremy Winterbloss understood the comic industry’s traditions of racism and sexism. Any product not delivered by White men would receive less orders than products offered by White men.

Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth
by Elizabeth Williamson
Published 8 Mar 2022

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 8 Kara Swisher, “Zuckerberg: The Recode Interview,” Vox, October 8, 2018, https://www.vox.com/2018/7/18/17575156/mark-zuckerberg-interview-facebook-recode-kara-swisher. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 9 Monika Bickert, “Removing Holocaust Denial Content,” Meta-Facebook, October 12, 2020, https://about.fb.com/news/2020/10/removing-holocaust-denial-content. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 10 Leonard Pozner and Veronique De La Rosa, “An Open Letter to Mark Zuckerberg: Our Child Died at Sandy Hook—Why Let Facebook Lies Hurt Us Even More?,” Guardian, July 25, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/25/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-sandy-hook-parents-open-letter.

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BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 3 Nicholas Confessore, “Cambridge Analytica and Facebook: The Scandal and the Fallout So Far,” New York Times, April 4, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/us/politics/cambridge-analytica-scandal-fallout.html. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 4 “Mark Zuckerberg Testimony: Senators Question Facebook’s Commitment to Privacy,” New York Times, April 10, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/10/us/politics/mark-zuckerberg-testimony.html. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 5 “Data Protection: Rules for the Protection of Personal Data Inside and Outside the EU,” European Commission, https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-topic/data-protection_en.

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BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 11 Kurt Wagner and Rani Molla, “Facebook’s User Growth Has Hit a Wall,” Vox, July 25, 2018, https://www.vox.com/2018/7/25/17614426/facebook-fb-earnings-q2-2018-user-growth-troubles. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 12 Janet Burns, “Sandy Hook Parents Decry Facebook’s Weak Moderation in Open Letter to Mark Zuckerberg,” Forbes, July 27, 2018, https://www.forbes.com/sites/janetwburns/2018/07/27/sandy-hook-parents-decry-facebooks-weak-moderation-in-open-letter-to-mark-zuckerberg. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 13 Casey Newton, “Facebook’s Forecast for the Future Looks Suddenly Bleak,” The Verge, July 26, 2018, https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/26/17615330/facebook-earnings-forecast-user-growth-revenue.

Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business
by Ken Auletta
Published 4 Jun 2018

And when it was revealed that Facebook’s algorithms inadvertently enabled advertisers to target consumers with cringe-worthy keywords like “Jew hater,” and a Russian troll farm secretly purchased $100 million of ads to spread “fake news” to further polarize Americans during the 2016 presidential contest, founder Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged the limitations of his managers to control the algorithms. “I wish I could tell you we’re going to be able to catch all bad content in our system,” he announced in September 2017. “I wish I could tell you we’re going to be able to stop all interference, but that wouldn’t be realistic.” This prompted Kevin Roose of the New York Times to label this Facebook’s “Frankenstein moment,” likening this to Mary Shelley’s book, when the scientist—Dr. Frankenstein—realizes his robot creature “has gone rogue.” In October 2017, Mark Zuckerberg sheepishly admitted he should not have been so quick to defend the ability of Facebook’s machines to block “fake” news pushed by Russian hackers to subvert the Clinton presidential campaign.

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Only four months later a headhunter called and asked if she would meet with Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook. At first she said no. “Carolyn was really torn,” Kassan recalls. “She’s a very ethical and loyal person. But this was an opportunity of a lifetime.” Eventually she weakened, and on the way to Australia for Microsoft she stopped in the Valley on a Sunday to meet with Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg. She spent a full day at Facebook. “I knew in my heart that’s where I wanted to be,” she says. “It was so much more entrepreneurial. Advertising was the entire business of Facebook, whereas at Microsoft it was a tiny piece.” Everson was the same age as Sheryl Sandberg, forty, and like her was a former Baker Scholar at the Harvard Business School and extremely well connected.

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The other barrier impeding direct Facebook competion, Andrew Robertson cautions: “Why would they trade their forty percent profit margins for ours?” At their peril, agencies forget that Silicon Valley companies like Facebook take pride in being disrupters, in reducing costs and better serving customers by offering less “friction” and shoving aside what they see as superfluous middlemen. Mark Zuckerberg’s famous corporate mantra at Facebook used to be “Move fast and break things.” (In 2014, Facebook changed it to “Move fast with stable infra,” which doesn’t have quite the same edge to it, no doubt deliberately.) Unlike most agencies, Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s vice president of global communications, marketing, and public policy says, Facebook takes “the Wayne Gretzky approach to business.

Trees on Mars: Our Obsession With the Future
by Hal Niedzviecki
Published 15 Mar 2015

(“He was definitely the youngest and most articulate entrepreneur in training that I know of at a Startup Weekend,” Marc Nager, the executive director of Startup Weekend, tells a tech commentator.)45 A promo e-mail I receive goes: “Want to be a marketing leader? Use the entrepreneurial techniques that made Mark Zuckerberg a success, says Ekaterina Walter, best-selling author of Think Like Zuck.” Even the unlovable likes of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is a hero. Here’s a glowing assessment of Zuckerberg in the New York Times on the eve of Facebook’s multibillion dollar IPO: “Mr. Zuckerberg’s success is an object lesson in what works in crowded, competitive Silicon Valley: Remain in charge, stave off potential predators and expand the company so quickly that no one can challenge the boss.”46 (Note: speedy constant expansion—keeping everyone in a constant state of change—that’s the way you stay on top.)

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Oh and you can follow the little tike on Twitter @gaptoothkid. 46. Somini Sengupta, “Mark Zuckerberg Remains the Undisputed Boss at Facebook,” The New York Times, February 2, 2012, sec. Technology, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/03/technology/from-earliest-days-zuckerberg-focused-on-con-trolling-facebook.html. 47. Laura M. Holson, “Sean Parker Brings Facebook-Style Skills to New York Social Scene,” The New York Times, December 17, 2011, sec. Fashion & Style, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/18/fashion/sean-parker-brings-facebook-style-skills-to-new-york-social-scene.html. 48. Sengupta, “Mark Zuckerberg Remains the Undisputed Boss at Facebook.” 49.

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They offer permanent connection to the ever-flowing tide of pop culture, to the possibilities of shape-shifting ourselves right into the future. In 2006, inspired by the empowering possibilities of connectivity, the Time magazine Person of the Year was “You.” The 2010 Time Person of the Year was Mark Zuckerberg.35 “You” aren’t good enough anymore. The rhetoric of special, of human hubris, continues to push into new terrain. Today it’s not just the present that we are repeatedly urged to shape and control; today, the future, too, is something that individuals are being told to contest, buy, sell and bring into being.

How to Build a Billion Dollar App: Discover the Secrets of the Most Successful Entrepreneurs of Our Time
by George Berkowski
Published 3 Sep 2014

mg= reno64-wsj. 17 ‘Small Retailers Reap the Benefits of Selling on Amazon, but Challenges Remain’, article on InternetRetailer.com, 14 February 2014, www.internetretailer.com/mobile500/. 18 Bill Siwicki, ‘It’s Official: Mobile Devices Surpass PCs in Online Retail’, article on InternetRetailer.com, 1 October 2013, www.internetretailer.com/2013/10/01/its-official-mobile-devices-surpass-pcs-online-retail. 19 ‘Mobile Commerce Comes of Age’, article on InternetRetailer.com, 24 September 2013, www.internetretailer.com/2013/09/24/mobile-commerce-comes-age. 20 ‘Gartner Says Worldwide PC Shipments Declined 6.9 Percent in Fourth Quarter of 2013’, article on Gartner.com, 9 January 2014, www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2647517. 21 Mary Meeker and Liang Wu, May 2013, slide 31, op. cit. 21 In-Soo Nam, ‘A Rising Addiction Among Youths: Smartphones’, article on WSJ.com, 23 July 2013, online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324263404578615162292157222.html. 23 ‘Americans Can’t Put Down Their SmartPhones, Even During Sex’, article on Jumio.com, 11 July 2013, www.jumio.com/2013/07/americans-cant-put-down-their-smartphones-even-during-sex/. 24 Drew Olanoff, ‘Mark Zuckerberg: Our Biggest Mistake was Betting Too Much on HTML5’, article on TechCrunch.com, 11 September 2012, TechCrunch.com/2012/09/11/mark-zuckerberg-our-biggest-mistake-with-mobile-was-betting-too-much-on-html5/. 25 Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs, Little, Brown: London, 2012, p. 501. 26 ‘Standish Newsroom – Open Source’, press release, Boston, April 2008, blog.standishgroup.com/pmresearch. 27 Richard Rothwell, ‘Creating Wealth with Free Software’, article on FreeSoftwareMagazine.com, 8 May 2012, www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/creating_wealth_free_software. 28 ‘Samsung Elec Says Gear Smartwatch Sales Hit 800,000 in 2 Months’, article on Reuters.com, 19 November 2013, www.reuters.com/article/2013/11/19/samsung-gear-idUSL4N0J41VR20131119. 29 Jay Yarow, ‘Meet the Team of Experts Apple Assembled To Create The iWatch, Its Next Industry-Defining Product’, article on BusinessInsider.com. 18 July 2013, www.BusinessInsider.com/iwatch-sensors-2013-7. 30 Macelo Ballve, ‘Wearable Gadgets Are Still Not Getting The Attention They Deserve – Here’s Why They Will Create A Massive New Market’, article on BusinessInsider.com, 29 August 2013, www.BusinessInsider.com/wearable-devices-create-a-new-market-2013-8.

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The challenges with Web apps are numerous, from ensuring compatibility with mobile Web browsers and all their different versions – which involves a lot of testing – to complexities around mobile Web browsers being able to reliably access sensors (such as the microphone, compass or accelerometer) on your phone, and all the way through to how fast the Web app will run if it hasn’t been designed to run specifically on your phone. Facebook famously tried to pursue Web apps, only to have CEO Mark Zuckerberg do an about-turn in 2012, stating that it was his ‘single biggest mistake’,24 due to those same complexity and performance issues inherent in Web apps. If it hadn’t been for Apple Board member Art Levinson petitioning Jobs, the platform might never have been opened up. ‘I called him half a dozen times to lobby for the potential of the apps’, but Jobs was against them, says Levinson, ‘partly because he felt his team did not have the bandwidth to figure out all the complexities that would be involved in policing third-party app developers.’25 It was definitely a valid point: Apple does check every single app submitted to the App Store before it’s released to the public, which has a certain cost and overheads associated with it.

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I admire Kevin Systrom, Instagram’s CEO, for possessing such a clear vision and such an ability to build a singularly brilliant app on a single platform. The final twist to the story – doubling Instagram’s valuation in a mere four days – is the stuff of Silicon Valley legend. Instagram marked a turning point in Internet history: it was the first billion-dollar acquisition of an app. It led to speculation that Mark Zuckerberg had lost his mind and that Silicon Valley crazy-think was back in full force. Were people deluded into thinking it was 1999 all over again? On the surface, Instagram was just a group of 16 developers hacking some software in a poky office above a pizza shop in Palo Alto. They hadn’t made a cent in revenues.

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley
by Corey Pein
Published 23 Apr 2018

He made me feel like a slacker. At the rate he was going, Toby would be the world’s first online summer camp billionaire before I figured out where to catch the bus. At least the drones were humble. The most unbearable tech scenesters were those who seemed most certain that they were destined to be the next Mark Zuckerberg. These fell into the final category—the bullies. The bullies were binge-drinking gym rats who, regardless of age, seemed perpetually twenty-five years old. Most were white, but Raj, a Desi, was Hacker Condo’s resident bully. By emulating the performative, coked-up machismo of their overlords in the finance sector, the bullies were determined to avoid the old stigma of the computer nerd as a simpering eunuch.

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There is, however, only one basketball court. An architect who designed custom luxury homes featured in magazines like Architectural Digest told me that nobody lived in those houses anyway. “The people who own them,” he said, “all have five others.” Some tech billionaires even owned five houses in the same place. Down in Palo Alto, Mark Zuckerberg purchased four properties adjacent to his $7 million five-bedroom home for a combined $39 million—more than ten times their assessed value. The purpose of the land grab was to maintain the seclusion of Zuckerberg’s backyard and master bedroom. At around that time, the city of Palo Alto passed an ordinance restricting public records access in order to protect the privacy of certain “very high-profile tech-related residents.”

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Startups promised independence and financial freedom to people desperate for a taste of both. But most startup “chief executives” possessed little of either, for investors typically managed the process from founding to exit. I asked one cheerfully cynical VC over beers, “Are startup founders capital, or are they labor?” It depends, he replied. “Mark Zuckerberg is capital. But for every Zuckerberg there’s one hundred guys who basically got fired from their startups. They aren’t capital. They’re labor,” he said. They were ideal laborers, too, being allergic to the concept of solidarity. These founders worked like dogs, and until they struck it rich—which most never did—they often lived in barrackslike quarters not much more comfortable than my own.

Crushing It!: How Great Entrepreneurs Build Their Business and Influence—and How You Can, Too
by Gary Vaynerchuk
Published 30 Jan 2018

There are 1.15 billion daily active users: “The Top 20 Valuable Facebook Statistics—Updated November 2017,” Zephoria Digital Marketing, https://zephoria.com/top-15-valuable-facebook-statistics. 3. Mark Zuckerberg called video: Michelle Castillo, “Mark Zuckerberg Sees Video as a ‘Mega Trend’ and Is Gunning for YouTube,” CNBC.com, Feb. 1, 2017, www.cnbc.com/2017/02/01/mark-zuckerberg-video-mega-trend-like-mobile.html. 4. In 2016, he told BuzzFeed: Mat Honan, “Why Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg Went All In on Live Video,” BuzzFeed News, Apr. 6, 2016, https://www.buzzfeed.com/mathonan/why-facebook-and-mark-zuckerberg-went-all-in-on-live-video?utm_term=.fdwpA8ZBM#.tlGzWbZG7. 5. the platform is in the process: Jon Fingas, “Facebook Will Court ‘Millennials’ with Its Original Videos,” Engadget, May 24, 2017, https://www.engadget.com/2017/05/24/facebook-original-video-shows. 6.

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As you’ll see, the strides Facebook is making in video make it likely that it’s about to become more appealing to those young viewers. You want to be waiting for them when they start opening Facebook accounts. Facebook will get to the young demo; you can count on it. Don’t ever underestimate Mark Zuckerberg, and don’t ever bet against Facebook. How I’m Crushing It Costa Kapothanasis, Costa Oil—10 Minute Oil Change IG: @costakapo Constantine “Costa” Kapothanasis sounds like a practical man. The first-generation Greek American from Portland, Maine, won a Division 1 baseball scholarship to a college in Maryland.

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Eighteen months after this book is published, Facebook ad prices will have doubled or more. Take advantage of this wide-open runway while you still can and jump-start your brand awareness. Finally, as big as YouTube is, by the time this book is published, Facebook will be emerging as a fierce competitor in video. Mark Zuckerberg called video a “mega trend” of the same nature as mobile3 and has made it clear that video is Facebook’s future. In 2016, he told BuzzFeed, “I wouldn’t be surprised if you fast-forward five years and most of the content that people see on Facebook and are sharing on a day-to-day basis is video.”4 When Facebook wants something to work, it puts all its support behind it.

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI
by Frank Pasquale
Published 14 May 2020

Paul Lewis, “ ‘Utterly Horrifying’: Ex-Facebook Insider Says Covert Data Harvesting Was Routine,” Guardian, March 20, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/20/facebook-data-cambridge-analytica-sandy-parakilas; Nicol Perlroth and Sheera Frenkel, “The End for Facebook’s Security Evangelist,” New York Times, March 20, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/20/technology/alex-stamos-facebook-security.html. 25. Zeynep Tufekci, “Mark Zuckerberg Is in Denial,” New York Times, November 15, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/15/opinion/mark-zuckerberg-is-in-denial.html?_r=2. 26. Olivier Sylvain, “Intermediary Design Duties,” Connecticut Law Review 50, no. 1 (2018): 203; Danielle Keats Citron and Mary Anne Franks, “The Internet as a Speech Machine and Other Myths Confounding Section 230 Reform” (working paper, Public Law Research Paper No. 20-8, Boston University School of Law, Massachusetts, 2020); Carrie Goldberg, Nobody’s Victim: Fighting Psychos, Stalkers, Pervs, and Trolls (New York: Plume, 2019), 38. 27.

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Manoel Horta Ribeiro, Raphael Ottoni, Robert West, Virgílio A. F. Almeida, and Wagner Meira Jr., “Auditing Radicalization Pathways on YouTube,” arXiv:1908.08313 (2019), https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.08313. 31. Evan Osnos, “Can Mark Zuckerberg Fix Facebook before It Breaks Democracy?” New Yorker, September 10, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/09/17/can-mark-zuckerberg-fix-facebook-before-it-breaks-democracy. 32. James Bridle, “Something Is Wrong on the Internet,” Medium, https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-internet-c39c471271d2. 33. James Bridle, New Dark Age (New York: Verso, 2018), 230. 34.

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Ryan Singel, “Feds Pop Google for $500M for Canadian Pill Ads,” Wired, August 24, 2011, https://www.wired.com/2011/08/google-drug-fine/. 53. Drew Harwell, “AI Will Solve Facebook’s Most Vexing Problems, Mark Zuckerberg Says. Just Don’t Ask When or How,” Washington Post, April 11, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/04/11/ai-will-solve-facebooks-most-vexing-problems-mark-zuckerberg-says-just-dont-ask-when-or-how/?utm_term=.a0a7c340ac66. 54. Instagram, “Community Guidelines,” https://help.instagram.com/477434105621119; also Sarah Jeong, “I Tried Leaving Facebook. I Couldn’t,” Verge, April 28, 2018, https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/28/17293056/facebook-deletefacebook-social-network-monopoly. 55.

Fair Shot: Rethinking Inequality and How We Earn
by Chris Hughes
Published 20 Feb 2018

Fast Company once put me on its cover with the headline “The Kid Who Made Obama President,” as if I were single-handedly responsible. As soon as the house of cards collapsed, people zeroed in on the power of chance in my story and discounted everything else. I went overnight from a wunderkind to the hapless, lucky roommate of Mark Zuckerberg. The truth is somewhere in between. For the early part of my life, my story played like a movie reel for the American Dream. I grew up in a middle-class family in a small town in North Carolina. I studied hard, got financial aid to go to a fancy prep school, and then went to Harvard. My roommates and I started Facebook our sophomore year, and my early success there and at the Obama campaign garnered me acclaim and notoriety.

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My roommates and I started Facebook our sophomore year, and my early success there and at the Obama campaign garnered me acclaim and notoriety. Eventually, Facebook’s IPO made me a lot of money. I worked my way up, and I took every chance offered to me. I also got very lucky. That luck wasn’t just because I was Mark Zuckerberg’s roommate—much larger forces were at work. A collection of economic and political decisions over the past four decades has given rise to unprecedented wealth for a small number of fortunate people, collectively called the one percent. America has created and supported powerful economic forces—specifically globalization, rapid technological development, and the growth of finance—that have made the rise of Larry Page, Jeff Bezos, and other new billionaires possible.

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I was only 18 years old that fall, but I knew that friends from Hickory and peers at Harvard saw in me the kind of “up by the bootstraps” success our country supposedly makes possible. Then, with the success of Facebook, that story was put on steroids. My sophomore year of college, I chose to room with an acquaintance I had met freshman year, Mark Zuckerberg, in order to be placed in the same dorm as many of my female friends. Dustin Moskovitz and Billy Olson were paired with Mark and me by chance, and the four of us lived in a single suite in Kirkland House. We got along well, but we weren’t a tight-knit group. Mark launched multiple projects that fall—a study guide for a class and a now infamous “hot or not” website that compared Harvard students’ faces to one another.

Your Computer Is on Fire
by Thomas S. Mullaney , Benjamin Peters , Mar Hicks and Kavita Philip
Published 9 Mar 2021

Rachelle Hampton, “The Black Feminists Who Saw the Alt-Right Threat Coming,” Slate (April 23, 2019), https://slate.com/technology/2019/04/black-feminists-alt-right-twitter-gamergate.html. 4. Diana ben-Aaron, “Interview: Weizenbaum Examines Computers and Society,” The Tech (April 9, 1985), 2. 5. Laura Raphael, “Mark Zuckerberg Called People Who Handed Over Their Data ‘Dumb F****,’” Esquire (March 20, 2018), https://www.esquire.com/uk/latest-news/a19490586/mark-zuckerberg-called-people-who-handed-over-their-data-dumb-f/. 6. In October 2019, Zuckerberg began to claim that he started Facebook as a way for people to share news and opinions about the US invasion of Iraq. For more on Facebook’s early days from one of its first employees, see Kate Losse, The Boy Kings (New York: Free Press, 2005). 7.

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Migge and Léglise, “Language and Colonialism,” 6. 30. Crystal, English as a Global Language. 31. Randolph Quirk and Henry G. Widdowson, “English in the World,” Teaching and Learning the Language and Literatures (1985): 1–34. 32. Maeve Shearlaw, “Mark Zuckerberg Says Connectivity Is a Basic Human Right—Do You Agree?,” Guardian (January 3, 2014), https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/poverty-matters/2014/jan/03/mark-zuckerberg-connectivity-basic-human-right. 33. Bill Wasik, “Welcome to the Age of Digital Imperialism,” New York Times (June 4, 2015), https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/welcome-to-the-age-of-digital-imperialism.html. 34.

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Demetria Irwin, “Facebook, #Yeswecode Make a Splash at the Essence Music Festival,” Grio (July 6, 2014), https://thegrio.com/2014/07/06/facebook-yes-we-code-at-essence-music-festival/. 56. Irwin, “Facebook, #Yeswecode Make a Splash.” 57. Qeyno Labs, “A Black Mark Zuckerberg?,” press release (June 17, 2014), https://www.prlog.org/12337721-black-mark-zuckerberg-hackathon-empowers-youth-to-transform-nola-into-their-own-silicon-valley.html. 58. “Van Jones: Giving Black Geniuses Tools to Win with #Yeswecode,” Essence (May 2, 2014), https://www.essence.com/festival/2014-essence-festival/tk-van-jones/. 59.

What Would Google Do?
by Jeff Jarvis
Published 15 Feb 2009

Google’s founders and executives understand the change brought by the internet. That is why they are so successful and powerful, running what The Times of London dubbed “the fastest growing company in the history of the world.” The same is true of a few disruptive capitalists and quasi-capitalists such as Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook; Craig Newmark, who calls himself founder and customer service representative—no joke—at craigslist; Jimmy Wales, cofounder of Wikipedia; Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon; and Kevin Rose, creator of Digg. They see a different world than the rest of us and make different decisions as a result, decisions that make no sense under old rules of old industries that are now blown apart thanks to these new ways and new thinkers.

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Only if you’re lucky. New Society Elegant organization Elegant organization I sat, dumbfounded, in an audience of executives at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum International Media Council in Davos, Switzerland, as the head of a powerful news organization begged young Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, for his secret. Please, the publisher beseeched him, how can my publication start a community like yours? We should own a community, shouldn’t we? Tell us how. Zuckerberg, 22 at the time, is a geek of few words. Some assume his laconicism is a sign of arrogance—that and his habit of wearing sandals at big business conferences.

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When Facebook introduced the news feed that compiles tidbits from friends’ pages and activities, some users were freaked by what they perceived as a loss of privacy (even though anything going into news feeds was already public). Protest groups were formed inside the service, using Facebook to organize a fight against Facebook. Founder Mark Zuckerberg apologized for not warning users and explaining the feature well enough—communication was his real problem—and Facebook added new privacy controls. There was no exodus. Today, I don’t think any user would disagree that the news feed is a brilliant insight; it is the heart of the service. Though he makes mistakes, Zuckerberg makes them well by listening to customers and responding quickly.

Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble
by Dan Lyons
Published 4 Apr 2016

In May 2011, LinkedIn, a social network, went public and saw its shares more than double in their first day of trading. Later in 2011 Groupon and Zynga floated the biggest IPOs since Google in 2004. In May 2012 Facebook went public, in the biggest IPO in the history of the tech industry, one that placed a value of more than $100 billion on the social network that Mark Zuckerberg had started on a lark in his Harvard dorm room eight years before. Now everyone is trying to spot the next Facebook, and a new tech frenzy is taking shape. Back on the East Coast, where I spend my weekends, there is a vague sense that maybe things are getting a little bit frothy out in the Bay Area.

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On top of that, a lot of these new start-up founders are somewhat unsavory people. The old tech industry was run by engineers and MBAs; the new tech industry is populated by young, amoral hustlers, the kind of young guys (and they are almost all guys) who watched The Social Network and its depiction of Mark Zuckerberg as a lying, thieving, backstabbing prick—and left the theater wanting to be just like that guy. Many are fresh out of college, or haven’t even bothered to graduate. Their companies look and feel a lot like frat houses. Twitter, at one point, will literally hold a frat-themed party. In 2012 a new word has entered the Silicon Valley lexicon: brogrammer, which refers to a kind of macho dickhead who chugs from a beer bong and harasses women.

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Maybe the people at HubSpot have figured something out. Maybe the best way to do something really innovative is to hire a bunch of young people who have no experience and therefore no preconceived notions about how to run a company. Larry Page and Sergey Brin were twenty-five years old when they founded Google. Mark Zuckerberg was twenty when he founded Facebook, and once famously said, “Young people are just smarter.” Maybe Zuckerberg was right. Sure, experience is valuable, but I’m willing to accept the idea that experience can also be an impediment. Forbes and Newsweek were filled with old-timers who scoffed at the Internet, didn’t understand it, and didn’t want to understand it.

Who’s Raising the Kids?: Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children
by Susan Linn
Published 12 Sep 2022

Adam Alter, Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked (New York: Penguin, 2017), 8.   1.  “Real Time Billionaires,” Forbes, www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires. These are updated every five minutes daily when the stock markets are open. When I first checked in November 2020, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates ranked number 1 and 2 respectively and Mark Zuckerberg ranked number 4. By March 2022, Mark Zuckerberg dropped down to the teens and Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates were 1, 2, and 4 respectively.   2.  See for instance, American Heritage Medical Dictionary (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/technophobe; Cambridge English Dictionary, Cambridge University Press, dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/nstagr/technophobe; Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/technophobia.   3.  

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Williams, McIntosh, and Farthing, “Profiling Children for Advertising.” 76.  Natasha Singer, “Mark Zuckerberg Is Urged to Scrap Plans for an Instagram for Children,” New York Times, April 15, 2021. 77.  Adam Barnes, “44 US Attorneys General Urge Facebook to Cancel ‘Instagram for Kids,’” The Hill, May 11, 2021, thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/552797-44-us-attorneys-general-urge-facebook-to-cancel-instagram-for. 78.  Senator Ed Markey and Representatives Kathy Castor and Lori Trahan wrote a public letter to Mark Zuckerberg urging him not to go forward with Instagram for Kids. www.markey.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/fb_wsj_report.pdf, September 15, 2021. 79.  

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Interestingly, while eighth and tenth graders who use social media two hours a week are happier than kids who don’t use it at all, the survey also found that those kids who are extremely light social media users are happier than kids who use social media two hours a day, which is not even considered heavy use.62 While social media platforms like Instagram and YouTube claim that they don’t allow users under thirteen years of age, millions of younger children lie about their ages to create accounts.63 The time preteen girls who pretend to be teenagers spend with social media is linked to increased dissatisfaction with their appearance.64 Yet, in March 2021, an internal memo leaked to BuzzFeed revealed that Instagram, which is owned by Meta, was creating a children’s version of its platform.65 Facebook was already directly targeting young children through Messenger Kids, an iteration of Facebook’s instant messaging service, which launched in 2017.66 Two years later, it was discovered that despite the company’s claim that children using Messenger Kids could talk only to users approved by their parents, children in group chats were in unsupervised contact with strangers.67 Facebook fixed what it called a “design flaw,” but critics saw it as emblematic of the company’s inability, or unwillingness, to truly protect children.68 At a congressional hearing just three days after news of Meta’s plan for a kids Instagram surfaced, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s founder, CEO, and principal shareholder, tried to allay concerns about children using social media by saying that “the research that we’ve seen is that using social apps to connect with other people can have positive mental-health benefits.”69 What’s especially egregious about Zuckerberg’s testimony and Meta’s determination to foist Instagram on preteens and younger kids is that the company’s executives have known for years that the popular social media site is toxic for a significant percentage of teenage girls.

Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech
by Sara Wachter-Boettcher
Published 9 Oct 2017

Victor Luckerson, “Here’s Why Facebook Won’t Put Your News Feed in Chronological Order,” Time, July 9, 2015, http://time.com/3951337/facebook-chronological-order. 50. Josh Constine, “Facebook’s S-1 Letter from Zuckerberg Urges Understanding before Investment,” TechCrunch, February 1, 2012, https://techcrunch.com/2012/02/01/facebook-ipo-letter. 51. Mark Zuckerberg, “Building Global Community,” Facebook post, February 16, 2017, https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/building-global-community/10154544292806634. 52. “When FOMO Meets JOMO,” Note to Self, WNYC, January 20, 2016, http://www.wnyc.org/story/fomo-jomo. Chapter 9: Meritocracy Now, Meritocracy Forever 1. From Brian S. Hall’s now-deleted article in Forbes, “There Is No Diversity Crisis in Tech,” which he reposted at Medium.com on October 7, 2015: https://medium.com/@brianshall/the-article-on-diversity-in-tech-that-forbes-took-down-15cfd28d5639#.sp3ogqmuw. 2.

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Back in 2010, technologist Tim Jones, then of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wrote that he had asked his Twitter followers to help him come up with a name for this method of using “deliberately confusing jargon and user-interfaces” to “trick your users into sharing more info about themselves than they really want to.” 8 One of the most popular suggestions was Zuckering. The term, of course, refers to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder—who, a few months before, had dramatically altered Facebook’s default privacy settings. Facebook insisted that the changes were empowering—that its new features would give the 350 million users it had at the time the tools to “personalize their privacy,” 9 by offering more granular controls over who can see what.

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But instead, Facebook once again decided to just let the machines sort it out, and pick up the pieces later. Only this time, there was a lot more at stake than users missing a few photos from their favorite friends, or seeing too many updates from a friend’s cousin who they hung out with once at a wedding. These core values aren’t new. In fact, if you ask Mark Zuckerberg, they’re the core of the company, and always have been. Back when Facebook filed for IPO, in 2012, he lauded those values in a letter to investors: “As most companies grow, they slow down too much because they’re more afraid of making mistakes than they are of losing opportunities by moving too slowly,” he wrote.

Impact: Reshaping Capitalism to Drive Real Change
by Ronald Cohen
Published 1 Jul 2020

Non-profit grants since inception: $822 million. 73 https://www.bridgespan.org/insights/blog/give-smart/impact-investing-ebay-founder-pierre-omidyar 74 http://skoll.org/about/about-skoll/ 75 Ibid. 76 https://thegiin.org/research/spotlight/investor-spotlight-capricorn-investment-group 77 https://www.saildrone.com/ 78 https://www.gatesfoundation.org/How-We-Work 79 https://sif.gatesfoundation.org/what-we-do/ Note that investments from the fund are structured as ‘program-related investments’, which is a defined term in the US Internal Revenue Code that governs charitable investments made by a private foundation. 80 http://www.investwithimpact.co/principal-venture-capital-bill-melinda-gates-foundation/ 81 https://sif.gatesfoundation.org/impact-stories/empowering-women-strengthening-families/ 82 https://beyondtradeoffs.economist.com/improving-lives-innovative-investments 83 http://www.investwithimpact.co/principal-venture-capital-bill-melinda-gates-foundation/ 84 Note: Wealth valued at $45 billion at time of founding https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-giving-away-99-of-his-facebook-shares-2015-12 85 https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/a-letter-to-our-daughter/10153375081581634/ 86 https://www.macfound.org/press/press-releases/150-million-catalytic-capital-help-address-critical-social-challenges/ 87 https://www.forbes.com/sites/kerryadolan/2019/04/16/questioning-big-philanthropy-at-the-skoll-world-forum-is-it-too-powerful-and-out-of-touch/#375764b76253 88 https://www.bertelsmannstiftung.de/fileadmin/files/user_upload/Market_Report_SII_in_Germany_2016.pdf 89 https://www.socialfinance-org-uk/resources/publications/portuguese-social-investment-taskforce-blueprint-portugal%22%80%99s-emerging-social Chapter 6: Government: Solving Bigger Problems, Faster 1 https://digitalcommons.pepperdine.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?

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Most of the Andela developers lived ‘on campus’ in subsidized housing during their fellowship immersion program.61 ‘The long-term goal is for them to be unleashed, to really spread and lead the spread of technology across the continent,’ said Sass.62 According to Sass, a quarter of them wanted to start their own companies,63 while others might become tech leaders at existing companies, advisors to organizations or help Andela scale its model.64 Andela’s business model – with a focus on workforce development, education and tech – and its longer-term goals of helping grow the African tech sector, had attracted the attention of highly sought-after investors. In 2015, AOL co-founder Steve Case and Omidyar were among those who participated in a funding round totaling $10 million to help Andela expand across the continent.65 A year later, Andela captured the eye of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, who led a $24-million second round of funding through their Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. In fact, Andela was CZI’s first lead investment and they were accompanied by GV (formerly Google Ventures), Spark Capital, Omidyar Network, Learn Capital and CRE Venture Capital.

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Shortly after investing, Zuckerberg traveled to Lagos to visit the Andela office and meet the company’s staff. Sass said in an interview, ‘We said to all of our applicants, especially in the early days … we are going to tell the entire world about the caliber of your talent. And in an instant, that just became incredibly real to them the second that [Mark Zuckerberg] walked in.’66 In 2017, the company raised $40 million in a third funding round led by CRE Venture Capital, one of the largest ever rounds in an Africa-based company to be led by an African venture firm. The new money would fund Andela’s expansion into two more African countries and double its base of developers.67 By 2019, Andela had served more than 200 clients, attracted over 130,000 applications and selected 1,500 developers.

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It
by Azeem Azhar
Published 6 Sep 2021

, India Today, 2 July 2018 <https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/16-lynchings-in-2-months-is-social-media-the-new-serial-killer-1275182-2018-07-02> [accessed 4 October 2020]. 10 ‘India Lynchings: WhatsApp Sets New Rules after Mob Killings’, BBC News, 20 July 2018 <https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-44897714> [accessed 4 October 2020]. 11 Reuters Staff, ‘Facebook’s WhatsApp Limits Users to Five Text Forwards to Curb Rumors’, Reuters, 21 January 2019 <https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-whatsapp-idUSKCN1PF0TP> [accessed 4 October 2020]. 12 Paul Mozur, ‘A Genocide Incited on Facebook, With Posts From Myanmar’s Military (Published 2018)’, New York Times, 15 October 2018 <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebook-genocide.html> [accessed 8 January 2021]. 13 Matthew Smith, ‘Facebook Wanted to Be a Force for Good in Myanmar. Now It Is Rejecting a Request to Help With a Genocide Investigation’, Time, 18 August 2020 <https://time.com/5880118/myanmar-rohingya-genocide-facebook-gambia/> [accessed 8 January 2021]. 14 Madeleine Carlisle, ‘Mark Zuckerberg Says Facebook’s Decision to Not Take Down Kenosha Militia Page Was a Mistake’, Time, 29 August 2020 <https://time.com/5884804/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-kenosha-shooting-jacob-blake/> [accessed 13 January 2021]. 15 Nick Clegg, ‘You and the Algorithm: It Takes Two to Tango’, Medium, 31 March 2021 <https://nickclegg.medium.com/you-and-the-algorithm-it-takes-two-to-tango-7722b19aa1c2> [accessed 31 March 2021]. 16 Carissa Véliz, ‘Privacy Matters Because It Empowers Us All’, Aeon, 2019 <https://aeon.co/essays/privacy-matters-because-it-empowers-us-all> [accessed 5 April 2021]. 17 ‘Google Form S-1’, 2004 <https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/000119312504073639/ds1.htm> [accessed 5 April 2021]. 18 Farhad Manjoo and Nadieh Bremer, ‘I Visited 47 Sites.

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MySpace grew quickly and became the titan of this emerging industry, having, at its peak, 115 million users. But it was Facebook that demonstrated the sheer speed with which digital technologies can grow. After Facebook launched in February 2004, it became one of the fastest-growing products in world history, amassing its first million users in just 15 months. Mark Zuckerberg, its founder, today has the most popular product on the planet. Facebook had 2.5 billion users at the end of 2019. Today, however, the speed of Facebook’s growth looks positively quaint. Witness Lime. Founded in San Francisco in January 2017, the company places distinctive green electric scooters and bikes around cities.

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Bundy’s invention represented an early move towards a more scientific, regulated, empirical system of people management. Since Bundy’s time – he died in 1907 – methods of managing employees became progressively more sophisticated. Methods like Bundy’s would be applied systematically across industries. The tipping point was the rise of scientific management, pioneered by Frederick Winslow Taylor. Like Mark Zuckerberg more than a century later, Taylor attended the prestigious boarding school Phillips Exeter Academy before attending – and dropping out of – Harvard. He went on to work in a machine shop in the steel industry at the age of 19. During his experiences on the shop floor, he noted that workers soldiered at a ‘slow easy gait’ because of a ‘natural laziness’.

The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism
by Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias
Published 19 Aug 2019

London: Sage, 2014. Kitchin, Rob, and Martin Dodge. Code/Space. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011. Kitchin, Rob, and Gavin McArdle. “Urban Data and City Dashboards: Six Key Issues.” SocArXiv (2016). https://osf.io/k2epn/. Klein, Ezra. “Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook’s Hardest Year, and What Comes Next.” Vox, April 2, 2018. https://www.vox.com/2018/4/2/17185052/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-interview-fake-news-bots-cambridge. Klein, Naomi. “Dancing the World into Being: A Conversation with Idle No More’s Leanne Simpson.” YES! Magazine, March 5, 2013. http://www.yesmagazine.org/peace-justice/dancing-the-world-into-being-a-conversation-with-idle-no-more-leanne-simpson. .

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They are often combined with an overarching imaginative claim that we might call myth: the myth that all this is inevitable and that today’s infrastructures of connection and data extraction fulfill human beings’ collective potential in some transcendent way.59 The term community, as something seemingly inherent to human life, can easily fuel this myth. Think not just of Mark Zuckerberg’s frequent appeals to Facebook’s “global community” but also of the Tencent CEO’s invocation of a “digital ecological community.”60 This ideology of inevitability also has its counterpart in ideas on the anticapitalist left that treat networks as the basis for a leap toward overthrowing capitalism.61 Colonialism’s and Capitalism’s New Embrace Data colonialism has a distinctive geography.

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The result, in Rieder’s view, is “a largely conservative vision of society” that interprets content based on accumulated total linkages, downplaying intense new patterns of linkage.127 The important point is not the details of Google’s constantly changing algorithm but that each software system—and every interface built on that software—embeds decisions that encapsulate a particular “theory of the social” on which that software’s functioning relies.128 The wider consequences of this new social theory need to be understood. Executives in the social quantification sector, whether or not they planned to, are becoming social theorists, or at least trying to sound like them. “Thank you for believing in this community,” wrote Mark Zuckerberg in his full-page apology in British Sunday newspapers on March 25, 2018, in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. But behind the bland term community lay a lot of background theorizing. Certainly executives’ habit of speaking like social theorists did not start in the past decade.129 Just before the 2012 Facebook international public-share offering, Zuckerberg claimed that Facebook is “a fabric that can make any experience online social.”130 In 2010, he had already dubbed the 2007 invention of the social graph (Facebook’s way of mapping the network connections between users) “our way of explaining the phenomenon we thought was happening in the world.”131 When Facebook’s open graph (which aggregates people’s Facebook networks with the wider data Facebook gets from “likes” and via its plug-ins) was launched later in 2010, Zuckerberg speculated more broadly: We believe that eventually almost all apps are going to be social but in the world there’s a natural spectrum from behaviors that are really naturally social to ones that aren’t and the ones that are naturally social are going to be the ones that turn into social apps. . . .

For Profit: A History of Corporations
by William Magnuson
Published 8 Nov 2022

Facebook’s headquarters are a visceral reminder of the enormous societal transformation that the technology industry in general and Silicon Valley in particular have wrought over the last two decades. A website started by a computer whiz operating out of a Harvard College dorm room turned, almost overnight, into an $800 billion company, creating instant millionaires out of its early contributors. Mark Zuckerberg himself is worth an estimated $76 billion. The golden age of start-up culture dawned with Facebook. And somehow, the most dominant corporation of the millennium gives away its most valuable product for free. It’s an unlikely story, but it’s also an emblematic one. Facebook is no longer unique in the universe of corporations.

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Henry Ford was forty when he founded his Ford Motor Company. Jerome Kohlberg was fifty when he started KKR, and his comparatively baby-faced partners, Henry Kravis and George Roberts, were both a fully grown thirty-two. All of them had extensive experience in their industries before deciding to launch their ventures. Mark Zuckerberg, on the other hand, was a college sophomore at Harvard, taking classes in psychology and Roman art, shuffling around campus in his Adidas slides, and attending fraternity parties on the weekends. But by the time Zuckerberg turned twenty, his company, Facebook, had a million users. Depending on your perspective about the merits of youth, this may sound either refreshing or terrifying.

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Was it just a way to pirate free music? At the end of the 1990s, a slew of companies had soared to great heights on bets about what the future of the internet would look like, but most of them came crashing down when the dot-com bubble burst in 2000. So the internet question was still very much up in the air. For Mark Zuckerberg, a sophomore living in Kirkland House at Harvard College, it was clear what the internet’s killer application was: fun. Zuckerberg had grown up loving computers. He received his first one in sixth grade, and he quickly became obsessed with video games, particularly the world-domination game Civilization, which he played well into adulthood.

Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology
by Anu Bradford
Published 25 Sep 2023

(Mar. 25, 2020). 40.David Vogel, Trading Up: Consumer and Environmental Regulation in a Global Economy (1995). 41.Tim Cook Calls for US Federal Privacy Law to Tackle “Weaponized” Personal Data, Guardian (Oct. 24, 2018), https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/oct/24/tim-cook-us-federal-privacy-law-weaponized-personal-data. 42.Mark Zuckerberg, The Internet Needs New Rules. Let’s Start in These Four Areas, Wash. Post (Mar. 30, 2019), https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/mark-zuckerberg-the-internet-needs-new-rules-lets-start-in-these-four-areas/2019/03/29/9e6f0504-521a-11e9-a3f7-78b7525a8d5f_story.html. 43.See generally California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018, Cal. Civ. Code § 1798.100 (2018) amended by initiative Proposition 24, Sec. 4 (California Privacy Rights Act of 2020). 44.Meghashyam Mali, Tech Mobilizes Against California Privacy Law, The Hill (July 1, 2018), https://thehill.com/policy/technology/394928-tech-mobilizes-against-california-privacy-law. 45.See GDPR supra note 1, art. 45; see also Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament and the Council Exchanging and Protecting Personal Data in a Globalised World (COM) (2017) 7 final (Jan. 10, 2017). 46.Eur.

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For example, in its 2020 Resolution on Forced Labour and the Situation of the Uyghurs in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, the European Parliament “strongly condemns the extensive use of digital surveillance technologies to monitor and control the population in Xinjiang.”208 Already back in 2008, European Commissioner Viviane Reding emphasized the importance of freedom of information: “We say, for instance, to the Chinese very clearly that their blocking of certain Internet content is absolutely unacceptable to us.”209 Of the US tech companies, Meta has been most vocal in its criticism of China’s internet policies. In a 2019 speech, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg criticized authoritarian regimes’ laws and regulations that undermine free speech and other human rights, singling out China as a country that is “building its own internet focused on very different values, and is now exporting their vision of the internet to other countries.”210 He also drew a contrast between Chinese-owned TikTok and WhatsApp, noting how the latter is being used in protests by activists who rely on the app’s strong encryption, whereas TikTok does not allow these protests to be mentioned.

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Colorful Balloons provides Facebook with valuable intelligence on how Chinese users engage online, including how they share information with their friends.68 However, it is unclear if Facebook can ever leverage this information to reenter the Chinese market with its own social media platform. Meta itself continues to insist that it is not entering the Chinese market due to a misalignment of values, with the company’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg noting in 2018 that Facebook “need[s] to figure out a solution that is in line with [its] principles and what [it] want[s] to do, and in line with the laws [in China], or else it’s not going to happen. Right now, there isn’t an intersection.”69 In recent years, Meta has become one of the most vocal China critics among the large US tech companies, pledging in 2019 not to build data centers in countries with “a track record of violating human rights like privacy or freedom of expression” and noting that the company “could never come to agreement on what it would take” for Facebook to operate in China.70 However, critics are quick to point out that the Chinese government makes extensive use of Facebook’s platform outside of China to spread its propaganda.71 It deploys Facebook to advance its policy positions and shape the global narrative about China.

Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower's Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again
by Brittany Kaiser
Published 21 Oct 2019

The SCL and Cambridge Analytica staff were energized by Alexander’s vision. The opportunity open to them was the equivalent of that at Facebook in the early days, and it hadn’t taken Facebook too many years to go public to the tune of an $18 billion valuation. Alexander wanted a similar outcome, and as Millennials, the staff looked to Mark Zuckerberg’s baby as a model of remarkable innovation in spaces no one had even thought to occupy until the company came along. Cambridge Analytica was based on the same idealistic notion of “connectivity” and “engagement” that had fueled Facebook. The company’s raison d’être was to boost engagement in uncharted territory, and those who worked there clearly believed, as those at Facebook had, that they were building something real that the world simply didn’t yet know it couldn’t do without.

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The young Cambridge Analytica staff were energized by Alexander’s vision; I was, too. We worked for a company that was building something important, something real that could boost engagement across the connected world. My own experience with Facebook was not dissimilar to that of every other Millennial. It seemed always to have been there as part of my life. I didn’t know Mark Zuckerberg directly, but when he started the company in 2004, he did so with a high school colleague of mine named Chris Hughes. Chris and I had worked together on Andover’s school newspaper, the Phillipian, and later I found it exciting to see one of our own involved in such an innovative project as “The Facebook” while still in college.

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With some forty thousand third-party developers, and more and more users from those third parties spending exponentially more time on Facebook, the social media company now had the ability to provide anyone with hundreds of data points on its users. With the Federal Trade Commission admonishment of Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook in 2010 regarding use of the Friends API and “deceptive practices,” the company was “now expected to plug the gaps,” but it struggled to find a way to make that work in tandem with its growth strategy.5 Would it be possible to care about both data protection and exponential profits?

Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age
by Brad Smith and Carol Ann Browne
Published 9 Sep 2019

Deepa Seetharaman, “Zuckerberg Defends Facebook Against Charges It Harmed Political Discourse,” Wall Street Journal, November 10, 2016, https://www.wsj.com/articles/zuckerberg-defends-facebook-against-charges-it-harmed-political-discourse-1478833876. Back to note reference 12. Chloe Watson, “The Key Moments from Mark Zuckerberg’s Testimony to Congress,” Guardian, April 11, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/11/mark-zuckerbergs-testimony-to-congress-the-key-moments. Back to note reference 13. Mark R. Warner, “Potential Policy Proposals for Regulation of Social Media and Technology Firms” (draft white paper, Senate Intelligence Committee, 2018), https://www.scribd.com/document/385137394/MRW-Social-Media-Regulation-Proposals-Developed.

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Back to note reference 12. Grace Halden, Three Mile Island: The Meltdown Crisis and Nuclear Power in American Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 2017), 65. Back to note reference 13. Julia Carrie Wong, “Mark Zuckerberg Apologises for Facebook’s ‘Mistakes’ over Cambridge Analytica,” Guardian, March 22, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/21/mark-zuckerberg-response-facebook-cambridge-analytica. Back to note reference 14. See Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: PublicAffairs, 2019).

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The people of Estonia learned firsthand after the Iron Curtain came crashing down that freedom brings its own challenges, and they can be dizzying. “In some sense that’s actually a very frightening situation because everybody has trouble figuring out what they really want,” the exhibit states. “So what should you want if everything’s allowed? And then people run themselves ragged in all directions.” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg created his online platform to make the world more “open and connected.” At one level, it’s the ultimate endorsement of freedom. But in a country where KGB intelligence agents had registered, tracked, and pulled printed samples from every typewriter in the country to discourage unsanctioned communications, Estonians know all too well how overwhelming it can be when the tap of information and ideas suddenly flows freely.

Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations
by Nicholas Carr
Published 5 Sep 2016

SCREAMING FOR QUIET THE DREAMS OF READERS LIFE, LIBERTY, AND THE PURSUIT OF PRIVACY HOOKED MOTHER GOOGLE THE LIBRARY OF UTOPIA THE BOYS OF MOUNTAIN VIEW THE EUNUCH’S CHILDREN PAST-TENSE POP THE LOVE THAT LAYS THE SWALE IN ROWS THE SNAPCHAT CANDIDATE WHY ROBOTS WILL ALWAYS NEED US LOST IN THE CLOUD THE DAEDALUS MISSION Acknowledgments Index UTOPIA IS CREEPY Introduction SILICON VALLEY DAYS IT WAS A SCENE out of an Ambien nightmare: A jackal with the face of Mark Zuckerberg stood over a freshly killed zebra, gnawing at the animal’s innards. But I was not asleep. The vision arrived midday, triggered by the Facebook founder’s announcement—this was in the spring of 2011—that “the only meat I’m eating is from animals I’ve killed myself.” Zuckerberg had begun his new “personal challenge,” he told Fortune magazine, by boiling a lobster alive.

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To go “off grid” now, you pretty much have to turn yourself into a counterespionage operative, a secret agent living in a yurt and nibbling the bruised leaves of a discarded cabbage. THE SOCIAL GRAFT November 6, 2007 “ONCE EVERY HUNDRED YEARS media changes,” boy-coder turned big-thinker Mark Zuckerberg declared today at the Facebook Social Advertising Event in New York City. It’s true. Look back over the last millennium or two, and you’ll see that every century, like clockwork, there’s been a big change in media. Cave painting lasted a hundred years, and then there was smoke signaling, which also lasted a hundred years, and of course there was the hundred years of yodeling, and then there was the printing press, which was invented almost precisely a hundred years ago, and so forth up to the present day—the day that Facebook picked up the hundred-year torch and ran with it.

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The Gothic High-Tech, who cannot abide death, face a problem here: The organ donation system is largely democratic; it can’t be gamed easily by wealth. A rich person may be able to travel somewhere that has shorter lines—Tennessee, say—but he can’t jump to the head of the line. So the challenge becomes one of increasing the supply, of making rare components plentiful. 7. A week ago, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in a move that he said was inspired by the experience of his friend Steve Jobs, announced that Facebook was introducing a new feature that would make it easy for members to identify themselves as organ donors. Should Zuckerberg’s move increase the supply of organs, it will save many lives and alleviate much suffering.

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism
by Evgeny Morozov
Published 15 Nov 2013

v=kUHF43xjMJM. 1 “‘Solutionism’ . . . is indeed the name of the game”: quoted in Gilles Paquet, The New Geo-Governance: A Baroque Approach (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2005), 315. 1 “The overriding question”: Paul Dourish and Scott D. Mainwaring, “UbiComp’s Colonial Impulse,” in Proceedings of the 2012 ACM Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, UbiComp ‘12 (New York: ACM, 2012), 133–142. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2370216.2370238, 6. 1 While Mark Zuckerberg insists: see, e.g., Zuckerberg’s interview with Charlie Rose: “Exclusive Interview with Facebook Leadership: Mark Zuckerberg, CEO/Co-Founder and Sheryl Sandberg, COO,” Charlie Rose, November 7, 2011, http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/11981. 2 BinCam, a new project from researchers in Britain and Germany: my account of BinCam is based on a paper written by its designers.

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Friedman, “Make Way for the Radical Center,” New York Times, July 23, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/opinion/sunday/24friedman.html. 111 “10,000 clicks from 10 states”: Lawrence Lessig, “The Last Best Chance for Campaign Finance Reform: Americans Elect,” The Atlantic, April 25, 2012, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/04/the-last-best-chance-for-campaign-finance-reform-americans-elect/256361 . 111 Cue the Shirky-esque tone of Mark Zuckerberg’s remarks in 2008: see his interview with Sarah Lacy at SXSW 2008. Video is available at http://allfacebook.com/mark-zuckerberg-sarah-lacy-interview-video_b1063. 111 “outdated and antiquated”: Steven Overly, “Web Start-Up Ruck.us Aims to Engage the Politically Independent,” Washington Post, March 12, 2012, http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/capitalbusiness/web-start-up-ruckus-aims-to-engage-the-politically-independent/2012/03/09/gIQAKvU55R_story.html . 112 “the word comes from rugby”: Ruck.us, “FAQs,” http://blog.ruck.us/faqs. 112 “Whereas 30 years ago we were blissfully ignorant”: Nathan Daschle, “How to Pick Your Presidential Candidate Online,” CNN.com, April 19, 2012, http://www.cnn.com/2012/04/19/opinion/daschle-elect/index.html. 113 “the Americans Elect innovation is so exciting”: ibid. 113 “The trends are undeniable”: ibid. 113 “Politics is the last sector”: Alex Fitzpatrick, “Ruck.Us Breaks Up Party Politics on the Social Web,” Mashable, May 11, 2012, http://mashable.com/2012/05/11/ruckus. 114 “Plots to disrupt the two-party system”: Steve Freiss, “Son of Democratic Party Royalty Creates a Ruck.us,” Politico, June 26, 2012, http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0612/77847.html. 114 “our two-party system doesn’t form”: ibid. 114 “the creativity of party politics”: Nancy L.

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If you listen to its loudest apostles, Silicon Valley is all about solving problems that someone else—perhaps the greedy bankers on Wall Street or the lazy know-nothings in Washington—have created. “Technology is not really about hardware and software any more. It’s really about the mining and use of this enormous data to make the world a better place,” Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman, told an audience of MIT students in 2011. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who argues that his company’s mission is to “make the world more open and connected,” concurs. “We don’t wake up in the morning with the primary goal of making money,” he proclaimed just a few months before his company’s rapidly plummeting stock convinced all but its most die-hard fans that Facebook and making money had parted ways long ago.

The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions...and Created Plenty of Controversy
by Leigh Gallagher
Published 14 Feb 2017

For his part, Le recalls Chesky spending a lot of time out on the balcony, either on the phone or “deep in thought.” Le made him an espresso every morning (which he says Chesky drank “in two seconds”) and drove him to the festival, during which time Chesky described his vision for the company and his fervent hope to meet Mark Zuckerberg, who was speaking at the conference. Despite pulling in zero outside business, the South by Southwest launch actually served a few purposes. By using the website himself, Chesky identified some kinks in the payment process. He’d forgotten to go to the ATM not once but twice, so for two nights he was in the awkward position of staying in the home of a stranger who had no reason to believe he’d actually pay.

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Despite the bookings and the media coverage, as soon as the convention was over, traffic crashed. “We realized if only there were political conventions every week, we’d be huge,” Chesky said. Instead, they were back at square one. Chesky would later put it in medical terms: they were losing their patient. “I Don’t Remember Mark Zuckerberg Assembling Cereal Boxes” Back at home in San Francisco, with Blecharczyk back in Boston, Chesky and Gebbia were launched, out of money, in debt, and without traffic. Desperate and nearly out of options, they resuscitated an idea they’d had before the DNC, which was to ship their “hosts” free breakfast that they could then in turn give to their paying guests.

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Back in the kitchen, with a thousand flat boxes and a hot-glue gun, they got to work, hand-folding the boxes and sealing them shut with the glue. “It was like doing giant origami on my kitchen table,” Chesky recalled during the Lacy interview. He burned his hands. He thought to himself that he couldn’t remember Mark Zuckerberg hot-gluing anything or burning his hands assembling cereal boxes to launch Facebook. Maybe, he thought, this wasn’t a good sign. But they finished the boxes, and, in their last-ditch attempt at stirring up attention for their failing company, alerted the press. Tech reporters got bombarded with pitches, they reasoned, but they probably didn’t get cereal shipped to their desks all that often.

AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order
by Kai-Fu Lee
Published 14 Sep 2018

Two years later, Facebook was storming college campuses with its clean design and niche targeting of students. Wang adopted both when he created Xiaonei (“On Campus”). The network was exclusive to Chinese college students, and the user interface was an exact copy of Mark Zuckerberg’s site. Wang meticulously recreated the home page, profiles, tool bars, and color schemes of the Palo Alto startup. Chinese media reported that the earliest version of Xiaonei even went so far as to put Facebook’s own tagline, “A Mark Zuckerberg Production,” at the bottom of each page. Xiaonei was a hit, but one that Wang sold off too early. As the site grew rapidly, he couldn’t raise enough money to pay for server costs and was forced to accept a buyout.

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gives a thousand families a stipend: Pender, “Oakland Group.” “VC for the People”: Steve Randy Waldman, “VC for the People,” Interfluidity (blog), April 16, 2014, http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/5066.html. “everyone has a cushion”: Chris Weller, “Mark Zuckerberg Calls for Exploring Basic Income in Harvard Commencement Speech,” Business Insider, May 25, 2017, http://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-basic-income-harvard-speech-2017-5. two fastest growing professions: Ben Casselman, “A Peek at Future Jobs Reveals Growing Economic Divides,” New York Times, October 24, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/24/business/economy/future-jobs.html.

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BUILDING BLOCKS AND STUMBLING BLOCKS Silicon Valley investors take as an article of faith that a pure innovation mentality is the foundation on which companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple are built. It was an irrepressible impulse to “think different” that drove people like Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos to create these companies that would change the world. In that school of thought, China’s knockoff clockmakers were headed down a dead-end road. A copycat mentality is a core stumbling block on the path to true innovation. By blindly imitating others—or so the theory goes—you stunt your own imagination and kill the chances of creating an original and innovative product.

Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World
by Bruce Schneier
Published 2 Mar 2015

Randall Stross (28 Aug 2005), “Google anything, so long as it’s not Google,” New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/28/technology/28digi.html. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg: Bobbie Johnson (10 Jan 2010), “Privacy no longer a social norm, says Facebook founder,” Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/jan/11/facebook-privacy. bought the four houses: Brian Bailey (11 Oct 2013), “Mark Zuckerberg buys four houses near his Palo Alto home,” San Jose Mercury News, http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_24285169/mark-zuckerberg-buys-four-houses-near-his-palo-alto-home. few secrets we don’t tell someone: Peter E. Sand (Spring/Summer 2006), “The privacy value,” I/S: A Journal of Law and Policy 2, http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/students/groups/is/files/2012/02/5-Sand.pdf.

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Both China and Russia: Shannon Tiezzi (28 Mar 2014), “China decries US ‘hypocrisy’ on cyber-espionage,” Diplomat, http://thediplomat.com/2014/03/china-decries-us-hypocrisy-on-cyber-espionage. Xinhua News Agency (11 Jul 2014), “Putin calls US surveillance practice ‘utter hypocrisy,’” China Daily, http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/world/2014-07/11/content_17735783.htm. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg: Mark Zuckerberg (13 Mar 2014), “As the world becomes more complex … ,” Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10101301165605491. 8: Commercial Fairness and Equality Accretive Health is: Office of the Minnesota Attorney General (19 Jan 2012), “Attorney General Swanson sues Accretive Health for patient privacy violations,” Office of the Minnesota Attorney General, http://www.ag.state.mn.us/Consumer/PressRelease/120119AccretiveHealth.asp.

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The Internet is fundamentally a global platform. While countries continue to censor and control, today people in repressive regimes can still read information from and exchange ideas with the rest of the world. Internet freedom is a human rights issue, and one that the US should support. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg publicly took the Obama administration to task on this, writing, “The US government should be the champion for the Internet, not a threat.” He’s right. 8 Commercial Fairness and Equality Accretive Health is a debt collection agency that worked for a number of hospitals in Minnesota. It was in charge of billing and collection for those hospitals, but it also coordinated scheduling, admissions, care plans, and duration of hospital stays.

The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers
by Ben Horowitz
Published 4 Mar 2014

The Struggle is a cold sweat. The Struggle is where your guts boil so much that you feel like you are going to spit blood. The Struggle is not failure, but it causes failure. Especially if you are weak. Always if you are weak. Most people are not strong enough. Every great entrepreneur from Steve Jobs to Mark Zuckerberg went through the Struggle and struggle they did, so you are not alone. But that does not mean that you will make it. You may not make it. That is why it is the Struggle. The Struggle is where greatness comes from. SOME STUFF THAT MAY OR MAY NOT HELP There is no answer to the Struggle, but here are some things that helped me: Don’t put it all on your shoulders.

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Roles needn’t be clearly defined and, in fact, can’t be, because everyone does a little bit of everything. In an environment like this there are no politics and nobody is jockeying for position or authority. It’s rather nice. So why do all organizations eventually create job titles and what is the proper way to manage them? (Thanks to Mark Zuckerberg for contributing to my thinking on this subject.) WHY DO TITLES MATTER? Two important factors drive all companies to eventually create job titles: 1. Employees want them. While you may plan to work at your company forever, at least some of your employees need to plan for life after your company.

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ZUCKERBERG: HOW BIG SHOULD THE TITLES BE? Should your company make Vice President the top title or should you have Chief Marketing Officers, Chief Revenue Officers, Chief People Officers, and Chief Snack Officers? There are two schools of thought regarding this, one represented by Marc Andreessen and the other by Mark Zuckerberg. Andreessen argues that people ask for many things from a company: salary, bonus, stock options, span of control, and titles. Of those, title is by far the cheapest, so it makes sense to give the highest titles possible. The hierarchy should have Presidents, Chiefs, and Senior Executive Vice Presidents.

Give People Money
by Annie Lowrey
Published 10 Jul 2018

North Koreans are now measurably shorter: Richard Knight, “Are North Koreans Really Three Inches Shorter Than South Koreans?,” BBC News, Apr. 23, 2012. intellectual flotsam: Annie Lowrey, “Switzerland’s Proposal to Pay People for Being Alive,” New York Times Magazine, Nov. 12, 2013. Mark Zuckerberg: Mark Zuckerberg, Commencement Address, Cambridge, MA, May 25, 2017, Harvard Gazette. Hillary Clinton: Hillary Rodham Clinton, What Happened (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017), 239. the Black Lives Matter movement: “Reparations,” The Movement for Black Lives, July 26, 2016, https://policy.m4bl.org/​reparations/.

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In the past few years—with the middle class being squeezed, trust in government eroding, technological change hastening, the economy getting Uberized, and a growing body of research on the power of cash as an antipoverty measure being produced—it has vaulted to a surprising prominence, even pitching from airy hypothetical to near-reality in some places. Mark Zuckerberg, Hillary Clinton, the Black Lives Matter movement, Bill Gates, Elon Musk—these are just a few of the policy proposal’s flirts, converts, and supporters. UBI pilots are starting or ongoing in Germany, the Netherlands, Finland, Canada, and Kenya, with India contemplating one as well. Some politicians are trying to get it adopted in California, and it has already been the subject of a Swiss referendum, where its reception exceeded activists’ expectations despite its defeat.

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Even if the government replaced Social Security and many of its other antipoverty programs with a UBI, its spending would still have to increase by a number in the hundreds of billions, each and every year. Stepping back even further: Is a UBI really the best use of scarce resources? Does it make any sense to bump up taxes in order to give people like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates $1,000 a month, along with all those working-class families, retirees, children, unemployed individuals, and so on? Would it not be more efficient to tax rich people and direct money to poor people through means-testing, as programs like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, better known as SNAP or food stamps, already do?

The Lonely Century: How Isolation Imperils Our Future
by Noreena Hertz
Published 13 May 2020

lawCode=HSC&sectionNum=118948). 111 See Jacob Shamsian, ‘Facebook’s head of policy says it would allow “denying the Holocaust” in the weeks before banning high-profile anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists’, Business Insider, 3 May 2019, https://www.insider.com/facebook-allows-holocaust-denial-anti-semitic-ban-2019-5. 112 Karen Zraick, ‘Mark Zuckerberg seeks to clarify remarks about Holocaust deniers after outcry’, New York Times, 18 July 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/18/technology/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-holocaust-denial.html. 113 ‘Social media global revenue 2013–2019’, Statista, 14 July 2016, https://www.statista.com/statistics/562397/worldwide-revenue-from-social-media/. Note that the data for 2016–19 are forecasts rather than reports. 114 Jamil Zaki, ‘The Technology of Kindness’. 115 Mark Zuckerberg, ‘The Internet needs new rules. Let’s start in these four areas’, Washington Post, 30 March 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/mark-zuckerberg-the-internet-needs-new-rules-lets-start-in-these-four-areas/2019/03/29/9e6f0504-521a-11e9-a3f7-78b7525a8d5f_story.html. 116 ‘Australian government pushes through expansive new legislation targeting abhorrent violent material online’, Ashurst Media Update, 10 April 2019, https://www.ashurst.com/en/news-and-insights/legal-updates/media-update-new-legislation-targeting-abhorrent-violent-material-online/. 117 But vague phrasing may dull the legislation’s teeth.

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And whilst I understand the reluctance of tech leaders like Mark Zuckerberg to take on the role of arbiter, especially given the tradition of free speech that surrounds the United States’ First Amendment, social media platforms can’t market themselves as public squares, yet at the same time insist they have only limited responsibility for what goes on inside them. Especially as the big players already do take editorial decisions and are willing to impose a value judgement on some issues. For example, Facebook bans nudity often to absurd degrees.111 This is in marked contrast to Mark Zuckerberg’s position on Holocaust denial, say, of which he said, ‘At the end of the day I don’t believe that our platform should take that down.’

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Indeed it appears that some of the world’s tech leaders have accepted that a certain volume of complaints, a certain level of fines, maybe even a certain number of deaths, is something they can tolerate when the prize is so big and so many billions of dollars in annual profits are at stake.113 In the same way that Big Tobacco determined it was acceptable to peddle a harmful product because the profits were so large, it seems that the social media giants have determined that the collateral damage they cause is an acceptable by-product of their business model. As Professor Zaki observed, ‘Mark Zuckerberg famously exhorted his employees to “move fast and break things”. By now, it’s clear they’ve broken quite a lot.’114 Leaving it to the platforms to self-regulate toxic content clearly hasn’t worked, as Mark Zuckerberg himself has now acknowledged.115 We need regulation with teeth to compel Big Tech to reform. The penalties handed out to date for failing to immediately remove unambiguously hateful content have been so low as to be meaningless in the context of Big Tech’s gargantuan, record-breaking profits.

The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties
by Christopher Caldwell
Published 21 Jan 2020

It spied on: James Bamford, “The Most Wanted Man in the World,” Wired, August 2014. “bricked”: Ibid. Verizon, for example, was ordered: FISA court order, Docket BR 13-80, April 25, 2013. Cited in Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, “The 10 Biggest Revelations from Edward Snowden’s Leaks,” Mashable, June 5, 2014. Online at mashable.com. Mark Zuckerberg taped over: Katie Rogers, “Mark Zuckerberg Covers His Laptop Camera. You Should Consider It, Too,” New York Times, June 22, 2016. high-tech companies were lobbying: Robin Blackburn, “The Corbyn Project,” New Left Review 111 (May–June 2018): 5–32. A 1992 Supreme Court decision: Christopher Caldwell, “Amazon’s Tax-Free Landscape Needs Bulldozing,” Financial Times, July 16–17, 2011.

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“a capitalist venture”: Olivier Zunz, Philanthropy in America: A History (Prince-ton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 3. Eliot Spitzer’s father used part: Fred Siegel and Michael Goodwin, “Troopergate, New York–Style,” Weekly Standard, August 20–27, 2007. Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million gift: Alex Kotlowitz, “Getting Schooled,” New York Times Book Review, August 23, 2015. Until a court intervened: Valerie Strauss, “The Secret E-mails About Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 Million Donation to Newark Schools,” Washington Post, January 6, 2013. “We all pay”: Rob Reich, “What Are Foundations For?,” Boston Review, March 1, 2013. Online at bostonreview.net. Quoted in Gara LaMarche, “Democracy and the Donor Class,” Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, 34 (Fall 2014).

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McNamara had won the esteem of the country’s leaders, and the authority to manage its now-nuclearized armed forces, on the strength of his corporate career. McNamara was not a sadistic military strategist, like William Tecumseh Sherman; he was a true believer in “systems management,” like, in a later era, Mark Zuckerberg. He took certain techniques useful for managing corporations and grievously misapplied them. In 1967, at the height of the war, McNamara told a convocation at recently integrated Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, that rational management, as he practiced it, was the only proper means of effecting humane change.

Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom
by Rebecca MacKinnon
Published 31 Jan 2012

This included a user’s profile picture, name, gender, current city, what professional and regional “networks” one belonged to within Facebook, the “causes” one had signed on to support, and one’s entire list of Facebook friends. The changes were driven by Facebook’s need to monetize the service but were also consistent with founder Mark Zuckerberg’s strong personal conviction that people everywhere should be open about their lives and actions. In Iran, where authorities were known to be using information and contacts obtained from people’s Facebook accounts while interrogating Green Movement activists detained from the summer of 2009 onward, the implications of the new privacy settings were truly frightening.

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Still, Tsui made an important point. Hundreds of millions of people “inhabit” Facebook’s digital kingdom. Call it Facebookistan. By mid-2011 Facebook had 700 million users. If it really were a country, it would be the world’s third largest, after India and China. The social network may have started out in Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard dorm room as a platform for college students to flirt with one another, but it is now a world unto itself: an alternative virtual reality that for many users is now inextricably intertwined with their physical reality—and one that is often celebrated as a platform not only for personal expression but for political liberation.

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There needs to be a mechanism that enables us to do this kind of work. Either Facebook is going to get it, or we’re going to be playing cat and mouse.” Fortunately for Egypt’s activists, the story ended well, at least in the short term, with the fall of the Mubarak regime. Wael Ghonim was soon lavishing praise on Mark Zuckerberg for having created the world’s greatest organizing tool for freedom and democracy. INSIDE THE LEVIATHAN Members of Facebook’s management team are adamant that the real-name requirement is key to protecting users from abusive and criminal behavior. Tim Sparapani, who worked for the American Civil Liberties Union before becoming Facebook’s public policy director, explained it to me this way: “Authenticity allows Facebook to be more permissive in terms of what we can allow people to say and do on the site.”

Hacking Growth: How Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success
by Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown
Published 24 Apr 2017

Ben Horowitz, “Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager,” Andreessen Horowitz website (no exact date given), a16z.com/2012/06/15/good-product-managerbad-product-manager/. 5. Noah Kagan, “What Happens After You Get Shot Down by Mark Zuckerberg?” Fast Company, July 24, 2014, fastcompany.com/3033427/hit-the-ground-running/what-happens-after-you-get-shot-down-by-mark-zuckerberg. 6. Harry McCracken, “Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s Bold Plan for the Future of Facebook,” Fast Company, Long Read/Behind the Brand (blog), November 16, 2015. 7. “Fireside Chat: Defining True Growth—How Do You Find Your North Star Metric,” GrowthHackers, https://growthhackers.com/videos/gh-conference-16-fireside-chat-with-nate-moch-vp-product-teams-at-zillow-and-morgan-brown-coo-at-inman-news. 8.

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The team was run by a hard-charging executive and former head of product marketing on the Facebook Platform and Ads products named Chamath Palihapitiya, who recommended to Mark Zuckerberg that he refocus his efforts on helping the site grow its number of users. Though Facebook, who had by this time about 70 million users, had already achieved remarkable growth, it looked like the company might be hitting a wall. So Mark Zuckerberg tasked the team to focus exclusively on experimenting with ways to break through that plateau. As the team racked up success after success, Zuckerberg saw that the investment in the new unit was paying off, and continued to add more manpower, enabling the team to experiment more and grow the site even faster.8 One of their biggest breakthroughs, the creation of a translation engine to spur international growth, provides a sharp contrast as to how the growth hacking method is so different from the traditional marketing approach.

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In larger companies, which may have multiple growth teams, the teams should report to a vice president or C-level executive who can champion their work with the rest of the C-suite. Support for these methods at the highest rungs of the organization is critical to the team’s sustained success. Mark Zuckerberg is an outstanding model of the leadership required. He was relentlessly focused on growth in the early days of Facebook, and his enthusiasm hasn’t waned since. In 2005, two years before Facebook formally established the growth team, Noah Kagan, a digital marketer who was employee number 30, brought a revenue generating idea to Zuckerberg.

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity
by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson
Published 15 May 2023

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Beveridge, William H. 1942. “Social Insurance and Allied Services.” Presented to Parliament, November 1942. http://pombo.free.fr/beve ridge42.pdf. Blake, Robert. 1966. Disraeli. London: Faber and Faber. Blodget, Henry. 2009. “Mark Zuckerberg on Innovation.” Business Insider, October 1. www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-innovation-2009-10. Bloom, Benjamin. 1984. “The Two Sigma Problem: The Search for Methods of Proof Instruction as Effective as One-To-One Tutoring.” Educational Researcher 13, no. 6: 4‒16. Bloom, Nicholas, Charles I. Jones, John Van Reenen, and Michael Webb. 2020.

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There was no consultation with those whose freedom of speech and association, education, government jobs, ability to travel, and even likelihood of getting government services and housing are now being shaped by the system. This is not something that happens only in dictatorships. In 2018 Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company’s algorithm would be modified to give users “meaningful social interactions.” What this meant in practice was that the platform’s algorithm would prioritize posts from other users, especially family and friends, rather than news organizations and established brands.

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Meanwhile, antiauthoritarianism morphed into a fascination with “disruption,” meaning that disrupting existing practices and livelihoods was welcome or even encouraged. The precise words differed, but the underlying thinking was reminiscent of British entrepreneurs in the early 1800s, who felt fully justified in ignoring any collateral damage they created along their path, especially on workers. Later, Mark Zuckerberg would make “Move fast and break things” a mantra for Facebook. An elitist approach came to dominate almost the entire industry. Software and programming were things in which very talented people excelled, and the less able were of limited use. Journalist Gregory Ferenstein interviewed dozens of tech start-up founders and leaders who expressed these opinions.

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters
Published 15 Sep 2014

12 Man and Machine 13 Seeing Green 14 The Founder’s Paradox Conclusion: Stagnation or Singularity? Acknowledgments Illustration Credits Index About the Authors Preface ZERO TO ONE EVERY MOMENT IN BUSINESS happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them. Of course, it’s easier to copy a model than to make something new. Doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1.

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Their technology probably would have worked at scale, but it could have worked only at scale: it required every computer to join the network at the same time, and that was never going to happen. Paradoxically, then, network effects businesses must start with especially small markets. Facebook started with just Harvard students—Mark Zuckerberg’s first product was designed to get all his classmates signed up, not to attract all people of Earth. This is why successful network businesses rarely get started by MBA types: the initial markets are so small that they often don’t even appear to be business opportunities at all. 3. Economies of Scale A monopoly business gets stronger as it gets bigger: the fixed costs of creating a product (engineering, management, office space) can be spread out over ever greater quantities of sales.

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When a big company makes an offer to acquire a successful startup, it almost always offers too much or too little: founders only sell when they have no more concrete visions for the company, in which case the acquirer probably overpaid; definite founders with robust plans don’t sell, which means the offer wasn’t high enough. When Yahoo! offered to buy Facebook for $1 billion in July 2006, I thought we should at least consider it. But Mark Zuckerberg walked into the board meeting and announced: “Okay, guys, this is just a formality, it shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes. We’re obviously not going to sell here.” Mark saw where he could take the company, and Yahoo! didn’t. A business with a good definite plan will always be underrated in a world where people see the future as random.

Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation
by Tyler Cowen
Published 11 Sep 2013

This isn’t merely a story about science, technology, engineering, and math majors (STEM), because a lot of scientists aren’t getting jobs today, especially if they don’t do the “right” kind of science. Does anyone envy the job prospects of a typical newly minted astronomy PhD? On the other hand, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook fame was a psychology major, and insights from psychology helped him make Facebook into a more appealing and alluring site. The ability to mix technical knowledge with solving real-world problems is the key, not sheer number-crunching or programming for its own sake. Number-crunching skills will be turned over to the machines sooner or later.

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The Upper East Side does well, as does Scarsdale (a suburb of New York), Cupertino, and Potomac and Bethesda near Washington, D.C. This reflects how many of the very highest earners come from internet companies and finance, with some government and law thrown into the mix. There has been Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Bill Gates, but finance is a common source of riches within the very highest tier of earners. To give one extreme but illuminating example, in 2007 the top twenty-five hedge fund earners pulled in more income than all the CEOs of the S&P 500 put together. The modern financial sector has computers, computerized trading, arbitrage, super-rapid communications, and computerized risk assessment at its core.

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If you are a talented twenty-two-year-old, just out of Harvard, you probably cannot walk into a furniture factory and quickly design a better machine. Young people have made fundamental contributions in some of the internet and social networking sectors, precisely because of the immaturity of those sectors. Mark Zuckerberg needed a good grasp of Myspace, but he didn’t have to master decades of previous efforts on online social networks. He was close to starting from scratch. In those cases, young people tend to dominate the sector, but of course that won’t cover the furniture factory. Now take a typical young person, not furniture-machine savvy but just out of Harvard with, say, a degree in economics.

Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us
by Dan Lyons
Published 22 Oct 2018

“‘Seeing Someone Cry at Work Is Becoming Normal’: Employees Say Whole Foods Is Using ‘Scorecards’ to Punish Them.” Business Insider, February 1, 2018. http://www.businessinsider.com/how-whole-foods-uses-scorecards-to-punish-employees-2018-1. “Pirate Bay Founder: Mark Zuckerberg Is ‘Basically the Biggest Dictator in the World.’” Business Insider Nordic online. Last modified November 27, 2017. http://nordic.businessinsider.com/pirate-bay-founder-mark-zuckerberg-is-basically-the-biggest-dictator-in-the-world-2017-10. “SF Tent on Sidewalk Prohibition Has Been Enforced 152 Times.” Fox KTVU online. Last modified September 12, 2017. http://www.ktvu.com/news/sf-tent-on-sidewalk-prohibition-has-been-enforced-152-times.

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In 2018, when Bezos went to Berlin to receive an award, hundreds of his own German workers showed up to protest. “We have an Amazon boss who wants to Americanize work relationships and take us back to the nineteenth century,” a union boss told Reuters. Second on the list was Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, whose company employs “secret police” also known as the “rat-catching team,” to spy on workers, operating what the Guardian calls “a ruthless code of secrecy,” using legal threats to keep workers from talking about “working conditions, misconduct or culture challenges within the company.” The thirty-four-year-old wunderkind runs a social network with more than two billion members, and has become the most powerful person on the planet, Scott Galloway, a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, told CNN in 2018.

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He tries to spend as much time at home as he can, which means, among other things, no crack-of-dawn power breakfasts, no work dinners, no pulling all-nighters. Being able to ease into the day at nine thirty on a nice day in June is part of the reason he started his own company. “The basic premise of being an entrepreneur,” Fried says, “is freedom. That’s why people start a business, for freedom.” These guys don’t want to be the next Mark Zuckerberg. They think people who do are, well, kind of nuts. They spend a lot of time encouraging aspiring entrepreneurs to pursue a healthier approach to operating a company. It starts with treating your employees well and looking after them. It also means looking after yourself. Work fewer hours. Avoid stress.

Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life
by Eric Klinenberg
Published 10 Sep 2018

CONCLUSION: BEFORE WE LIFT THE NEXT SHOVEL “Are we building the world we all want?”: Mark Zuckerberg, “Building Global Community,” Facebook, February 16, 2017, https://www.facebook.com/​notes/​mark-zuckerberg/​building-global-community/​10154544292806634/. “That’s who we are”: See Tony Romm, “Trump Campaign Fires Back at Zuckerberg,” Politico, April 13, 2016, https://www.politico.com/​story/​2016/​04/​mark-zuckerberg-trump-feud-221897, and Seth Fiegerman, “Mark Zuckerberg Criticizes Trump on Immigration,” CNN, January 27, 2017, http://money.cnn.com/​2017/​01/​27/​technology/​zuckerberg-trump-immigration/​index.html. “engagement will go down”: Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook post, January 11, 2018. https://www.facebook.com/​zuck/​posts/​10104413015393571/.

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It blends climate adaptation with mitigation while also improving the quality of urban life, regardless of the weather, and giving the people fortunate enough to be near it a way to connect. The water is coming. With the right kind of social infrastructure, we may well get through it without building an ark. CONCLUSION Before We Lift the Next Shovel In February 2017, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted a six-thousand-word open letter on the site he created. It’s addressed “To our community,” and within a few sentences Zuckerberg asks his company’s two billion or so users a straightforward question: “Are we building the world we all want?” The answer was self-evident. If there’s a core principle in Zuckerberg’s worldview, it’s that human beings make progress when we break down social and geographic divisions and form larger, more expansive moral communities.

Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe
by Roger McNamee
Published 1 Jan 2019

If Rose was taken aback by how furious I was, he hid it well. Let me back up. I am a longtime tech investor and evangelist. Tech had been my career and my passion, but by 2016, I was backing away from full-time professional investing and contemplating retirement. I had been an early advisor to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg—Zuck, to many colleagues and friends—and an early investor in Facebook. I had been a true believer for a decade. Even at this writing, I still own shares in Facebook. In terms of my own narrow self-interest, I had no reason to bite Facebook’s hand. It would never have occurred to me to be an anti-Facebook activist.

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The most likely case is that the technology and business model of Facebook and others will continue to undermine democracy, public health, privacy, and innovation until a countervailing power, in the form of government intervention or user protest, forces change. * * * — TEN DAYS BEFORE the November 2016 election, I had reached out formally to Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, two people I considered friends, to share my fear that bad actors were exploiting Facebook’s architecture and business model to inflict harm on innocent people, and that the company was not living up to its potential as a force for good in society.

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—DAVID WONG I should probably tell the story of how I intersected with Facebook in the first place. In the middle of 2006, Facebook’s chief privacy officer, Chris Kelly, sent me an email stating that his boss was facing an existential crisis and required advice from an unbiased person. Would I be willing to meet with Mark Zuckerberg? Facebook was two years old, Zuck was twenty-two, and I was fifty. The platform was limited to college students, graduates with an alumni email address, and high school students. News Feed, the heart of Facebook’s user experience, was not yet available. The company had only nine million dollars in revenue in the prior year.

The Self-Made Billionaire Effect: How Extreme Producers Create Massive Value
by John Sviokla and Mitch Cohen
Published 30 Dec 2014

In 2000, a fleece sweatshirt offered in many different colors made Uniqlo a household name and set the stage for further expansion in Japan and around the world. Today, the company continues to grow its Uniqlo brand in international markets, with stores in New York and London. Mark Zuckerberg b. 1984, United States Facebook Mark Zuckerberg matriculated at Harvard University in 2002 and quickly built his reputation as one of the best computer programmers on campus. This caught the attention of a trio of students who were developing a match-making program. Zuckerberg joined the project, but soon left to team up with friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to develop the social network that would become Facebook.

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As we began collecting data and conducting interviews it became almost immediately clear that a lot of the truisms that get touted as the keys to successful entrepreneurship didn’t stand up to the data we had. For instance: Age Our tech-dominated era—populated by savvy wunderkinder—has left the impression that most self-made billionaires cross that billion-dollar finish line early in their careers. While it is true that people like Bill Gates, Michael Dell, and Mark Zuckerberg made their first billion while still quite young—and with the first companies they formed—the majority of people in our sample are like Dietrich Mateschitz, who didn’t hit the billion-dollar mark until well after his fortieth birthday. For more than 70 percent of the sample, the idea or transition that catapulted them to billion-dollar success happened after age thirty (see Figure 1-1).

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Two years after starting Spanx, founder and Producer Sara Blakely handed the operations of the business over to Performer CEO Laurie Ann Goldman, who ran the company for twelve years. Bloomberg’s Producer Michael Bloomberg started the financial data giant with the technology Performer Tom Secunda at his side. In the technology world, these pairings are more public than elsewhere: there is Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg (Producer) and Sheryl Sandberg (Performer), eBay’s Pierre Omidyar (Producer) and Meg Whitman (Performer), Microsoft’s Bill Gates (Producer) and Paul Allen (Performer), just to name a few. Sometimes these pairs seem destined to work together. The serial Producer Mark Cuban—cofounder of Broadcast.com and the current owner of the Dallas Mavericks—wrote about the Performer Martin Woodall, who was Cuban’s partner in MicroSolutions, his first multimillion-dollar business: “While I covered my mistakes by throwing time and effort at the problem, Martin was so detail-oriented, he had to make sure things were perfect so there would never be any problems.

Leadership by Algorithm: Who Leads and Who Follows in the AI Era?
by David de Cremer
Published 25 May 2020

Without a doubt you will remember the controversy in 2018 where it was revealed that the data of as many as 87 million Facebook users were accessed and used for both research and political purposes. The founder and CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, received much criticism and people wondered whether he realized the importance of privacy to human users. Indeed, the end users here are humans, like you and me, so why was he being so inconsiderate in how their data was used? Was he not aware that he – as creator – was responsible not only for ensuring technological progress, but also for the welfare of his customers? To answer this question, let us rewind to June 2017, where Mark Zuckerberg, in an interview with Freakonomics Radio said: “Of course, privacy is extremely important, and people engage and share their content and feel free to connect because they know that their privacy is going to be protected [on Facebook].”

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To answer this question, let us rewind to June 2017, where Mark Zuckerberg, in an interview with Freakonomics Radio said: “Of course, privacy is extremely important, and people engage and share their content and feel free to connect because they know that their privacy is going to be protected [on Facebook].” Great! The creator of Facebook knew that privacy matters to the human end user and should be treated with care. But, only one year later, it became clear that he was not really treating privacy and the value it carries for humans with much care. What became clear instead is that people like Mark Zuckerberg were primarily driven by the ambition to innovate and show off rapid technological development (remember how cool it makes your company), rather than thinking about the consequences it may have for the kind of society that will be created. Zuckerberg suffers from what I call an innovation only bias.²⁰⁴ He wants to innovate to serve the goal of innovation itself.

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Such a bias can be called a blind spot, because it shows that if we are obsessed with creating something unique that seems to have almost unlimited possibilities, we only come to see the value of the innovation itself. And often the consequences revealed are to the detriment of its end user and society at large. This is exactly what happened in the case of Facebook. It was only when Mark Zuckerberg was forced by his court hearings to think about his own role in the technological innovation, that he realized he was also responsible for the consequences that a platform such as Facebook reveals to the welfare and interest of its human users. As he said: “I started [Facebook], I run it, I’m responsible for what happens here.

Kings of Crypto: One Startup's Quest to Take Cryptocurrency Out of Silicon Valley and Onto Wall Street
by Jeff John Roberts
Published 15 Dec 2020

The bitcoin buzz in the air also electrified the Coinbase crew’s apartment-turned-office on Bluxome Street as a steady stream of bitcoin pilgrims dropped by. These included people who would go on to become some of the most famous figures in the crypto clique. The venture capitalist Marc Andreessen came by, and so did Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, the Harvard rowers who took a large legal settlement from Mark Zuckerberg over the founding of Facebook and plowed it into a bitcoin fortune. A visionary and crypto zealot named Balaji Srinivasan turned up. Craig and others thought he looked like a cross between a drug dealer and a street person with his torn Nikes and stained sweatpants, but they became transfixed.

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Much bigger. 9 Brian Has a Master Plan Brian breathed a sigh of satisfaction as he clicked on “publish” and his blog post went live. It was September of 2016, a month after the Bitfinex hack, and he was wearing a plain black T-shirt. Like other Silicon Valley CEOs, he had taken on a distinct sartorial style as a type of self-branding. Brian’s style wasn’t as conspicuous as Mark Zuckerberg’s hoodie or Steve Jobs’s turtleneck—an affect later copied by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. Instead, Brian took to donning a simple T-shirt—usually black, sometimes white—for speeches and public appearances. It was a nod to simplicity and focus. Since founding Coinbase, Brian had kept his blog as a chronicle of product announcements, hiring milestones, and other signs of progress.

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Since the beginning, he had fought time and again to exert total control over Coinbase, whether this meant nudging out his Y Combinator partner or dictating terms to the startup’s angel investors. And as Coinbase grew bigger, he turned to a new tactic to ensure he would keep that control. In Silicon Valley, executives like Mark Zuckerberg have discovered a way to ensure they are not just chief executives, but kings of the companies they found. Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, used the same trick to stay in control, even as they distributed more and more of the company’s stock. The secret for staying in power involved creating a new class of shares with super voting rights.

The Ones We've Been Waiting For: How a New Generation of Leaders Will Transform America
by Charlotte Alter
Published 18 Feb 2020

“A lot of what we have to deal with are issues and decisions that were made by people in generations before us.” Over the last three years, the quiet rumblings of generational change have become a deafening roar. You can hear it in the din of the crowds at campaign rallies, in the youthful voices singing at global climate marches, in the staticky silence after Mark Zuckerberg has to explain to retirement-age senators how Facebook makes money. You can sense it in the urgency around tackling police violence, the demands to address the student debt crisis, and the drumbeat of youth-led activism around reforming America’s gun laws. You can see it in the young mayors implementing progressive policies on the local level, in the first-time women candidates who seized congressional seats in the 2018 midterms, and in the surprise momentum behind the presidential aspirations of a thirty-eight-year-old Indiana mayor.

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Pete was a dorky kid, with a chubby face and a smile that actually turned up at the edges, like something drawn by Dr. Seuss. He was one of the only freshman kids at Harvard from South Bend, Indiana, and when he first arrived he felt as if he were entering an X-Men universe where everyone else had superpowers. Some kids at Harvard were tech wizards (like Mark Zuckerberg, who lived a few dorms over in Kirkland House), others were artistic prodigies (like his roommate Uzo, better known as Uzodinma Iweala, who wrote the bestselling novel Beasts of No Nation while still in college), and others were so rich and connected they might as well have been born wearing tuxedos.

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Still, even if millennials are better at metabolizing online information than their parents, the spread and weaponization of misleading information will likely be a permanent feature of millennial political life. The demise of the old gatekeepers led to the rise of a new kind of archetype: the disrupter. The infinite new opportunities in the digital space and the thrilling freedom of a vast, unregulated digital ecosystem gave young upstarts the courage to, as Mark Zuckerberg put it, “move fast and break things.” Why should they respect the old ways when this was a whole new world? The future, they thought, belonged to the innovator, the coder, the breaker of rules, not the cog in some outdated machine. So it’s probably not a coincidence that individualistic millennials raised in this bold new world had little reverence for the institutions of the old one: they became more skeptical than older Americans of organized religion, political parties, corporations, and labor unions.

The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads
by Tim Wu
Published 14 May 2016

Chow-White (New York: Routledge, 2011). 13. Amy Lee, “Myspace Collapse: How the Social Network Fell Apart,” Huffington Post, June 30, 2011, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/​2011/​06/​30/​how-myspace-fell-apart_n_887853.html. 14. Fred Vogelstein, “The Wired Interview: Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg,” Wired, June 29, 2009, http://www.wired.com/​2009/​06/​mark-zuckerberg-speaks/. 15. Zeynep Tufekci, “Grooming, Gossip, Facebook and Myspace,” Information, Communication & Society, 11 (2008), 546, doi: 10.1080/13691180801999050. 16. Larry Dignan, “Facebook’s IPO: Massive Valuation Brings Business Model Scrutiny,” May 16, 2012, http://www.cnet.com/​news/​facebooks-ipo-massive-valuation-brings-business-model-scrutiny/. 17.

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“We’ve been in touch with the Undergraduate Council, and this is a very high priority for the College,” said Harvard’s residential computing director in mid-2004. “We have every intention of completing the facebook by the end of the spring semester.”1 So Harvard computer services had an idea and they were running with it. But a nineteen-year-old undergraduate named Mark Zuckerberg—a gifted programmer in full possession of all the arrogance of youth, who loved nothing more than to hack out code overnight—felt compelled to show he could do the job better and faster. Zuckerberg had already accomplished a number of complicated computer projects with his friends. “We were just building stuff,” he said later, “ ’cause we thought it was cool.”

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Amazingly, it was information that users were all handing over for free, because, well, everyone else was, too. The power of networks. The madness of crowds. Zuckerberg, like Google’s founders, understood advertising’s potential to degrade his product; he had the technologist’s wariness of advertising and its tendency to ruin websites. As with Larry Page, so with Mark Zuckerberg, the Holy Grail was advertising that people actually wanted to see; Facebook figured that nanotargeting could make that happen. Until then, Zuckerberg would remain manifestly averse to anything that might interrupt the experience of his users. When, early on, Sprite offered $1 million to turn the site green for a day, he didn’t even consider it.

Alpha Girls: The Women Upstarts Who Took on Silicon Valley's Male Culture and Made the Deals of a Lifetime
by Julian Guthrie
Published 15 Nov 2019

Things were not that different in the more recent gold rush. The Valley was always a region dominated by men, from William Hewlett, Dave Packard, Bob Noyce, Gordon Moore, Andy Grove, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, and Steve Wozniak to, decades later, in the twenty-first century, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Travis Kalanick, and Marc Benioff. Mary Jane, fueled by peanut butter sandwiches packed in wax paper for the two-day journey, was under no illusion that it would be easy to navigate the old boys’ club of Sand Hill Road and Silicon Valley. Even today, decades after Mary Jane first arrived, 94 percent of investing partners at venture capital firms—the financial decision makers shaping the future—are men, and more than 80 percent of venture firms have never had a woman investing partner.

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They hoped to meet with former LinkedIn employee Matt Cohler, now Facebook’s vice president of product management. Arriving at the office, Kevin and Arthur found Cohler and Dustin Moskovitz struggling to assemble Ikea furniture. The office was a mess. The men were directed to the conference room, where they were surprised a few minutes later by the appearance of Facebook’s co-founder Mark Zuckerberg and its president Sean Parker, holding burritos. Parker was an entrepreneur with a colorful track record. He had co-founded Napster, the music file-sharing site that had had a spectacular rise before an ignominious fall at the hands of the Recording Industry Association of America on copyright infringement charges.

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Benioff had come a long way from their exploratory lunch on the country club terrace in San Mateo, when he had asked her, “Should I do this?” and “Can I do this on my own?” Magdalena, without hesitating, had answered in the affirmative. Long before just about anyone else, she had seen the clouds gathering, pointing to the future. THERESIA In the Monday partners’ meeting at Accel, Theresia filed away Mark Zuckerberg’s “I’m CEO, Bitch” business card without comment and got out her sequentially dated and coded notebook and mechanical pencil in preparation for the all-important sit-down with the Facebook team. In addition to Theresia, seated around the table on the Accel side were Kevin Efrusy, Jim Breyer, Peter Wagner, Peter Fenton, and Ping Li, who had been hired as a principal six months earlier.

Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy
by Nathan Schneider
Published 10 Sep 2018

The Law and Economics of Residential Stability,” Yale Law Journal 127 (2017). 9. Jeff Abbott, “Indigenous Weavers Organize for Collective Intellectual Property Rights,” Waging Nonviolence (July 17, 2017). 10. Richard Feloni, “Why Mark Zuckerberg Wants Everyone to Read the Fourteenth-Century Islamic Book The Muqaddimah,” Business Insider (June 2, 2015); Mark Zuckerberg, “Building Global Community” (February 16, 2017), facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/building-global-community/10154544292806634. 11. I have been a guest speaker at Singularity University’s Global Solutions Program. 12. Peter Diamandis, “I Am Peter Diamandis, from XPRIZE, Singularity University, Planetary Resources, Human Longevity Inc., and More.

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A Bitcoin-based charity in Florida bought a nine-acre forest as a sanctuary for the homeless; Wired deemed Bitcoin “the great equalizer” for its potential to put financial services in the hands of the poor. It also attracted the interest of such innovation-hungry investors as the Winklevoss twins, Mark Zuckerberg’s old nemeses. Bill Gates called it “better than currency.” But soon the Bitcoin revolution began to look more and more like the system it was intended to replace—except perhaps more centralized, less egalitarian, and similarly clogged with unseemly interests.5 As the value of bitcoins swelled against the dollar over the course of 2013, a mining arms race began.

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Together, we are writing the next social contracts as we go, deciding what goes in and what we ignore. Yet the questions that the cooperative movement persisted in raising for generations have too often been neglected: Who owns the engines of the economy, and how are they governed? In early 2017, Facebook CEO (and Ibn Khaldun enthusiast) Mark Zuckerberg posted a nearly 6,000-word letter called “Building Global Community.” The name Trump doesn’t appear in it, but it’s hard not to read as a postmortem on the election several months before, in whose aftermath Facebook came under scrutiny for enabling foreign interventions to spread. “Democracy is receding in many countries,” Zuckerberg observed, “and there is a large opportunity across the world to encourage civic participation.”

21 Lessons for the 21st Century
by Yuval Noah Harari
Published 29 Aug 2018

Knopf, 2016). 3 Cara McGoogan, ‘How to See All the Terrifying Things Google Knows about You’, Telegraph, 18 August 2017; Caitlin Dewey, ‘Everything Google Knows about You (and How It Knows It)’, Washington Post, 19 November 2014. 4 Dan Bates, ‘YouTube Is Losing Money Even Though It Has More Than 1 Billion Viewers’, Daily Mail, 26 February 2015; Olivia Solon, ‘Google’s Bad Week: YouTube Loses Millions As Advertising Row Reaches US’, Guardian, 25 March 2017; Seth Fiegerman, ‘Twitter Is Now Losing Users in the US’, CNN, 27 July 2017. 5. Community 1 Mark Zuckerberg, ‘Building Global Community’, Facebook, 16 February 2017. 2 John Shinal, ‘Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook can play a role that churches and Little League once filled’, CNBC, 26 June 2017. 3 Shinal, ‘Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook can play a role’, op. cit; John Shinal, ‘Zuckerberg says Facebook has a new missioin as it deals with fake news and hate speech,’ CNBC, 22 June 2017. 4 Robin Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 5 See, for example, Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present (London: Penguin, 2017). 6 For a general survey and critique see: Derek Y.

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Once politicians can press our emotional buttons directly, generating anxiety, hatred, joy and boredom at will, politics will become a mere emotional circus. As much as we should fear the power of big corporations, history suggests that we are not necessarily better off in the hands of over-mighty governments. As of March 2018, I would prefer to give my data to Mark Zuckerberg than to Vladimir Putin (though the Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed that perhaps there isn’t much of a choice here, as any data entrusted to Zuckerberg may well find its way to Putin). Private ownership of one’s own data may sound more attractive than either of these options, but it is unclear what it actually means.

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Perhaps the very same scientists and entrepreneurs who disrupted the world in the first place could engineer some technological solution? For example, might networked algorithms form the scaffolding for a global human community that could collectively own all the data and oversee the future development of life? As global inequality rises and social tensions increase around the world, perhaps Mark Zuckerberg could call upon his 2 billion friends to join forces and do something together? PART II The Political Challenge The merger of infotech and biotech threatens the core modern values of liberty and equality. Any solution to the technological challenge has to involve global cooperation. But nationalism, religion and culture divide humankind into hostile camps and make it very difficult to cooperate on a global level. 5 COMMUNITY Humans have bodies California is used to earthquakes, but the political tremor of the 2016 US elections still came as a rude shock to Silicon Valley.

They Don't Represent Us: Reclaiming Our Democracy
by Lawrence Lessig
Published 5 Nov 2019

On the continued interventions in 2018, see Jonathan Albright, “Facebook and the 2018 Midterms: A Look at the Data,” Medium, November 4, 2018, available at link #139. In March 2019, Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook would shift its focus to emphasize user privacy more. What was not clear from the announcement was how the shift would affect the business model of advertising—or whether it would at all. See Mark Zuckerberg, “A Privacy-Focused Vision for Social Networking,” Facebook, March 6, 2019, available at link #140. See also Mike Issac, “Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg Says He’ll Shift Focus to Users’ Privacy,” New York Times, March 6, 2019, available at link #141. 117.Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalism, 509.

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As a story in early 2019 reported, TV sets are increasingly cheap because the manufacturers are now selling the data about what we watch.90 TV is still a relatively anonymous zone, but if the Internet is any lesson, it won’t be for very long. It took a long time for Americans to understand this basic fact about the Internet economy. Even in 2018, Senator Orrin Hatch had no clue about it, asking Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, “So, how do you sustain a business model in which users don’t pay for your service?”91 For much of the early 2000s, many Americans believed that they were just getting great stuff for free, because the tech companies wanted to gain a huge market share. What they would do with that market share no one quite knew.

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The nudge economy is just being born, and the ethics of nudge are complex.109 But put aside the question of how the data is collected—important and difficult but beyond the scope of this book. Focus instead on how the data that is collected gets used. What is the use that we can rightly complain about? From Facebook’s perspective, this issue is solely about its customers. Is it giving its customers what its customers want? If it is, then no harm, no foul. That’s how Mark Zuckerberg defended his company in the Wall Street Journal. Our job is to serve, Zuckerberg all but said. What could possibly be wrong with that?110 That is a critically important perspective. Critically, though, it is not the only perspective. Besides the Facebook customers, there is the democracy that Facebook operates within—and affects profoundly.

The Nowhere Office: Reinventing Work and the Workplace of the Future
by Julia Hobsbawm
Published 11 Apr 2022

Zoe Schiffer, ‘Apple Employees Push Back Against Returning to the Office in Internal Letter’, Verge, 4 June 2021, https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/4/22491629/apple-employees-push-back-return-office-internal-letter-tim-cook 18. ‘Machines Will Do More Tasks Than Humans by 2025: WEF’, Phys.org, 17 September 2018, https://phys.org/news/2018-09-machines-tasks-humans-wef.html 19. Scott Stein, ‘Virtual Mark Zuckerberg Showed Me Facebook’s New VR Workplace’, Cnet, 19 August 2021, https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/virtual-mark-zuckerberg-showed-me-facebooks-new-vr-workplace-solution/ 20. Attributed to film director Woody Allen variously as 80 per cent and 90 per cent. 21. Adam Grant, ‘Productivity Isn’t About Time Management. It’s About Attention Management’, New York Times, 28 March 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/28/smarter-living/productivity-isnt-about-time-management-its-about-attention-management.html 22.

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In the summer of 2021 Google faced significant employee discontent when it announced that it intended to use its pay calculator to implement pay according to proximity to the office, reflecting the priority some employers still put on presenteeism.21 This strategy is risky and unfair as Sarah O’Connor commented in the Financial Times: If two workers from the same head office want to switch to working from home, but one inherited a house in an expensive city while the other had been living in a commuter town, is it fair for the latter to take a pay cut?22 She quoted Mark Zuckerberg of Meta telling his employees by video: ‘We’ll adjust salary to location… There’ll be severe ramifications for people who are not honest about this.’ But who is not being honest? Some companies are clearly struggling to accept the serious shift in mindset and values of their talent. It remains to be seen whether management will rise to the challenges of supporting home-based working or continue to believe they can persuade and cajole workers to be present in the office when they don’t want to be.

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See Martin Wolf, The Shifts and the Shocks: What We’ve Learned – and Have Still to Learn – from the Financial Crisis (Allen Lane, 2014) 11. Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine (Granta, 2011) 12. The metaverse of virtual reality became thrown into the public spotlight at the end of 2021 when Facebook’s parent company name was rebranded by Mark Zuckerberg as ‘Meta’. The original phrase was coined in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel, The Snow Crash; Daniel Villareal, ‘What is “Snow Crash”? Twitter Compares Facebook’s “Metaverse” Announcement to ’90s Novel’, Newsweek, 28 October 2021, https://www.newsweek.com/what-snow-crash-twitter-compares-facebooks-metaverse-announcement-90s-dystopian-sci-fi-1643690 13.

The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future
by Andrew Yang
Published 2 Apr 2018

Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, January 2017: Charlie Rose, interview with Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, Columbia University, January 2017. Elon Musk, February, 2017: Chris Weller, “Elon Musk Doubles Down on Universal Basic Income: ‘It’s Going to Be Necessary,’” Business Insider, February 13, 2017. Mark Zuckerberg, May 2017: Mark Zuckerberg, commencement speech, Harvard University, May 2017. … adopting it would permanently grow the economy by 12.56 to 13.10 percent…: Michalis Nikiforos, Marshall Steinbaum, and Gennaro Zezza, “Modeling the Macroeconomic Effects of a Universal Basic Income,” Roosevelt Institute, August 29, 2017

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Bill Gates, January 2017: “A problem of excess [automation] forces us to look at the individuals affected and take those extra resources and make sure they’re directed to them in terms of re-education and income policies…” (Gates later suggested taxing robots.) Elon Musk, February, 2017: “I think we’ll end up doing universal basic income… It’s going to be necessary… There will be fewer and fewer jobs that a robot cannot do better. I want to be clear. These are not things I wish will happen; these are things I think probably will happen.” Mark Zuckerberg, May 2017: “We should explore… universal basic income so that everyone has a cushion to try new ideas.” My mom, September 2017: “If you think it’s a good idea, Andy, I’m sure it’s a good idea.” You may be thinking, This will never happen. And if it did, wouldn’t it cause runaway inflation? Enable generations of wastrels?

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Max Ventilla, the founder and CEO of AltSchool, has said that “the worst use of software in [education] is in replacement of humans… that’s craziness… It’s about the relationship that kids have with their peers, with adults. That’s what creates the motivation that creates the learning.” AltSchool is a company founded in 2014 to personalize education for all children across the country. AltSchool has raised over $175 million from Mark Zuckerberg, Emerson Collective, and others. It has opened six schools that collectively serve hundreds of elementary school students in San Francisco and New York. It employs more than 50 engineers who are developing tools each day that teachers request. The school uses video cameras to monitor tiny student interactions for playback.

The System: Who Owns the Internet, and How It Owns Us
by James Ball
Published 19 Aug 2020

In the wake of various privacy scandals at Facebook – among a relentless wave of bad PR over extremism, its corporate culture, censorship, and more – there’s no shortage of people who would like to see its CEO Mark Zuckerberg similarly humbled. That’s not intrinsically wrong: the people at the top of the pyramid rarely face anything like the same kinds of consequences for their actions that the rest of us do. But tarring and feathering the odd executive won’t change the system. We need to think bigger than that. We need to become systems thinkers. We can’t think about tackling Mark Zuckerberg, or even tackling Facebook, or social networking. The physical architecture of the internet is a network of networks.

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But it’s these things that shape the real internet – the big four tech giants are products of all of these factors. Looking into the architecture of the internet – who built it, who governs it, how it works, and who funds it – becomes, then, a way of looking at the real power structure of a huge swathe of the modern world. While we might think of Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Jeff Bezos or the other charismatic dotcom CEOs as the new rulers of the world, they’re just the tip of an iceberg. It’s time to see what lies beneath. I am at my very core a creature of the internet. My earliest childhood had computers hooked up via creaking modems to the bulletin boards that were the precursor of the popular web.

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Whereas, for the most part … we never really trusted the cable company.’ The same is true – for Eliason at least – about the people who make the decisions which shape their respective companies. We talk about the CEO/founders of the tech giants as if they have unprecedented power over their businesses. And it’s true that Mark Zuckerberg has created a structure that gives him control of Facebook’s voting shares15 – but Comcast, founded by its current CEO’s father, has it written into its articles of incorporation that Brian Roberts shall be chair and CEO for so long as he lives and wants the job.16 There is, it seems, nothing new under the son.

Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason
by William Davies
Published 26 Feb 2019

Instead, truth and intelligence are things to be hoarded and exploited to the maximum. Business starts to take on the air of a military campaign, in which subterfuge and deception are key weapons, and the aim is to destroy rivals in the field. In Thiel’s eyes world-changing founders, such as Jeff Bezos of Amazon or Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, are willing to exploit their secret to its ultimate conclusion, to the point of destroying all competition. If monopoly seems unfair or threatening, as economists and regulators have traditionally argued, Thiel’s answer is brutal: “competition is for losers.” The triumphant entrepreneur becomes a Napoleonic figure, who changes the world through sheer force of will.

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As he wrote in the early 1930s: As military action must be taken in a given strategic position even if all the data potentially procurable are not available, so also in economic life action must be taken without working out all the details of what is to be done. Here the success of everything depends upon intuition.9 Anticipating contemporary fascination with the personalities of Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg, Schumpeter was intrigued by the exceptional psychological attributes of these characters. It wasn’t just money that motivated them, but “the will to conquer: the impulse to fight, to prove oneself superior to others,” he suggested.10 Austrian economics, as it became known, sought to channel the aristocratic, military ethos into the realm of entrepreneurial combat, and the state needed to stand well back.

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The main center of these Napoleonic disruptors is Silicon Valley, where the goal is to establish a global nervous system with even greater sensitivity to our feelings than the free market. 7 WAR OF WORDS From “facts” to “data” During a question-and-answer session hosted on Facebook in June 2015, Mark Zuckerberg outlined a startling vision of where his company was heading. “One day, I believe we’ll be able to send full rich thoughts to each other directly using technology,” he said. “You’ll just be able to think of something and your friends will immediately be able to experience it too if you’d like.

Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning From It
by Brian Dumaine
Published 11 May 2020

That’s little solace, however, to those who have been crushed by Amazon’s wheel as well as to the politicians who represent them. A rising tide of political antipathy toward Amazon could someday dramatically alter its trajectory. Bezos is not alone in displaying big tech hubris. Other Internet titans, such as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Uber’s cofounder and ex-CEO Travis Kalanick, and Google’s cofounder and CEO Larry Page at times have displayed the same Silicon Valley social blindness. All are brilliant technologists who feel more comfortable with things they can quantify rather than with things they can’t, such as human emotions.

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In a statement Sanders released around the same time he introduced his Stop BEZOS bill, he said: “At a time of massive income and wealth inequality, when the three wealthiest people in America own more wealth than the bottom 50 percent and when 52 percent of all new income goes to the top one percent, the American people are tired of subsidizing multi-billionaires who own some of the largest and most profitable corporations in America.” Sanders had a point. Consider that as of early 2019, Jeff Bezos, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett, and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg together were worth $357 billion. They could write a $1,000 check to every man, woman, and child in America and still be multibillionaires. The kind of income inequality Sanders was talking about was starkly profiled in a 2018 article by the New York Times. Karleen Smith, who once worked as a clerk at Macy’s in the Landmark Mall outside Washington, D.C., has now taken up residence in her former store, which has been turned into a homeless shelter.

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In essence, with a UBI the federal government steps in and pays every American a basic wage to make up for the disruption that technology is about to wreak on the job market. Bezos, who has libertarian leanings, hasn’t made up his mind yet on a UBI. In general, he is a social progressive who is not politically outspoken and has limited his public advocacy. That puts him at odds with his fellow tech titans, including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and his cofounder Chris Hughes, Tesla’s Elon Musk, and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, all of whom support some form of a universal basic income. The UBI is simply a logical response to a socially and politically complex problem. It’s designed to make sure that those holding jobs that will be disrupted by technology will have enough money to retrain for a new job or, if untrainable, survive on minimum-wage jobs.

The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator, Silicon Valley's Most Exclusive School for Startups
by Randall Stross
Published 4 Sep 2013

Jessica Mah, “Culture and Purpose from the Start,” Jessica Mah Meets World blog, June 11, 2010, http://jessicamah.com/blog-23-1. The quotation comes from the final paragraph of the long post. A slightly different version of the same paragraph is included earlier in the post. 10. E. B. Boyd, “Where Is the Female Mark Zuckerberg?” San Francisco, December 2011 [posted online November 22, 2011], www.modernluxury.com/san-francisco/story/where-the-female-mark-zuckerberg. Earlier in the year, Aileen Lee, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, had published on TC a widely read essay, “Why Women Rule the Internet,” in which she argued that a new batch of e-commerce companies were springing up that addressed female consumers and that a majority of users of Facebook, Zynga, Groupon, and Twitter were female.

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Three weeks into the summer, Mah described the culture that she and Su were creating: “InDinero is actually like a family. We cook and clean for each other, treat each other like playful siblings, work as hard as you’d expect from a group of Asian immigrants.”9 Shortly after YC concluded, inDinero raised $1.2 million. • “Where is the female Mark Zuckerberg?” asked San Francisco magazine in a cover story that ran in late 2011. “For the first time in startup history,” the article asserted, “girl wonders actually have an edge over the boys.” Leah Busque, founder of TaskRabbit, was featured, and shorter profiles were provided of more than two dozen others, including Alexa Andrzejewski of Foodspotting, and Susan Feldman and Alison Pincus of One Kings Lane.

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But she wonders why it is that someone like twenty-six-year-old Aaron Levie, founder and still chief executive of Box, an online storage service like Dropbox, can brush aside any suggestion that he step aside. “I’ve always wanted to build companies,” Boyd quotes Levie. “The best way to keep me super excited is to keep me in the driver’s seat.” Why do the boys get to stay in the driver’s seat and the girls do not? • It is a few weeks since the “Where Is the Female Mark Zuckerberg?” article appeared. When Paul Graham sits down in the New York studio of Bloomberg TV for an interview, he finds himself fielding a barrage of questions from reporter Emily Chang about what should be done to increase the numbers of women and minorities in tech startups.11 He begins by saying that the makeup of a YC batch reflects that of the applicant pool.

New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World--And How to Make It Work for You
by Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms
Published 2 Apr 2018

You’ll remember the rest, and you might even remember being mildly irritated by having your social media feed utterly dominated by it that summer. From its launch in Frates’s Boston, the challenge circumnavigated the world, bringing in celebrities, politicians, sports stars, and everyday people, from Oprah and Mark Zuckerberg to a 102-year-old British great-grandfather, Jack Reynolds, the oldest person to take the challenge. “It was very chilly—in fact it was bloody cold, especially just in Union Jack boxer shorts,” Reynolds remarked. “But some lovely women with a warm towel and a shot of Grouse whisky soon warmed me up!”

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The platform owner or platform steward: The company Reddit Inc. is the platform owner for Reddit. It sets the overarching rules. It owns the brand’s IP and pockets the ad revenue. Victoria Taylor worked for Reddit Inc. To take some other examples, Airbnb’s platform owner is Airbnb Inc. Facebook’s is Facebook Inc. (and, in effect, Mark Zuckerberg himself, who retains effective control of the company). Likewise, Wikipedia, which might feel “ownerless” to its users, is in fact governed and controlled by a board with the power to fundamentally alter its superstructure and rules, something its volunteer editors and users can’t do. Platform owners have the ability to control—or at least substantially influence—who is allowed to participate in the platform, its governance and decision-making; how value is distributed; and even whether the platform lives or dies.

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The production values were gorgeous; the cinematic storytelling was worthy of Russell’s film school training. The call to action accompanying the video was smart and, at the time, a real innovation. The founders set up a website making it easy to tweet at “20 culture makers and 12 policymakers to use their power for good.” They asked the public to call on people like Mark Zuckerberg, Justin Bieber, Bill O’Reilly, and Oprah to help “make Kony famous.” The video was seeded and propelled by the existing Invisible Children community, and especially its fervent teenage and mainly female fan base. Its hard work over eight years had seemed to pay off; when it mattered, the fans had shown up to promote the cause.

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future
by Sebastian Mallaby
Published 1 Feb 2022

Chapter Nine Peter Thiel, Y Combinator, and the Valley’s Youth Revolt Toward the end of 2004, Sequoia’s investment team assembled for an intriguing meeting. Roelof Botha, a thirty-one-year-old partner, had arranged for a visit from an even younger entrepreneur, a Harvard sophomore named Mark Zuckerberg. These days, Sequoia realized, startup founders could be very young; this Zuckerberg was only twenty. In the new era of software ventures, entrepreneurs just needed a mastery of code, an idea for a product, and a maniacal focus. The meeting was set for 8:00 a.m. At 8:05 a.m., Zuckerberg had not shown up.

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Sometimes he didn’t show up for work.[7] When he did appear, he was not always constructive; “he’s bringing a bunch of girls back to the office because he can show them he’s a startup founder,” one of his two co-founders grumbled.[8] In April 2004, Sequoia and the other Plaxo investors weighed in. To the relief of the co-founders, they fired Parker from his own company.[9] After Sequoia wielded the ax, Parker embarked on his fourth act: he was nothing if not resilient. Hearing of Facebook’s conquest of the campuses, he emailed Mark Zuckerberg with an offer to introduce him to investors. The pair had dinner in New York and found they had plenty in common: two ambitious young founders who had launched experiments in online social networking. When Zuckerberg moved out to Palo Alto in June 2004 with a few friends, the guys rented a ranch-style house a block from where Parker was living.

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Not surprisingly, the speakers often amplified Graham’s own views. One visitor presented a slide with a discussion question for the group: “VCs: soulless agents of Satan, or just clumsy rapists?”[73] A couple of years later, when Y Combinator had established itself in Palo Alto, Graham invited none other than Mark Zuckerberg to speak at an event at Stanford. The veteran of the Wirehog presentation stood up and voiced the shared conviction of the rising generation: “Young people are just smarter.”[74] Coming on the heels of Masayoshi Son’s growth checks, the spread of Bechtolsheim-type angels, and Peter Thiel’s hands-off investing, Y Combinator represented yet another challenge to traditional venture capital.

The Start-Up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career
by Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha
Published 14 Feb 2012

You can carve out a similar professional niche in the job market by making choices that make you different from the smart people around you. Matt Cohler, now a partner at Benchmark Capital, spent six years in his late twenties and early thirties being a lieutenant to CEOs at LinkedIn (me) and Facebook (Mark Zuckerberg). Most supertalented people want to be the front man; few play the consigliere role well. In other words, there’s less competition and significant opportunity to be an all-star right-hand man. Matt excelled at this role, building a portfolio of accomplishments and relationships along the way.

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But in fact, each move made sense given the interplay of her assets, aspirations, and the market realities. Her honed management skills would be useful for a fast-growing company; her economics background would help develop a sales model for a new type of online advertising; and Google’s mission was rooted in making the world a better place. After six years at Google, Mark Zuckerberg hired Sheryl to be COO at Facebook, where she remains today. What Flickr and Sheryl have in common is that they each challenge common assumptions about the path to success. Flickr contradicts the idea that winning start-ups come out of nowhere and ride the founders’ brilliant idea to take over the world.

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The strength of the cofounders and early employees reflects the individual strength of the CEO; that’s why investors don’t evaluate the CEO in isolation from his or her team. Vinod Khosla, cofounder of Sun Microsystems and a Silicon Valley investor, says, “The team you build is the company you build.” Mark Zuckerberg says he spends half his time recruiting. Just as entrepreneurs are always recruiting and building a team of stunning people, you want to always be investing in your professional network to grow the start-up that is your career. Quite simply, if you want to accelerate your career, you need the help and support of others.

The Four: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Divided and Conquered the World
by Scott Galloway
Published 2 Oct 2017

Facebook already is positioning itself to crush the young company. Imran Khan, the company’s chief strategy officer, claimed: “Snapchat is a camera company. It is not a social company.” I don’t know if it’s the scorn the Zuck feels after Evan rejected his overtures about acquisition, or a warranted response to a threat. But I believe the first thing Mark Zuckerberg thinks when he opens his eyes in the morning, and the last as he closes them at night, is: “We’re going to wipe Snap Inc. off the face of the planet.” And he will. Zuckerberg understands images are Facebook’s killer app, much of it residing in the Instagram wing of his social empire. We absorb imagery sixty thousand times faster than words.24 So, images make a beeline for the heart.

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Soon, other tech companies, including the Four, were plowing research into the technology. Nobody wanted to sleep through the Next Big Thing. Virtual reality is the mother of all head fakes. The most powerful force in the universe is regression to the mean. Everyone dies, and gets it wrong along the way. Mark Zuckerberg has been (very) right about a lot of things and was due to make an enormously bad call. And he has. Technology firms do not (yet) have the skills to shape people’s decisions on what to wear in public. People care (a lot) about their looks. Most don’t want to look like they’ve never kissed a girl.

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Did Amazon need a $1 billion government subsidy? By purposefully managing their business at breakeven, Amazon has built a firm approaching half a trillion dollars in value, that has paid little corporate income tax. Facebook: Nobody wants to be seen as a company not on board with Facebook. Old CEOs want to put Mark Zuckerberg on stage with his hoodie. It doesn’t matter that he is neither charming nor a good speaker—he’s the equivalent of skinny jeans and makes every company that tries on Facebook look younger. Sheryl Sandberg also has been key—she’s hugely likable, and is seen as the archetype of the modern, successful woman: “Hey everybody!

The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age
by Astra Taylor
Published 4 Mar 2014

The more we comment and share, the more we rate and like, the more economic value is accumulated by those who control the platforms on which our interactions take place.11 Taking this argument one step further, a frustrated minority have complained that we are living in a world of “digital feudalism,” where sites like Facebook and Tumblr offer up land for content providers to work while platform owners expropriate value with impunity and, if you read the fine print, stake unprecedented claim over users’ creations.12 “By turn, we are the heroic commoners feeding revolutions in the Middle East and, at the same time, ‘modern serfs’ working on Mark Zuckerberg’s and other digital plantations,” Marina Gorbis of the Institute for the Future has written. “We, the armies of digital peasants, scramble for subsistence in digital manor economies, lucky to receive scraps of ad dollars here and there, but mostly getting by, sometimes happily, on social rewards—fun, social connections, online reputations.

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Almost twenty years later, these sentiments were echoed by Google’s Eric Schmidt and the State Department’s Jared Cohen, who partnered to write The New Digital Age: “The Internet is the largest experiment involving anarchy in history,” they insist. It is “the world’s largest ungoverned space,” one “not truly bound by terrestrial laws.” While openness has many virtues, it is also undeniably ambiguous. Is open a means or an end? What is open and to whom? Mark Zuckerberg said he designed Facebook because he wanted to make the world more “open and connected,” but his company does everything it can to keep users within its confines and exclusively retains the data they emit. Yet this vagueness is hardly a surprise given the history of the term, which was originally imported from software production: the designation “open source” was invented to rebrand free software as business friendly, foregrounding efficiency and economic benefits (open as in open markets) over ethical concerns (the freedom of free software).16 In keeping with this transformation, openness is often invoked in a way that evades discussions of ownership and equity, highlighting individual agency over commercial might and ignoring underlying power imbalances.

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Facebook executives met with emissaries from various companies to figure out how to better serve them, including letting advertisers see more of what users are doing and saying. Their clients seem pleased: Ford and Coca-Cola have stated that the collaboration has had a positive impact on sales, and Facebook’s stock has risen accordingly.27 We want to make it “easier for marketers to reach their customers,” Mark Zuckerberg assured investors in late 2012, right around the time it was revealed that Facebook was working with a company called Datalogix to track what users bought offline, in brick-and-mortar stores, to provide an even more granular view of user habits.28 As the company works to match promotional messages with people, the trick, according to the Times, “is to avoid violating its users’ perceived sense of privacy or inviting regulatory scrutiny.”29 We are witnessing the beginning of a “revolution in the ways marketers and media intrude in—and shape—our lives,” Joseph Turow, author of The Daily You, has written.30 Yet despite all the democratic rhetoric about the Internet empowering consumers, it is clear that this revolution is not of the bottom-up variety.

Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World
by Joseph Menn
Published 3 Jun 2019

But the herd needed new blood. If Jake was as good as he seemed, he could bring not only new energy but potentially more recruits. Jake soon gave some evidence of being a good bet. His press clippings were astonishing, including a 2010 Rolling Stone profile that called him “a bizarro version of Mark Zuckerberg” and the leading spreader of “the gospel of anonymity.” Inside cDc, Jake handled himself differently than the others, arguing more fiercely and sometimes with disdain for his elders. That accelerated after he hooked up with something even bigger than Tor: WikiLeaks. Activist hackers started the site in 2006 and first won wide attention in 2010, when they posted a video called “Collateral Murder” that captured the gunfire from a US helicopter that killed a dozen people, including two Reuters journalists, in Iraq.

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Beto’s technological savvy, while not in the same league as Mudge’s or Christien Rioux’s, put him way ahead of the average member of Congress on the subject and helped him appeal to younger voters as well as those increasingly concerned about tech threatening privacy and traditional jobs while spreading falsehoods. Certainly, he was a sharp contrast to those members of Congress who questioned Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg and stumbled over such basic concepts as its advertising-dependent business model and how Facebook differed from Twitter. Beto’s familiarity with tech also helped him reach funders in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. cDc members quietly whispered about his history to a few of the most trustworthy and wealthy tech people they knew.

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Executives above him repeatedly minimized the Russian activity in his public reports. When he briefed Facebook’s board about what he had found in September 2017, the directors asked him if he had successfully rooted out all of the stealth accounts. He answered, truthfully, that he had not. The board members then grilled CEO Mark Zuckerberg and chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg about why they hadn’t told them how bad it was. Sandberg paid the tongue-lashing forward, yelling at Stamos: “You threw us under the bus!” Stamos never controlled all of the security apparatus at the company, and the board flare-up cemented his reputation for being overly aggressive.

Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups
by Ali Tamaseb
Published 14 Sep 2021

—CHUCK PALAHNIUK, SURVIVOR Years ago, when I was starting my first company, my idea of a successful startup mostly came from movies I’d watched, articles I’d read, and the ever-present popular mythology of famous companies. Facebook’s story made me believe that most successful founders start when they are in college, as Mark Zuckerberg did. Apple’s story made me believe that you needed two co-founders, one technical genius and one business visionary to become super successful (it wasn’t until much later that I learned Apple actually had a third co-founder at the very beginning). Billion-dollar startups—or “unicorns,” a term coined by venture capitalist Aileen Lee—are, as their name indicates, relatively rare.

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Soon, the demand surged so much that Levie, balancing sixteen-hour days with the company and a full load of college coursework, dropped out of school to become Box’s CEO. He was nineteen. There’s an enduring myth that most billion-dollar startups begin this way, by young people with the freedom to take big risks. It’s not just Levie—the legend of the tech wunderkind is etched into the public imagination. Mark Zuckerberg famously coded Facebook in his Harvard dorm room. Melanie Perkins was twenty-two when she pitched the idea of Canva, a graphic design platform valued at billions of dollars. Ritesh Agarwal was nineteen when he started Oyo Rooms, a global hotel chain valued at multiple billions of dollars. And Patrick and John Collison, the brothers who co-founded Stripe, were each billionaires before the age of thirty.

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If their goal was to start a company so they could sell it and use the money to retire and have fun for the rest of their lives, they wouldn’t have started from zero to launch a new idea and a new company—again and again and again. Even for those who aren’t Super Founders, individuals who start billion-dollar companies tend to have a compulsion to build stuff. Take Mark Zuckerberg. When he famously created Facebook in his Harvard dorm room, he was a nineteen-year-old wunderkind with no real work experience. By that time, though, he’d already built three other projects: CourseMatch, which helped Harvard students choose classes; FaceMash, an app that ranked Harvard students by attractiveness; and Synapse Music Player.

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
by John Carreyrou
Published 20 May 2018

Lorraine drove over from McLean on several occasions and accompanied Noel, clad in her jogging suit, on walks through the neighborhood. One day, Noel came over to the Fuisz home for lunch. Richard joined them out on the house’s big stone patio and the conversation drifted to Elizabeth. She had just been profiled in Inc. magazine alongside several other young entrepreneurs, including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. The press her daughter was beginning to garner was a source of great pride to Noel. As they nibbled on a meal Lorraine had picked up from a McLean gourmet shop, Fuisz suggested to Noel in a syrupy singsong voice he employed when he turned on the charm that he could be of assistance to Elizabeth.

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While the rest of the country licked its wounds from the devastating financial crisis, a new technology boom was getting under way, fueled by several factors. One of them was the wild success of Facebook. In June 2010, the social network’s private valuation rose to $23 billion. Six months later, it jumped to $50 billion. Every startup founder in the Valley wanted to be the next Mark Zuckerberg and every VC wanted a seat on the next rocket ship to riches. The emergence of Twitter, which was valued at more than $1 billion in late 2009, added to the excitement. Meanwhile, the iPhone and competing smartphones featuring Google’s Android operating system were beginning to usher in a shift to mobile computing, as cellular networks became faster and capable of handling larger amounts of data.

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Those sounded like the words of a high school chemistry student, not a sophisticated laboratory scientist. The New Yorker writer had called the description “comically vague.” When I stopped to think about it, I found it hard to believe that a college dropout with just two semesters of chemical engineering courses under her belt had pioneered cutting-edge new science. Sure, Mark Zuckerberg had learned to code on his father’s computer when he was ten, but medicine was different: it wasn’t something you could teach yourself in the basement of your house. You needed years of formal training and decades of research to add value. There was a reason many Nobel laureates in medicine were in their sixties when their achievements were recognized.

Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics
by Peter Geoghegan
Published 2 Jan 2020

Our current policies on fact checking people in political office, or those running for office, are a threat to what Facebook stands for. We strongly object to this policy as it stands. It doesn’t protect voices, but instead allows politicians to weaponise our platform by targeting people who believe that content posted by political figures is trustworthy. Open letter from Facebook employees to CEO MARK ZUCKERBERG, October 2019 55 New Oxford Street is an unlikely setting for a raid by a squad of enforcement officials seeking to investigate election plundering. The office block looks like many in central London, nine storeys of glass and steel in muted greys and light blues. When a local estate agent was letting two of the floors in 2019, it listed the nearby underground stations as one of the biggest selling points.

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Many of its former staffers founded Blue State Digital, a multi-million-dollar consultancy that worked on political campaigns on both sides of the Atlantic. One of the first politicians to recognise the full capabilities of digital social networks was a first-term senator from Illinois. In 2007, Chris Hughes – Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard roommate – left Facebook to join Barack Obama’s nascent presidential campaign. The then 24-year-old, who has since become a vocal critic of the tech giant he helped build, set up My.BarackObama.com, or MyBo, which allowed supporters to become active campaign organisers. Around 2 million volunteers organised 200,000 events and raised $30 million in what was dubbed “the Facebook election”.23 Obama won 365 of the 538 Electoral College votes.

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It had suspended political advertisements ahead of a referendum on abortion in Ireland in 2018 after evidence emerged of foreign, mainly American, ‘pro-life’ donors buying adverts targeted at Irish voters.§ Facebook was, he said, introducing a comprehensive library of all paid-for political advertising. Richard Allan was a flinty witness. I could only see the back of his white-haired head and his gesticulating hands. His answers were often short and testy. He said that Mark Zuckerberg – who had been invited – would like to have attended but couldn’t find the time. The politicians were not impressed. A green seat was left vacant with the Facebook founder’s name on it. One lawmaker complained that democracy had “been upended by frat boy billionaires from California”. A month earlier, the British Information Commissioner had issued Facebook with its maximum fine – half a million pounds – for failing to protect user data.66 Allan looked most uncomfortable when he was asked about his second job, as a life peer in the House of Lords.

Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest
by Zeynep Tufekci
Published 14 May 2017

Craig Silverman, “This Analysis Shows How Fake Election News Stories Outperformed Real News on Facebook,” BuzzFeed, November 16, 2016, https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/viral-fake-election-news-outperformed-real-news-on-facebook; Craig Silverman and Alexander Lawrence, “How Teens in the Balkans Are Duping Trump Supporters with Fake News,” BuzzFeed, November 3, 2016, https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became-a-global-hub-for-pro-trump-misinfo; and Zeynep Tufekci, “Mark Zuckerberg Is in Denial,” New York Times, November 15, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/15/opinion/mark-zuckerberg-is-in-denial.html. 11. Silverman, “This Analysis.” 12. Sue Shellenbarger, “Most Students Don’t Know When News Is Fake, Stanford Study Finds,” Wall Street Journal, November 22, 2016, http://www.wsj.com/articles/most-students-dont-know-when-news-is-fake-stanford-study-finds-1479752576; Craig Silverman and Jeremy Singer-Vine, “Most Americans Who See Fake News Believe It, New Survey Says,” BuzzFeed, December 6, 2016, https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/fake-news-survey. 13.

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Facebook’s policy on real names is not an accident. Trying to force or nudge people to use their “real names” is part of the articulated ideology of Facebook and is central to its business model. The rule is also part of the expressed ideology of its founder (who still controls the platform), Mark Zuckerberg. In reference to pseudonym use, Zuckerberg once said, “Having two identities for yourself is an example of lack of integrity”—a statement ignoring the obvious function of social roles: people live in multiple contexts and they do not behave the same way in each of them.20 A student is not the same way at home, in class, or at a party.

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Even though Michael Anti is what his Chinese friends call him and is his byline in the New York Times, the name is a pen name. Anti never uses his legal name, Zhao Jing, which is completely unknown to his circle of friends and colleagues, let alone his readers. Anti angrily decried the contrast between his treatment and that of Facebook cofounder Mark Zuckerberg’s puppy, named Beast, which is allowed its own page. Because of Facebook’s real-name policy, to this day, Anti does not have a Facebook page. Even in developed nations where people are not necessarily hiding from the authorities, Facebook’s policies cause problems for social movements. LGBTQ people have been some of the sharpest and most vocal critics of Facebook’s real-name policies.

The New Prophets of Capital
by Nicole Aschoff
Published 10 Mar 2015

Women who channel their energies toward reaching the top of corporate America undermine the struggles of women trying to realize institutional change by organizing unions and implementing laws that protect women (and men) in the workplace. An anecdote shared by Sandberg illustrates this point: In 2010 Mark Zuckerberg pledged $100 million to improve the performance metrics of the Newark Public Schools. The money would be distributed through a new foundation called Startup: Education. Sandberg recommended Jen Holleran, a woman she knew “with deep knowledge and experience in school reform” to run the foundation.

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It’s not just Bill and Medinda Gates. Education reformers lobby Congress to pass legislation written by the American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization of conservative legislators and business groups that writes sample legislation for political representatives to present to Congress and state legislatures. When Mark Zuckerberg decided to donate $100 million to “fix” the Newark Public School System, the foundation board established to decide how to use the money had only a single community member on it—(former) Mayor Cory Booker.48 Foundations are not only unaccountable and undemocratic—they often also implement programs and structures that are undemocratic.

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Altieri, and Peter Rosset, “Ten Reasons Why the Rockefeller and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundations’ Alliance for Another Green Revolution Will Not Solve the Problems of Poverty and Hunger in Sub-Saharan Africa,” Food First Policy Brief No. 12, San Francisco: Food First, 2006. 39For a good discussion of the Green Revolution and its problems, see McMichael, Development and Social Change. 40Holt-Giménez, Altieri, and Rosset, “Ten Reasons.” 41“Giving with One Hand and Taking with Two: A Critique of AGRA’s African Agricultural Status Report 2013,” Johannesburg: African Centre for Biosafety, 2013, www.acbio.org.za/images/stories/dmdocuments/AGRA-report-Nov2013.pdf. 42See AGRA Watch, www.seattleglobaljustice.org/agra-watch/about-us/. 43African Centre for Biosafety, “Giving with One Hand,” p. 18. 44Robert Rothstein, March 8, 2011, www.epi.org/publication/fact-challenged_policy/. 45Dana Goldstein, “Grading ‘Waiting for Superman,’” Nation, October 11, 2010. 46Ravitch, Reign of Error, p. 33. 47William J. Bushaw, “The Seven Most Surprising Findings of the 2012 PDK/Gallup Poll on Public Schools,” Education Week blog, August 23, 2012. 48Maggie Severns, “Whatever Happened to the $100 Million Mark Zuckerberg Gave to Newark Schools?” Mother Jones, March 28, 2013. 49Robert Reich, “A Failure of Philanthropy,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, Winter 2005. 5 Looking Forward Capitalism both creates and destroys, and the past three decades have been no exception. Unprecedented generation of wealth, global integration, and technological innovation have been accompanied by a stratospheric rise in inequality, ever-expanding environmental destruction, and a loss of faith in capitalism as the best possible system.

The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World
by Brad Stone
Published 30 Jan 2017

Some of that is overheated, but there were consequences to their approaches that even Uber and Airbnb did not anticipate. At the center of this maelstrom are the young, wealthy, charismatic chief executives: Travis Kalanick and Brian Chesky. They represent a new kind of technology CEO, nothing at all like Bill Gates, Larry Page, and Mark Zuckerberg, the awkward, introverted innovators who typified the previous generation of tech leaders. Instead, they are extroverted storytellers, capable of positioning their companies in the context of dramatic progress for humanity and recruiting not only armies of engineers but drivers, hosts, lobbyists, and lawmakers to their cause.

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But Tiendung Le, who now lives in Melbourne, remembers Chesky as distracted and jittery that week, often standing on the balcony and staring wistfully toward downtown, as if all the action were there and he was far from it. “He was not very much present in the place, in the sense that he seemed to be thinking about something else,” Tiendung Le told me. On the second morning of his stay, Chesky planned to hear Mark Zuckerberg speak at the conference, and Tiendung Le gave him a ride. On the way they talked about the young and successful Zuckerberg, who was rocketing to fame. Chesky bristled with excitement at the opportunity to hear him speak. (The talk, with blogger Sarah Lacy, was considered something of a famous bust when attendees started Tweeting angrily that the conversation lacked substance.)

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But it was too late. Chesky bombed, and Floodgate passed on the deal. All these investors had concerns about the size of the market, about the absence of any real users, and about the founders themselves, who didn’t resemble the wonky innovators who’d created great Silicon Valley companies, people like Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs. Design students seemed risky; Stanford computer science dropouts were considered a much better bet. And, frankly, the idea itself seemed small. “We made the classic mistake that all investors make,” wrote Fred Wilson, a Twitter backer, a few years later. “We focused too much on what they were doing at the time and not enough on what they could do, would do, and did do.”11 The year 2008 was also an anxious time in Silicon Valley.

Hatching Twitter
by Nick Bilton
Published 5 Nov 2013

He turned around to make sure no one was within earshot. Then he opened the address book on his phone, scrolled down past the people’s names that began with the letter J, then past K, then L, and finally arrived at the number he was looking for: Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook. He peered over his shoulder again as Crystal and Ev and others stood talking by the kitchen, then looked back at his phone as he pressed the phone number next to Mark Zuckerberg’s name. IV. #EV The Third Twitter Leader Jack sat glaring at Ev, not a word coming out of his mouth, his eyes so steady and precise you’d have thought he was in the middle of a staring contest.

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Or when Biz and Ev went to Al Gore’s apartment at the St. Regis for dinner and got “shit-faced drunk” as the former vice president of the United States tried to convince them to sell him part of Twitter. Or other bizarre acquisition attempts by Ashton Kutcher at his pool in Los Angeles and by Mark Zuckerberg at awkward meetings at his sparsely furnished house. Or when Kanye West, will.i.am, Lady Gaga, Arnold Schwarzenegger, John McCain, and countless other celebrities and politicians had arrived, sometimes unannounced, at the office, rapping, singing, preaching, tweeting (some others were even high or drunk), trying to understand how this bizarre thing that was changing society could be controlled and how they could own a piece of it.

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When Ev stepped up to take charge of the company, he took a completely different approach to management, always trusting employees from the get-go, which gave them a sense of pride and, in turn, a loyalty to Ev and Twitter. Jack’s stare was interrupted when the following words came out of Ev’s mouth: “Mark Zuckerberg” and “Facebook.” In the weeks leading up to Jack’s firing, Facebook had been trying to buy Twitter. Mark had made it his personal mission to woo Jack into selling the little blue bird to Facebook. After Jack was let go, it was the two other Twitter cofounders who now needed romancing. Biz and Ev had driven down to Facebook’s campus a few days earlier to meet with Mark.

American Marxism
by Mark R. Levin
Published 12 Jul 2021

Marin Center for Academic Renewal, February 2019, https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED594180.pdf (April 22, 2021), 1. 17 Ibid., 94. 18 Lily Zheng, “We’re Entering the Age of Corporate Social Justice,” Harvard Business Review, June 15, 2020, https://hbr.org/2020/06/were-entering-the-age-of-corporate-social-justice (April 22, 2021). 19 Dan McLaughlin, “The Party in Power Is Directing a Corporate Conspiracy against Its Political Opposition,” National Review, April 13, 2021, https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/04/the-party-in-power-is-directing-a-corporate-conspiracy-against-its-political-opposition/ (April 22, 2021). 20 Zachary Evans, “Amazon, Google Join Hundreds of American Corporations in Signing Letter Opposing Voting Limits,” National Review, April 14, 2021, https://www.nationalreview.com/news/amazon-google-join-hundreds-of-american-corporations-in-signing-letter-opposing-voting-limits/ (April 22, 2021). 21 Phill Kline, “How Mark Zuckerberg’s $350 million threatens democracy,” Washington Examiner, October 21, 2020, https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/how-mark-zuckerbergs-dollar350-million-threatens-democracy/ar-BB1afARG (April 22, 2021); J. Christian Adams, “The Real Kraken: What Really Happened to Donald Trump in the 2020 Election,” PJ Media, December 2, 2020, https://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2020/12/02/the-real-kraken-what-really-happened-to-donald-trump-in-the-2020-election-n1185494 (April 22, 2021). 22 Mark R.

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YouTube removes video featuring man who reversed his transgender surgery 9. YouTube suspends and demonetizes conservative news network One America News (OAN) 10. Instagram bans ads for Senator Marsha Blackburn’s children’s book On January 31, 2021, Project Veritas released a video it received from a Facebook insider where CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other top executives discussed the company’s “wide-ranging powers to censor political speech and promote partisan objectives.”68 In the January 7 video, Zuckerberg is seen accusing then-President Trump of subverting the republic. “It’s so important that our political leaders lead by example, make sure we put the nation first here, and what we’ve seen is that the president [Trump] has been doing the opposite of that….

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A hard lesson has been learned, particularly in the last year, that Big Tech is, in fact, an oligopoly of its own, in which a few billionaires censor, suspend, ban, and edit the postings, videos, and comments that offend or challenge the orthodoxy of the Democratic Party, the various Marxist movements, the coronavirus pandemic authoritarians, etc. Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg even contributed hundreds of millions of dollars in grants during the last election to increase turnout in Democratic Party strongholds in key battleground states.21 What can be done about these assaults on our liberty, families, and country? Of course, I do not have all the answers. To begin with, I warned years ago, in Liberty and Tyranny, that we “must become more engaged in public matters….

Late Bloomers: The Power of Patience in a World Obsessed With Early Achievement
by Rich Karlgaard
Published 15 Apr 2019

In technology, whiz kid Palmer Luckey, the twenty-year-old founder of Oculus VR (acquired by Facebook for $2 billion), became a face of virtual reality, while fourteen-year-old Robert Nay cleared over $2 million in just two weeks with his mobile game Bubble Ball. At twenty-six, Evan Spiegel was worth $5.4 billion when Snapchat issued public stock in 2017. But Spiegel has miles to go to catch up with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, now an elder statesman at thirty-four, who with $60 billion is one of the five richest people in the world. Even in the stodgy world of chess, Norwegian Magnus Carlsen was a three-time world champion by twenty-five. This after earning the title of grandmaster at thirteen; at twenty-one, he’d become the youngest person ever to be ranked number one, and at twenty-three, he was named one of the “100 Most Influential People in the World” by Time magazine.

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Record-setting American astronaut Scott Kelly, a late bloomer himself, was even less of a standout. “I spent most days looking out the classroom window,” he told me. “You could have held a gun to my head, and it wouldn’t have made a difference.” Kelly’s brain wasn’t ready to bloom. Many of us see more of ourselves in Scott Kelly than in Mark Zuckerberg. We too have stories of fumbling starts, confusion, career or educational gaps, bad habits, bad luck, or lack of confidence. For the fortunate majority of us, however, some kind of intellectual or spiritual awakening happened, and we stepped onto a new, improved road. We found our way. But others become so steeped in shame or see themselves as so far removed from opportunity that they never develop their ability to bloom.

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* * * In pursuit of early blooming—to get the highest possible test scores and GPAs, be admitted to the best college, and enter the right career track—we give young adults precious little time to be kids. And the perception that young people are “just smarter,” as once declared by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (when he was twenty-two), implies they should be successful more quickly. But often they’re not. For every Zuckerberg, who made his first billion by twenty-three, or Lena Dunham, the twenty-five-year-old creator of the HBO show Girls, there are tens of thousands of twenty-somethings sitting in their parents’ basements wondering why they performed poorly in school and haven’t yet made a movie, disrupted an industry, or started a fashion line.

The Future Is Analog: How to Create a More Human World
by David Sax
Published 15 Jan 2022

Futurists and “digital prophets,” like the elfin Australian David “Shingy” Shing, with his Vegas fountain of wild hair and Elton John glasses, were paid handsomely to interpret the transformative impact of the latest digital buzzword—big data, wearable, drone, virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), artificial intelligence (AI)—and how it would change everything from the world’s economic order to pizza delivery. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg were widely regarded as oracles of digitization, and we paid careful attention to their latest projections about the future it would form. The promise of the digital future constantly shaped our culture. From books and stories to TV shows and blockbuster movies, we sat and watched this future projected with awe: the holodeck, transporters, and touchscreen interface of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the hoverboards and giant TV screens of Back to the Future II, the dystopian predictions of Maximum Overdrive, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, The Lawnmower Man, and, my personal favorite, Demolition Man, where a cryogenically frozen supercop (played by Sylvester Stallone) is thawed out in the future to hunt down his thawed supervillain nemesis (played by Wesley Snipes) in a digital utopia where commercial jingles dominate popular music and toilets automatically clean your bum with three magical seashells.

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SAP had miraculously created a VR experience that was more boring than an actual business meeting. Don’t worry though, Facebook is here to fix this. “Five years from now people are going to be able to live where they want and work from wherever they want—but are going to be able to feel present as if they’re together when they’re doing that,” Mark Zuckerberg said when unveiling the company’s new Horizon Workrooms platform for VR meetings in the summer of 2021. Horizon Workrooms put a fun, fresh spin on the remote meeting, with VR-enabled cartoon avatars featuring dynamic arm movements and facial expressions—a spin so fresh and fun that Business Insider condemned it as a “loathsome worker-surveillance dystopia” designed to accelerate the growing trend of corporations spying on every keystroke their employees make.

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“There’s a naive faith in democracy that the more participation you permit, the more barriers you tear down, it will lead to a spontaneous order, but there’s so many examples where increased access and transparency made the world worse.” And yet transparency was the core value of social media companies and their godlike founding fathers, Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey, who wrapped themselves in the flag of free speech and open access whenever the consequences of their creations led to offline chaos, violence, and social erosion. “I think transparency is overrated in too many respects,” Fukuyama said, noting that a completely open conversation, without social norms, rules, or the constraints of a civilized society, is ultimately counterproductive to a healthy democratic process.

Mastering the VC Game: A Venture Capital Insider Reveals How to Get From Start-Up to IPO on Your Terms
by Jeffrey Bussgang
Published 31 Mar 2010

Many VCs prefer young founders who are incredibly brilliant and gifted even though they are inexperienced and naïve. Look at the case studies of the successful start-ups begun by college dropouts, such as Microsoft (Bill Gates), Dell (Michael Dell), and Facebook (Mark Zuckerberg). Fred Wilson’s observation on Facebook is that the singular focus of the young entrepreneur is very powerful. “You have this twenty-five-year-old founder, Mark Zuckerberg, who doesn’t have a wife, he doesn’t have kids, he doesn’t have anything in his life that’s distracting him from what he’s trying to do. And there’s nobody saying to him, ‘God damn it, take the money off the table.

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I was also fortunate enough to be able to convince some of today’s most successful entrepreneurs—including the founders of Constant Contact, LinkedIn, Sirtris, Twitter, Zynga, and others—to talk from their deep knowledge and experience about how to work with VCs to shape a young company and help it grow. The purpose of this book is to share the magic formula of how great entrepreneurs team with VCs to create valuable companies from raw start-up. Whether you are the next Mark Zuckerberg (the Harvard student who started Facebook) or Jim Barksdale (the seasoned Fortune 500 executive who became CEO of Netscape), Mastering the VC Game will provide you with an insider’s guide to the world of VC-backed company formation, growth, and exit. In the book’s first two chapters, I will explore the psyche of the two protagonists in the start-up game: the entrepreneur and the VC.

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Thus, imagine the fewer than one thousand senior VCs spending their time shuttling back and forth between Silicon Valley, Boston, and New York City, all tightly interconnected through their college and business school alumni networks, interlocking business and personal relationships, and all connected by no more than one degree of separation using social networking tools like Reid Hoffman’s LinkedIn, Jack Dorsey’s Twitter, or Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook. There are exceptions to every rule and this description is obviously a general characterization, but in short, that is the general essence of the astoundingly tightly woven VC club. As a member of this club, I am pleased to take you inside for a tour—with the help of several of its most successful and long-standing members.

Eat People: And Other Unapologetic Rules for Game-Changing Entrepreneurs
by Andy Kessler
Published 1 Feb 2011

Social networking is a powerful tool, especially for getting someone else to do work for you. Interviewing Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg helped me finally make sense of the phenomenon. “What did you see that got this thing off the ground?” I asked. “There’s this weird effect,” he explained. “If you have a lot of people contributing information, a lot of times you can build a source or a set of information that’s just better than any individual can do.” I have T-shirts older than Mark Zuckerberg. At the time I met him Facebook probably had a mere 100 million users. He was twenty-two, confident but somewhat soft-spoken.

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I met Rupert Murdoch in the early nineties when he almost lost News Corporation under a siege of debt, and when he began transforming the entire media space, from newspapers to TV to film. I met Mark Cuban when he and his partner Todd Wagner were peddling AudioNet to anyone in Silicon Valley who would listen, before they sold the audio and video streaming company to Yahoo! for $5.7 billion. I met Mark Zuckerberg just as Facebook was crossing a few million users; he talked about lowering the cost of communications between groups of people. Today, a good chunk of the planet logs in to the site regularly to keep in touch with friends and family. I can go on. Meg Whitman when she was at eBay, Jeff Bezos at Amazon, even a few telecom folks who were billionaires for a moment in time.

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I wonder if in a hundred years, some wiseass is going to tour Google’s Larry Page’s Palo Alto home and point out to anyone who will listen that Page wasn’t really rich—what, no holodeck? You can bet on it. How Many? I WOULDN’T BE SO BOLD AS TO TELL YOU THAT YOUR IDEA OR your job or your investments have to go 12 for 12 (or 13 for 13) with my Rules for Free Radicals. But the more the better. Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook has embraced ten of the Rules; I leave it to you to figure out the ones he has missed, so far anyway. Some Rules are easy. Jeez, if you can’t find something that scales, you’re clearly not looking hard enough. Finding things that are adaptive to humans—that could be a little harder.

A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream
by Yuval Levin
Published 21 Jan 2020

I owe this distinction between substitute and supplement to Joshua Mitchell, who laid it out to me in conversation but has since articulated it most fully in his excellent essay “When Supplements Become Substitutes,” in the Autumn 2018 issue of City Journal. 2. Mark Zuckerberg, “Building Global Community,” Facebook, February 16, 2017, www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/building-global-community/10103508221158471/. (Throughout this chapter, and throughout the book, I treat “social media” as a singular rather than a plural term. This is in line with how the term is increasingly used and with recent dictionary usages, though I recognize there are arguments for attaching it to plural terms, since media is the plural of medium.) 3. Max Read, “Does Even Mark Zuckerberg Know What Facebook Is?,” New York Magazine, October 2, 2017. 4.

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A lot of our time on these platforms is spent communicating in more traditional ways—exchanging information, keeping up with family and friends, learning something, being entertained. But what has been truly distinct about social media, and truly disruptive, has more to do with the tendency to substitute display and response for communication. That substitution points us to the peculiar idea of sociality that has shaped these platforms and been shaped by them. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, has been unusually articulate about this idea. He is careful always to describe Facebook users as a “community” and believes, as he put it in a 2017 manifesto for the company, that “Facebook stands for bringing us closer together and building a global community.” The role of the platform, in Zuckerberg’s vision, is fundamentally infrastructural.

Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World
by Cal Newport
Published 5 Feb 2019

“we are in great haste”: Thoreau, Walden, 34. Alter decided to measure his own smartphone use: Alter, Irresistible, 13–14. “There are millions of smartphone users”: Alter, Irresistible, 14. “Facebook . . . was built”: “Facebook’s Letter from Mark Zuckerberg—Full Text,” The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/feb/01/facebook-letter-mark-zuckerberg-text The term constant is not hyperbole: “Tweens, Teens, and Screens: What Our New Research Uncovers,” Common Sense Media, November 2, 2015, https://www.commonsensemedia.org/blog/tweens-teens-and-screens-what-our-new-research-uncovers.

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The key question, of course, is whether the spread of solitude deprivation should concern us. Tackled abstractly, the answer is not immediately obvious. The idea of being “alone” can seem unappealing, and we’ve been sold, over the past two decades, the idea that more connectivity is better than less. Surrounding the announcement of his company’s 2012 IPO, for example, Mark Zuckerberg triumphantly wrote: “Facebook . . . was built to accomplish a social mission—to make the world more open and connected.” This obsession with connection is clearly overly optimistic, and it’s easy to make light of its grandiose ambition, but when solitude deprivation is put into the context of the ideas discussed earlier in this chapter, this prioritization of communication over reflection becomes a source of serious concern.

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PRACTICE: DELETE SOCIAL MEDIA FROM YOUR PHONE Something big happened to Facebook starting around 2012. In March of that year, they began, for the first time, to show ads on the mobile version of their service. By October, 14 percent of the company’s ad revenue came from mobile ads, making it into a small but nicely profitable piece of Mark Zuckerberg’s growing empire. Then it took off. By the spring of 2014, Facebook reported that 62 percent of its revenue came from mobile, leading the technology website The Verge to declare: “Facebook is a mobile company now.” This statement has continued to prove accurate: by 2017, mobile ad revenue rose to 88 percent of their earnings, and is still climbing.

The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay
by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman
Published 14 Oct 2019

As we have seen, only 63% of national income is included in the base of the income tax—many forms of income are legally exempt. A significant portion of taxpayers benefit from these exemptions, but the truly wealthy benefit even more. For many of them, virtually all of their income is exempt. Think about it: what’s the true economic income of Mark Zuckerberg? He owns about 20% of Facebook, a company that made $20 billion in profits in 2018. So his income that year was 20% of 20 billion, $4 billion. However, Facebook did not pay any dividend, so none of these $4 billion were subject to individual income taxation. Like many other billionaires, Zuckerberg’s effective individual income tax rate is close to 0% today, and it will remain close to 0% for as long as he does not sell his stocks.

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In that case, the wealthy cannot dodge taxes other than by reducing their true economic resources—that is, by choosing to become poorer. People rarely volunteer to become much poorer, even for such a noble cause as eschewing taxes. The changes in real behavior provoked by the tax code are generally quite limited. It’s unlikely that Steve Jobs would have invented another iMarvel if only his tax rate had been zero. Or that Mark Zuckerberg would have opted for a career in fine arts if the Internal Revenue Code had been penned differently. Yes, Apple does shift profits to Jersey, Facebook does create shell companies in the Cayman Islands, and a sprawling industry helps the wealthy slash their tax bills. But that’s tax avoidance, which flourishes in a light regulatory environment.

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Raising other taxes, such as the estate tax, would not do either. We might take comfort in the idea that the richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos, will one day pay estate taxes on his immense wealth. But since the founder of Amazon turned fifty-five in 2019, that won’t (hopefully) happen before 2050. And let’s not mention Mark Zuckerberg, born in 1984—is it wise to wait until 2075 for him to contribute to the public coffers? The way to address this issue is by taxing wealth itself, today and not at some distant future date.17 A wealth tax will never replace the income tax; its goal is more limited: to ensure that the ultra-wealthy do not pay less than the rest of the population.

Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else
by Chrystia Freeland
Published 11 Oct 2012

“They make a lot of money and they work incredibly hard and the husbands never see their children,” Holly Peterson said of the financiers of the Upper East Side. Their lives are driven not by culture or seasons or family tradition, but by the requirements of the latest deal or the mood of the markets. When Mark Zuckerberg rebuffed Yuri Milner’s first approach, the Russian investor, who was already a multimillionaire, turned up at the Internet boy wonder’s office in Palo Alto the next day, a round-trip journey of twelve thousand miles. In November 2010, the number two and heir apparent of one of the top private equity firms told me he was about to make a similar journey.

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Inspired and advised by the liberal Soros, Pete Peterson—himself a Republican and former Nixon cabinet member—has spent $1 billion of his Blackstone windfall on a foundation dedicated to bringing down America’s deficit and entitlement spending. Bill Gates, likewise, devotes most of his energy and intellect today to his foundation’s work on causes ranging from supporting charter schools to combating disease in Africa. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has yet to reach his thirtieth birthday, but last fall he donated $100 million to improving Newark’s public schools. Insurance and real estate magnate Eli Broad has become an influential funder of stem cell research and school reform; Jim Balsillie, a cofounder of BlackBerry creator RIM, has established his own international affairs think tank; the list goes on and on.

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David Rubenstein, the billionaire cofounder of the Carlyle Group, one of the world’s biggest private equity firms, told me that when he visited America’s top business schools during their spring recruiting season in 2011, he discovered that everyone wants to be an entrepreneur. “When I graduated from college, you wanted to work for IBM or GE,” he told me.” Now when I talk to people graduating from business school, they want to start their own company. Everyone wants to be Mark Zuckerberg; no one wants to be a corporate CEO. They want to be entrepreneurs and make their own great wealth.” That quest starts earlier and earlier. Jones and Doriot were both nearly fifty when they started their businesses. Nowadays, would-be plutocrats want to be well on their way to their fortune by their thirtieth birthday.

User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work & Play
by Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant
Published 7 Nov 2019

Renuka, women like her, and even others in Kenya and Indonesia all shared a greater lack. It wasn’t that the internet didn’t work. It was that all too often, no one understood what the internet was. In the West we like to believe that the technologies that have transformed our lives can do the same for others in different cultures. Consider the optimism of Mark Zuckerberg, who in August 2013 declared that he’d use some of his billions to provide internet access to the entire world, through a new initiative called Internet.org.2 By 2017, when you arrived at the organization’s website, you saw smiling people on snowy steppes, and Africans joyfully cradling smartphones.

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The idea was wildly popular at Facebook, sparking debate over how to do it, different tweaks and permutations, different names. Pearlman had another spin. “Leah wondered, wouldn’t it be cool if you could give someone props,” Rosenstein told me as we sat talking in a quiet corner of the sprawling modern offices of his startup, Asana, cofounded with Mark Zuckerberg’s college buddy Dustin Moskovitz. “At first I thought it was silly.” But Rosenstein and Pearlman kept thinking. “We talked about it, and by the end we had zoomed out and asked, ‘What are our goals with Facebook?’ One of our goals was a world in which people lift each other up, where positivity is the path of least resistance.”2 At the time, the only place to say anything in response to a post was in the comments.

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Instead, with the mere rudiments of Facebook’s data, they could target people based on their specific personalities: how a particular person reacted to messages of fear or hope or generosity or greed. For the first time in the history of user-friendly design, you could change a person’s experience based on not just assumptions about an individual, but actual knowledge. Mark Zuckerberg has always borrowed from the language of user-friendly design to communicate his ambitions, saying that Facebook made its users happier and more fulfilled by “bringing the world closer together.” And yet he created much more than that: a company that could understand users with a precision that couldn’t be dreamed of before.

The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter
by David Sax
Published 8 Nov 2016

It stands out because the board is always different, the rules are clear, and the game is played in under an hour. Yet the capacity for deploying strategy, by building alliances or using emotions to foster deception, is limitless. Settlers of Catan was the first big European crossover tabletop hit in America. It initially gained a foothold in colleges and the technology industry (Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly a huge fan), but as its cult following turned mainstream, it woke the nation up to this new concept of play. “The rise of Eurogames parallels the rise of digital games, but Eurogames are insistently analog,” Adrienne Raphel wrote in the New Yorker, in a profile of Teuber. “They can be as complex as video games, but, because there’s no fixed narrative, groups of people play together over and over.”

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While old industry giants such as General Motors and General Electric were pandering for bailouts, companies such as Twitter, which counted their staff in the dozens, were being valued at many billions of dollars. Why invest in a blue-chip company struggling to adapt, when a small investment in a tech startup could make you rich overnight? Today, it is the titans of technology—Tesla’s Elon Musk, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Uber’s Travis Kalanick—who are the new gods of capitalism. Their stories of rapid success are the subjects of best-selling biographies and Hollywood movies. Silicon Valley has supplanted Wall Street as the destination for the best and brightest. The Economist reported that in 2014, one fifth of American business school graduates went to work in technology.

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Second, the high-tech world is fueled by education. Its businesses are created by highly educated individuals, often at universities, and many of the products and services it sells appeal to an educated population. Education has become the pet cause of digital’s business leaders. Bill and Melinda Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and the venture capitalist Jim Breyer are among the top supporters of education philanthropy, funding everything from university scholarships and research grants to experiments in school reform stretching from inner-city Newark to remote African villages. Underlying this is the belief that digital technology can transform education in the same way it transformed business, media, and communications.

Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World
by Adam Grant
Published 2 Feb 2016

When companies run suggestion boxes: Birgit Verworn, “Does Age Have an Impact on Having Ideas? An Analysis of the Quantity and Quality of Ideas Submitted to a Suggestion System,” Creativity and Innovation Management 18 (2009): 326–34. average founder is thirty-eight: Claire Cain Miller, “The Next Mark Zuckerberg Is Not Who You Might Think,” New York Times, July 2, 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/07/02/upshot/the-next-mark-zuckerberg-is-not-who-you-might-think.html. writer E. M. Forster: Karl E. Weick, The Social Psychology of Organizing, 2nd ed. (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979). conceptual innovators are sprinters: David Galenson, Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).

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I saw how success is not usually attained by being ahead of everyone else but by waiting patiently for the right time to act. And to my utter shock, I learned that procrastinating can be good. Anyone who has ever worked with me knows how much I hate leaving things to the last minute, how I always think that anything that can be done should be done right away. Mark Zuckerberg, along with many others, will be pleased if I can let go of the relentless pressure I feel to finish everything early—and, as Adam points out, it might just help me and my teams achieve better results. INFORMED OPTIMIST Every day, we all encounter things we love and things that need to change.

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When asked to name their favorite books, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel each chose Lord of the Rings,, the epic tale of a hobbit’s adventures to destroy a dangerous ring of power. Sheryl Sandberg and Jeff Bezos both pointed to A Wrinkle in Time,, in which a young girl learns to bend the laws of physics and travel through time. Mark Zuckerberg was partial to Ender’s Game, where it’s up to a group of kids to save the planet from an alien attack. Jack Ma named his favorite childhood book as Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, about a woodcutter who takes the initiative to change his own fate. It’s likely that they were all highly original children, which accounts for why they were drawn to these tales in the first place.

The Education of Millionaires: It's Not What You Think and It's Not Too Late
by Michael Ellsberg
Published 15 Jan 2011

It looked like a good business opportunity, but there were plenty of other players, and it seemed plenty likely that they could beat us. And we were also thinking, Google could just jump in at any moment. They easily could have won in 2004. Now, of course, it’s a different story.” Dustin and his college buddies, roommates and fellow cofounders Mark Zuckerberg and Chris Hughes, famously decided to move out to Palo Alto that summer, 2004, with the intention of going back to Harvard in the fall. “But by the time the end of June rolled around, it was more like a hundred and fifty thousand users, and we thought, ‘OK, this is actually pretty difficult to do, even without having sixty or eighty hours a week of classes, homework and paid work.

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If your happiness depends on your draft pick or a single audition, that’s giving way too much power to someone else.” Learn the business side of your craft, and you’ll come away with applicable, marketable skills no matter what. For Dustin, of course, going for his dreams paid off. For several years, Mark Zuckerberg was the world’s youngest-ever self-made billionaire. But Dustin is eight days younger than Zuckerberg. When Facebook’s valuation soared in 2010, Dustin’s chunk surged to over two billion, and he took Zuckerberg’s place as the world’s youngest. Dustin has already started his next venture, Asana (http://asana.com), which aims to revolutionize workplace collaboration as thoroughly as Facebook has revolutionized the way we socialize.

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Bisnow and his team of merry twentysomethings had arrived at the central halls of global power. Now, Elliott rolls with Bill Clinton, Mark Cuban, and fellow non-college-graduates Ted Turner, Sean Parker, Russell Simmons, and Twitter cofounder Evan Williams, all of whom have participated at Summit Series gatherings. Aside from Facebook cofounder (and college dropout) Mark Zuckerberg, Elliott is now quite possibly one of the most well-connected twentysomethings on the planet. As a Forbes profile of Summit asks, “Do you know of a more influential networking event for a new generation of geniuses? If so, let me know.”2 Elliott has left the family newsletter business in good hands and is focusing entirely on Summit.

The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition
by Jonathan Tepper
Published 20 Nov 2018

But algorithms are programmed by people, and people are imperfect and have biases. The left may be happy that conservatives are censored today, but who will control these platforms in 5 to 10 years? And who will prevent these giants from cooperating with countries that censor their own citizens? Outright censorship is not so outlandish. According to the New York Times, Mark Zuckerberg has been learning Chinese. More important, the social network has quietly developed software to suppress posts from appearing in people's news feeds in specific geographic areas. “The feature was created to help Facebook get into China, a market where the social network has been blocked.”16 Mr.

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At first, they encouraged readers to post links that led back to their own news websites.37 Facebook was getting so much traffic that they convinced publishers to post Instant Articles directly on Facebook so load times would be faster and the content would be tailored to Facebook's audience. Gradually, Facebook started exerting more and more control over what was being seen, to the point that they became the main publishers of everyone's content. Mark Zuckerberg says his site is a “community,” but the site is not a co-op. Facebook decides what gets views and what doesn't and captures all the profit. As Facebook's News Feed became an incessant barrage of children's baseball games, cat memes, pratfall videos, and news articles, Facebook started restricting what content would actually make it onto people's feed.

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Today, over 70% of traffic is dominated by the two sources.46 For websites like the comedy hub Funny or Die, Facebook ended up capturing all the economics of their content. In the end, Funny or Die eliminated its entire editorial team following a trend of comedy websites scaling back. When Funny or Die fired most of its staff, employee Matt Klinman posted on Twitter, “Mark Zuckerberg just walked into Funny or Die and laid off all my friends.” He explained: “There is simply no money in making comedy online anymore. Facebook has completely destroyed independent digital comedy and we need to fucking talk about it.”47 Today, there's no reason to go to a comedy website that has a video if that same video is right on Facebook.

The End of Work: Why Your Passion Can Become Your Job
by John Tamny
Published 6 May 2018

Gates—the world’s second richest man—told Fortune that 50 percent of one’s wealth is a “low bar” for giving, while Buffett—not far behind—has pledged to give away 99 percent of his wealth.6 Buffett has been a major donor to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has pursued such lofty goals as eradicating global poverty and disease and empowering women to transform their lives. You can do that when wealth is abundant. The Gates Foundation employs 1,376 persons in its efforts to make the world a better place with an endowment of some $39 billion.7 And in time, the Gates Foundation will be dwarfed by other, bigger foundations. Indeed, in December 2015, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, and his wife, Priscilla Chan, pledged to give away 99 percent of their Facebook stock to charity. Chan Zuckerberg Science, an offshoot of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, LLC, already has $3 billion behind it and employs, the Wall Street Journal reports, “dozens of top scientists who think it is possible to cure, prevent or manage diseases by the end of the century.”8 It’s not crazy to speculate that Zuckerberg’s grandchildren might be born into a world no longer ravaged by cancer thanks to the generosity of their grandparents.

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While a net worth of $75 million got you into the Forbes 400 in 1982, the price of entry was $1.5 billion by 2014.10 With the exception of a few mild recessions and the big one in 2008, the U.S. economy has grown fairly rapidly since 1982, and the ranks of the richest have changed constantly. Mark Zuckerberg was a high school student in 2000, but by 2015 he was pledging to give away tens of billions. If the U.S. and world economies continue to grow, the richest people in the world in 2046 will be a very different crowd from those of today. And the wealth in the hands of the superrich thirty years from now promises to be mind-boggling.

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Brooks, Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth about Compassionate Conservatism (New York: Basic Books, 2006), xii. 2.Nikhil Deogun, “The Legacy: Roberto Goizueta Led Coca-Cola Stock Surge, and Its Home Prospers,” Wall Street Journal, October 20, 1997. 3.Ibid. 4.Ibid. 5.Ibid. 6.John Tamny, “If Charity Is Their Goal, Gates and Buffett Should Hoard Their Wealth,” Forbes.com, June 17, 2010. 7.Source: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Fact Sheet, http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Who-We-Are/General-Information/Foundation-Factsheet. 8.Deepa Seetharaman, “Zuckerberg Fund to Invest $3 Billion,” Wall Street Journal, September 22, 2016. 9.Sarah Frier, “Mark Zuckerberg Philanthropy Pledge Sets New Giving Standard,” Bloomberg, December 1, 2015. 10.Robert Arnott, William Bernstein, and Lillian Wu, “The Myth of Dynastic Wealth: The Rich Get Poorer,” Cato Journal, Vol. 35 (Fall 2015): 461–463. 11.Arthur C. Brooks, Who Really Cares, 3. 12.Ibid., 13.Ibid., 7. 14.Ibid., 77. 15.Ibid., 78. 16.Ibid., 124. 17.Blair Tindall, Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs and Classical Music (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005),149. 18.Ibid., 50. 19.Ibid., 50. 20.Ibid., 53–54. 21.Ibid., 154. 22.Ibid., 208. 23.Ibid., 22. 24.Ibid., 86. 25.Ibid., 97. 26.Ibid., 209. 27.Ibid., 304. 28.Monte Burke, “College Coaches Deserve Their Pay,” Wall Street Journal, August 30, 2015. 29.Ibid. 30.Ibid. 31.Ibid. 32.Brooks, Who Really Cares, 119. 33.Brooks, Who Really Cares, 139. 34.Rebecca R.

Thinking Machines: The Inside Story of Artificial Intelligence and Our Race to Build the Future
by Luke Dormehl
Published 10 Aug 2016

For those children born in 1964 and after, digits would replace rivets in their engineering dreams. Apple’s Steve Jobs was only nine years old at the time of the New York World’s Fair. Google’s co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, would not be born for close to another decade; Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg for another ten years after that. As it turned out, the most forward-looking section of Flushing Meadows Corona Park turned out to be the exhibit belonging to International Business Machines Corporation, better known as IBM. IBM’s mission for the 1964 World’s Fair was to cement computers (and more specifically Artificial Intelligence) in the public consciousness, alongside better-known wonders like space rockets and nuclear reactors.

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‘Tay is now offline and we’ll look to bring Tay back only when we are confident we can better anticipate malicious intent that conflicts with our principles and values,’ wrote Microsoft’s head of research in a formal apology to everyone hurt by the AI’s ‘offensive and hurtful tweets’. But despite these deeply embarrassing mishaps, it doesn’t mean that chatbots can’t be useful. The Rise of Virtual Assistants A few months earlier, in January 2016, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced his latest New Year’s resolution. As the co-founder of the world’s biggest social network and with a personal net worth estimated at $46 billion, Zuckerberg had already achieved more than most of us could hope to in multiple lifetimes. However that hadn’t stopped the youthful innovator from setting himself one New Year’s resolution each year in order to, as he puts it, ‘learn new things and grow outside my work at Facebook’.

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The Difference between Narrow and Wide A lifetime of sci-fi movies and books have ingrained in us the expectation that there will be some Singularity-style ‘tipping point’ at which Artificial General Intelligence will take place. Devices will get gradually smarter and smarter until, somewhere in a secret research lab deep in Silicon Valley, a message pops up on Mark Zuckerberg or Sergey Brin’s computer monitor, saying that AGI has been achieved. Like Ernest Hemingway once wrote about bankruptcy, Artificial General Intelligence will take place ‘gradually, then suddenly’. This is the narrative played out in films like James Cameron’s seminal Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future
by Joi Ito and Jeff Howe
Published 6 Dec 2016

The project was the brainchild of Code.org, a nonprofit group that shares some of the same goals as the Scratch Foundation. By week’s end some twenty million people had written six hundred million lines of code, the organizers announced. Code.org boasts deep pockets and a glamorous cast of funders, including Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey. Not everyone has been impressed. Shortly after the group launched in February 2013, Dave Winer, a longtime computer industry gadfly and the author of the blog Scripting News, wrote that “you should [code] because you love it, because it’s fun—because it’s wonderful to create machines with your mind.

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That night I collected data that demonstrated all the core principles we would publish a year later in Nature Neuroscience, announcing that ChR2 could be used to depolarize neurons.”9 This was a significant breakthrough—and in 2015 it would be recognized as exactly that when Deisseroth and Boyden received $3 million each as part of the Breakthrough Prize awards organized by Mark Zuckerberg and other tech-industry philanthropists.10 Previously neuroscientists were simply spectators at brain events, watching vast swaths of neurons react to this or that stimulus, and attempting to infer causality. But with “optogenetics,” as Deisseroth and another colleague called the new technique, researchers could stimulate individual neural circuits and observe how they behaved.

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All of a sudden it has learned to play really good Go, very quickly. But it doesn’t have a lot of experience. What we saw in chess and checkers is that experience counts for a lot.”7 Not everyone has cheered on the machine’s inexorable invasion of all aspects of our lives. On the day the Nature article was published, Mark Zuckerberg wrote a post announcing that Facebook had its own AI capable of beating humans at Go. “Why don’t you leave that ancient game alone and let it be without any artificial players? Do we really need an AI in everything?”8 By June the comment had received more than eighty-five thousand reactions and four thousand comments.

Ctrl Alt Delete: Reboot Your Business. Reboot Your Life. Your Future Depends on It.
by Mitch Joel
Published 20 May 2013

EVERYBODY IS BETTING ON MOBILE (JUST ASK GOOGLE, FACEBOOK, AND TWITTER). We’re all experts until something happens like Facebook buying Instagram for $1 billion. Facebook made it hard (very, very hard) to look past the billion dollars, but the deal was a testament to the one-screen world. It’s no secret that Facebook struggles to win on the mobile platforms. Mark Zuckerberg curated a hacker culture on a Web-based platform in building up Facebook to what it has become. On top of that, Facebook’s Achilles’ heel is photos. People post, share, comment, and look at photos nonstop on Facebook (admit it, just today you were probably creeping on someone from high school that you swore you would never speak to again).

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Squiggly means that you can’t hide behind small thinking and quarterly employee reviews. This means that we can’t be afraid to have a more squiggly career path, and we also have to be more open to doing the big, big stuff (Steve Jobs would often talk about making a “dent in the universe”). You will hear Mark Zuckerberg talk about Facebook as the place to connect the world. Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Google often talk about Google’s mission to organize the world’s information and knowledge (and, with that, they squiggle to create self-driving cars!). It’s one thing to dream big. It’s another thing to think and do big.

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In March 2012, I had the pleasure of delivering the opening keynote address at the Art of Marketing event in Toronto. With more than fifteen hundred business professionals in attendance, I shared the stage with people like Martin Lindstrom (author of Brandwashed and Buyology), Randi Zuckerberg (former head of marketing at Facebook and sister of its founder, Mark Zuckerberg), Scooter Braun (music industry professional and the person who discovered and manages Justin Bieber), and many others. The daylong, fully sold-out event featured seven top-of-their-game speakers and marketing professionals, but one individual stole the show. Eric Ryan is the co-founder (with his business partner, Adam Lowry) and chief brand architect of Method.

The Smartphone Society
by Nicole Aschoff

The top ten apps people kept on their smartphones in 2017 were the following: 1. Facebook 2. Gmail 3. Google Maps 4. Amazon 5. Facebook Messenger 6. YouTube 7. Google Search 8. Google Play Store 9. Instagram 10. Apple App Store Mark Zuckerberg, Sergei Brin, Larry Page, Jeff Bezos—these are the titans of today. Facebook is social media. Google is search. Amazon is e-commerce. Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com, is worth $112 billion. Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, is worth $69 billion. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, more than $50 billion each. But these men’s titanic profiles are based on more than their wealth.

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The Center for Responsive Politics reports that in 2016, the internet and electronics industry together spent a record $178.5 million on federal lobbying, putting them right behind the pharmaceutical industry and twice Wall Street financial firms’ spending.56 Continuing the revolving-door tradition between Washington and the internet industry, Facebook hired for highranking positions Chris Herndon, former counsel on the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee; Caitlin O’Neill, Nancy Pelosi’s former chief of staff; and Jodi Seth, John Kerry’s communications director. Tech titans are also testing other strategies to ward off growing criticism. Mark Zuckerberg went on a “listening tour” of the United States beginning in January 2017. In the months after the presidential election, as public disapproval grew over the company’s role in allowing fake news to possibly impact the election results, Zuckerberg declared that he needed to get out to the people.

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To get to the future, Silicon Valley thought leaders believe society needs to remain free from the suffocating grasp of the government. Ellen Ullman sees this Ayn Randian sensibility expressed often in the Valley by men who see the government as “anathema, a pit, the muck in which dreams of changing the world will forever sink.”23 In his early days at the helm of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg listed himself as “enemy of the state.” Katherine Losse, in her memoir about working at Facebook, recalls an encounter with Zuckerberg in which he asked her to write a series of blog posts about “the way the world was going.” He wanted one post to discuss the theme of “companies over countries.”

How Democracy Ends
by David Runciman
Published 9 May 2018

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 35. 49David Edgerton, Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 (London: Profile, 2006). 50Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Richard Tuck, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 9. 51Mark Zuckerberg, ‘Building global community’, Facebook, 16 February 2017, http://bit.ly/2m39az5 52Dave Eggers, The Circle (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013). 53Mark Zuckerberg, ‘Mark Zuckerberg’, Facebook, 3 January 2017, http://bit.ly/2hXwZIi 54Josh Glancy, ‘Mark Zuckerberg’s “Listening Tour”’, Sunday Times, 23 July 2017, http://bit.ly/2hvF4gm 55Eggers, The Circle, p. 386. 56The fullest account of this story is in Jon Ronson, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed (New York: Riverhead Books, 2015). 57Ezra Klein & Alvin Chang, ‘“Political identity is fair game for hatred”: how Republicans and Democrats discriminate’, Vox, 7 December 2015, http://bit.ly/2ja3CQb 58‘Mark Lilla vs identity politics’, The American Conservative, 16 August 2017, http://bit.ly/2uTZYhy 59‘5th Republican debate transcript’, Washington Post, 15 December 2015, http://wapo.st/2mTDrBY 60Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1942). 61Joe McGinnis, The Selling of the President 1968 (New York: Trident Press, 1969). 62Robert A.

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They are not used to being loathed. The state is not sure how to deal with monsters like these. Still, they are just corporations. If American democracy found the strength to face down corporate titans like Standard Oil at the start of the twentieth century, why shouldn’t it take on Google and Facebook today? Mark Zuckerberg is mind-bogglingly wealthy. But John D. Rockefeller was on some measures the richest man who has ever lived. That wasn’t enough to save his corporate creation. All corporations have an off switch. The state knows where to find it. Or at least it used to. No corporation, however rich or powerful, can exist without the support of the state.

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These cult leaders of the new solutionism, along with their many devotees, have nothing against democracy because they are sure that anything which enhances our problem-solving ability is a democratic plus. At the same time, they remain confident that their technology is able to supply democratic recognition across the board: it is giving voice to the voiceless. What they cannot tell us is how these two things go together. Because they don’t. This makes Mark Zuckerberg a bigger threat to American democracy than Donald Trump. Zuckerberg has no evil designs on democratic institutions; indeed, he seems to have very little gripe with democracy at all. His intentions are good. That is the threat he poses. The central challenge democracy faces is to find a way to reconnect what has come apart, which means first of all seeing that simply pushing harder at the two sides of democratic life without connecting them will do no good.

Abolish Silicon Valley: How to Liberate Technology From Capitalism
by Wendy Liu
Published 22 Mar 2020

It means creating a world where technology is developed according to different values, for different goals. In short, it means developing technology outside the logic of capital. When we think of the tech industry, it’s easy to get caught up in the quirks of the individuals involved. The mind conjures images of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg robotically testifying in front of Congress,2 or Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick lecturing an Uber driver about personal responsibility.3 We associate Google with its founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin; Twitter with CEO Jack Dorsey; Apple with founder Steve Jobs and current CEO Tim Cook; Microsoft with founder Bill Gates.

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A few of our fellow founders were even scrappier than we were, living out of suitcases and staying in discount hotels each night; the four of us living in a two-bedroom apartment was positively luxurious in comparison, even if Nick was consigned to sleeping on a fetid couch that gave him a rash. In my mind, we had nothing but our youth. Our startup’s mission was a battle, and youth was our most lethal weapon — hell, Mark Zuckerberg once said that young people were just smarter, and look how far he got. It would be silly to not exhaust our intellectual firepower in the service of crushing our enemies. Our youth was what gave us the ability to iterate faster, work harder, and innovate more than our competitors; our youth was what made us better than them.

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While the Luddites are often caricatured as prone to bursts of irrational tech hatred, situating their story in the proper political and economic context reveals their actions to be part of a long tradition of resistance by workers who have to fight for themselves because no one else will. For more on this, see Eric Hobsbawm’s 1952 article “The Machine Breakers”, or E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (Penguin, 1992). 2 In 2018, Mark Zuckerberg testified in front of various Senate committees in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica revelations. The testimony was unsatisfying and unedifying, but the robot memes were amusing. 3 In February 2017, Bloomberg reported on a video by Uber driver Fawzi Kamel who happened to get then-CEO Travis Kalanick as a passenger.

The Dark Cloud: How the Digital World Is Costing the Earth
by Guillaume Pitron
Published 14 Jun 2023

And so consumers are drawn in with supposedly ‘free’ services in order to keep siphoning more and more of their data.38 Facebook, the true champion of this economic model, ‘has become the most effective advertising authority in the world’, and sells a lot of intelligence on who you are, explains a specialised journalist in his book on the social network’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg.39 It is so successful that in the US more than half of the $240 billion of its annual advertising revenue is generated online. Why not apply this logic to selling vegetables, cinema tickets, and when billing medical procedures? After all, says Dutch privacy activist Douwe Schmidt, ‘everything can be free as long as we are willing to give our data away’.40 Do we really want every aspect of our behaviour to be entirely transformed into data by these platforms?

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But the trade press quickly pointed out that the data centre’s power supply came predominantly from a coal-fired plant.24 These revelations would soon trigger a global campaign by Greenpeace against Facebook’s use of fossil fuels. The US non-profit released a series of reports exposing the energy policy of Mark Zuckerberg’s company while, on the social network, internet users formed groups to share Greenpeace’s petitions. We can imagine the threats this posed to Facebook’s reputation. ‘Even if they never said it, at the time Facebook’s directors were beleaguered by Greenpeace’, reported one observer.25 They had to move quickly by making significant announcements.

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‘I don’t know how to explain this culture of secrecy around Facebook’, says Karl Andersson. ‘These people are really paranoid.’34 On the web, the company is everywhere, but in the physical world it is invisible. With its insipid buildings and minimalist communication taking place under Pinnacle Sweden AB — a subsidiary that serves as a screen — Mark Zuckerberg’s gamble may have paid off: to be forgotten in a way that ‘the residents of Luleå are no longer interested in Facebook,’ says Niklas Österberg.35 Researcher Asta Vonderau has analysed the outcomes of what clearly looks to be a deliberate strategy to render the Californian company’s physical presence invisible, ‘with the aim of minimising friction and contestation […] which could disturb free data and profit flows’.36 This strategy of frictionless profit is not new.

Competition Overdose: How Free Market Mythology Transformed Us From Citizen Kings to Market Servants
by Maurice E. Stucke and Ariel Ezrachi
Published 14 May 2020

NM AG Complaint ¶ 118. But Google did add, “We really appreciate the research that your organization has been looking into, to make the internet a more safe space for everyone.” 41.Roger McNamee, “I Mentored Mark Zuckerberg. I Loved Facebook. But I Can’t Stay Silent about What’s Happening,” Time, January 17, 2019, https://time.com/5505441. 42.McNamee, “I Mentored Mark Zuckerberg.” 43.McNamee, “I Mentored Mark Zuckerberg” (“Every action a user took gave Facebook a better understanding of that user—and of that user’s friends—enabling the company to make tiny ‘improvements’ in the user experience every day, which is to say it got better at manipulating the attention of users”); Roger McNamee, Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe (New York: Penguin Press, 2019), 9, 62–63, 98–101. 44.McNamee, Zucked, 103. 45.Chang Liu and Jianling Ma, “Social Support Through Online Social Networking Sites and Addiction among College Students: The Mediating Roles of Fear of Missing Out and Problematic Smartphone Use,” Current Psychology (2018), https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-018-0075-5. 46.Zephoria Digital Marketing, “The Top 20 Valuable Facebook Statistics—Updated April 2019,” accessed April 30, 2019, https://zephoria.com/top-15-valuable-facebook-statistics/. 47.Todd Clarke, “22+ Instagram Stats That Marketers Can’t Ignore This Year,” Hootsuite Blog, March 5, 2019, https://blog.hootsuite.com/instagram-statistics/. 48.Rani Molla and Kurt Wagner, “People Spend Almost as Much Time on Instagram as They Do on Facebook,” Recode, June 25, 2018, https://www.vox.com/2018/6/25/17501224/instagram-facebook-snapchat-time-spent-growth-data (data for Android users). 49.Facebook Inc., Third Quarter 2018 Results Conference Call (October 30, 2018), https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2018/Q3/Q318-earnings-call-transcript.pdf. 50.Rayna Sariyska et al., “The Motivation for Facebook Use—Is It a Matter of Bonding or Control over Others?

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Children are specifically targeted as part of this goal.”39 Moreover, by representing that Tiny Lab’s apps were “suitable and safe for children, complying with all applicable privacy laws,”40 Google is alleged to have engaged in “unfair or deceptive acts or practices” in violation of New Mexico’s laws and to the detriment of consumers. Google’s efforts to addict us and our children are surely matched in their effectiveness—if not their precise methods—by Facebook’s. As explained by Roger McNamee, author of Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe, who was an early investor in Facebook and a longtime mentor to Mark Zuckerberg but has since become one of Facebook’s fiercest (and most knowledgeable) critics: The company’s business model “depends on advertising, which in turn depends on manipulating the attention of users so they see more ads. One of the best ways to manipulate attention is to appeal to outrage and fear, emotions that increase engagement.”41 Evoking outrage and fear is only part of the strategy.

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Google even allows you to choose “the privacy settings that are right for you with your Privacy Checkup.”110 Facebook states, “You’re In Charge” and “in control of your Facebook experience.”111 Nor are advertisers forced to advertise with Google’s and Facebook’s networks. Other options remain. And publishers can always wean themselves off the Gamemakers’ advertising networks and charge for their products. But how real are any of these options? First, are we, the users, really in control? By one count, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, said, “You are in control of your data” forty-five times during the two congressional hearings, where he was called to testify after the fallout from the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal.112 The scandal, contrary to this illusion—or delusion—of control, exposed how Cambridge Analytica accessed the Facebook data of up to eighty-seven million people, entirely unbeknownst to them, in order to develop techniques designed to help Donald Trump win the 2016 presidential election.113 We typically view the Gamemaker as the servant that keeps providing us with services at no cost, rather than as the master that it really is.

The Startup Way: Making Entrepreneurship a Fundamental Discipline of Every Enterprise
by Eric Ries
Published 15 Mar 2017

More than at any other time in history, these components can be combined without requiring explicit permission or a business-development relationship. As reddit and Hipmunk co-founder Alexis Ohanian wrote in Without Their Permission, “The Internet is an open system: It works because you don’t need to ask anyone’s permission to be creative and because every address is equally accessible.”5 Imagine how Facebook would look if Mark Zuckerberg had needed to sign twenty partnership agreements before he was able to start experimenting with his idea on the Harvard campus. There’s an important paradox built into Silicon Valley’s veneration of the power of small teams. Startups are distinct from small businesses; most startups resolutely do not want to stay small.

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The answer is that, instead of pedigree, we infer the quality of founders from the results they are able to deliver with limited resources, gambling on the chance that early success will be the hallmark of future greatness. Many investors believe that how a team runs the fund-raising process predicts how they’ll run a company, and use it as a leading indicator. There’s a now-famous interview with Mark Zuckerberg, back when he was building what he called “TheFacebook.com,” in which he’s very passionate about his idea, but also not very clear about it. In a traditional business setting, people wouldn’t have invested in his idea after listening to his description. He said, “I really just want to create a really cool college directory product that is very relevant for students.

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Even the very best investors, the ones we laud for their “golden gut,” get it wrong more often than they get it right. The only way to win in this world is to take more shots on goal. Try more radical things. Pay close attention to what works and what doesn’t. And double down on the winners. A STARTUP IS MISSION—AND VISION—DRIVEN Outside of Silicon Valley, Mark Zuckerberg’s declaration that “We don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services”20 was met with eye rolls. But in Silicon Valley, we really believe it. Silicon Valley is obsessed with vision and the visionary founder who can uniquely execute it. This focus has been a source of some controversy as Lean Startup has become more popular.

How to Talk to a Science Denier: Conversations With Flat Earthers, Climate Deniers, and Others Who Defy Reason
by Lee McIntyre
Published 14 Sep 2021

Whether or not Zuckerberg wants Facebook to be the “arbiter of truth,” so many people get their news from his website that perhaps it already is. Steven Levy, “Mark Zuckerberg Is an Arbiter of Truth—Whether He Likes It or Not,” Wired, June 5, 2020, https://www.wired.com/story/mark-zuckerberg-is-an-arbiter-of-truth-whether-he-likes-it-or-not/. 34. Tony Romm, “Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Says in Interview He Fears ‘Erosion of Truth’ but Defends Allowing Politicians to Lie in Ads,” Washington Post, October 17, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/10/17/facebook-ceo-mark-zuckerberg-says-interview-he-fears-erosion-truth-defends-allowing-politicians-lie-ads/. 35.

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According to one February 2020 study out of Brown University, 25 percent of all tweets promoting climate denial come from bots.32 We’ve already seen how many Flat Earthers and anti-vaxxers are converted through YouTube videos. But what can be done about the spread of science denial on social media? During the pandemic, some social media companies stepped up their efforts to combat false information and conspiracy theories about COVID-19. Prior to the pandemic, CEO Mark Zuckerberg had struggled with the idea of whether it was Facebook’s job to police the sort of misinformation that was shared on his site.33 Famously, in 2019, he said that although he feared the erosion of truth, “I don’t think people want to live in a world where you can only say things that tech companies decide are 100 percent true.”34 At that time, the subject of conversation was misleading political ads (which he decided to allow).35 By the time of the pandemic—at least for misinformation about the coronavirus—Zuckerberg changed his tune.

The End of Jobs: Money, Meaning and Freedom Without the 9-To-5
by Taylor Pearson
Published 27 Jun 2015

If there was a better chance to be successful (on better terms) out there waiting for me, why wasn’t someone investigating my school for cruelly allowing me to graduate into this job market? What Are Jobs and Entrepreneurship? We hear the word “job” and imagine that someone is squirreled away in a cubicle, mindlessly filling out TPS reports for Proctor and Gamble. We hear the word “entrepreneur” and imagine Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. Those are all true characterizations, but these two concepts leave a wide berth in between. How do we clearly distinguish between “jobs” and “entrepreneurship?” In his book Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?, Seth Godin defines a linchpin as: “[A]n individual who can walk into chaos and create order, someone who can invent, connect, create and make things happen.”

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Would-be entrepreneurs imagine having to go out and buy a lot of physical equipment, hire staff, and rent office space. For a large and growing number of businesses, that’s no longer the case. The Social Network, the movie chronicling Facebook’s rise to a multi-billion dollar company depicts Mark Zuckerberg starting Facebook in his college dorm room. Basecamp, a multi-million dollar project management software company, was started by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, while living in different countries and while also running a web development consultancy. But it’s not just tech companies.

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Dan Ariely, Uri Gneezy, George Lowenstein, and Nina Mazar, “Large Stakes and Big Mistakes,” Federal Reserve Bank of Boston Working Paper No. 05-11, July 23, 2005 59. Pink, Daniel H. (2011-04-05). Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us 60. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6h5cY7d6nPU 61. http://www.inc.com/allison-fass/peter-thiel-mark-zuckerberg-luck-day-facebook-turned-down-billion-dollars.html 62. Pink, Daniel H. (2011-04-05). Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (Kindle Locations 1836-1848). Penguin Group US. Kindle Edition. Conclusion 63. JFK’s speech at Rice University on September 12th, 1962 64. Source: Peter Thiel, Zero to One 65.

Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are
by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
Published 8 May 2017

David Kirkpatrick tells this story in his authorized account of the website’s history, The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World. He dubs the introduction of News Feed “the biggest crisis Facebook has ever faced.” But Kirkpatrick reports that when he interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, cofounder and head of the rapidly growing company, the CEO was unfazed. The reason? Zuckerberg had access to digital truth serum: numbers on people’s clicks and visits to Facebook. As Kirkpatrick writes: Zuckerberg in fact knew that people liked the News Feed, no matter what they were saying in the groups.

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Digital truth serum, on average, will show us that the world is worse than we have thought. Do we need to know this? Learning about Google searches, porn data, and who clicks on what might not make you think, “This is great. We can understand who we really are.” You might instead think, “This is horrible. We can understand who we really are.” But the truth helps—and not just for Mark Zuckerberg or others looking to attract clicks or customers. There are at least three ways that this knowledge can improve our lives. First, there can be comfort in knowing that you are not alone in your insecurities and embarrassing behavior. It can be nice to know others are insecure about their bodies.

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The data tells us that some parts of America are better at giving kids a chance to escape poverty. So what places are best at giving people a chance to escape the grim reaper? We like to think of death as the great equalizer. Nobody, after all, can avoid it. Not the pauper nor the king, the homeless man nor Mark Zuckerberg. Everybody dies. But if the wealthy can’t avoid death, data tells us that they can now delay it. American women in the top 1 percent of income live, on average, ten years longer than American women in the bottom 1 percent of income. For men, the gap is fifteen years. How do these patterns vary in different parts of the United States?

The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy
by Paolo Gerbaudo
Published 19 Jul 2018

In Autonomist Marxist debates, starting from the times of Potere Operaio in the 1970s, it was viewed as a means to remunerate that productive activity which happens outside the workplace, at a time at which value production is dependent on social, cultural and linguistic processes. More recently, UBI has been proposed as a solution to the automation revolution and its negative effects on employment. Personalities from the Silicon Valley, including Mark Zuckerberg, have thrown their hats in favour of basic income, signalling a growing interest also from some capitalist sectors towards this measure. Podemos has proposed the introduction of this measure on a universal basis. The Five Star Movement has instead adopted it as a synonym for a jobseekers’ allowance, along the lines of the one available in the United Kingdom, or the Hartz IV welfare reform in Germany, with the transfer being conditional on the acceptance of employment opportunities.

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Whereas in the industrial era, the party styled itself after the Fordist factory, in these times of social media and apps it has come to adopt the quality of Facebook and other digital companies known under the collective acronym of FAANGs. Looking at the doings of formations such as the Pirate Parties, the Five Star Movement and Podemos, it soon becomes apparent that what these organisations propose is a political translation of the operational model that brought to success figures such as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, applying the logic of the digital company to the political arena to reap economies of scale in the way they reach out to their supporters and involve them in online discussions and decisions. This tendency has been seen in their enthusiastic adoption of social media of all sorts, with many of these formations rapidly gathering a large following on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

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Iglesias revealed that he bought his clothes at the cheap shop Alcampo. Similarly, Mélenchon has carefully avoided the bourgeoise suit and tie and made himself recognisable by wearing the ‘Mao suit’, similar to the one worn by Mao Tse-Tung. Curiously, this unassuming style of dress resembles the one of Silicon Valley executives such as Mark Zuckerberg, who famously often wears sneakers and a hoodie even in highly formal circumstances. Mélenchon has also used YouTube to convey a more personable and authentic image than the one sported on official occasions. As described by Antonie Leaument, coordinator of social media for France Insoumise, ‘When I watch Mé-lenchon on YouTube, I see him the way he actually is.

Outnumbered: From Facebook and Google to Fake News and Filter-Bubbles – the Algorithms That Control Our Lives
by David Sumpter
Published 18 Jun 2018

There is a real buzz about the progress being made and a friendly rivalry between the groups. Some of these engineers and mathematicians believe we are only a decade or so from true AI. Others see it as centuries away. I wondered what their bosses made of all the excitement. CHAPTER SEVENTEEN The Bacterial Brain In 2016, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg set himself a challenge: to build an automated butler that would help him around the house. The name of his butler, Jarvis, was inspired by an AI robot built by the character Iron Man from the comic and film series The Avengers. The fictional Jarvis has a human-like intelligence, reading Iron Man’s thoughts and connecting emotionally with him.

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When I had looked at algorithms that tried to influence us, I found out that they were exploiting some very simple aspects of our behaviour to decide what search information to show us and what to try to sell us. Neural networks have cracked a few games, but we can’t yet see a way up the next mountain. When Alex and I built our own language bot, it could fool us for a few sentences before revealing itself as a total fake. At the end of his year-long challenge to build Jarvis, the butler, Mark Zuckerberg put a video up on Facebook demonstrating the results. I have to warn you before you watch his upload that it is pure cringe. We are welcomed into Mark’s bedroom as he wakes up in his trademark grey T-shirt. Jarvis informs Mark about his daily meetings and reports that he has been entertaining his one-year-old daughter with a ‘Mandarin lesson’ since she woke up.

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His final product is a masterclass in practical application of the techniques we have seen in this book: face and voice recognition through convolutional neural networks, a form of regression model used to predict when he wants some toast or his daughter wants to learn Mandarin and ‘also like’ algorithms for choosing music that the whole family want to listen to. Facebook has developed a library of programming routines that helps its employees, and in this case Mark Zuckerberg, turn these algorithms into applications. When I get over the corniness of his video, and delve more deeply into his blog post, I realise that Zuckerberg is pretty smart (I know I might be a bit late on this one). He makes the grade as a data alchemist. While his fellow Silicon Valley colleagues are trying to prove their intellectual credentials by sitting on panel groups hosted by theoretical physicists, Mark is getting stuck into programming interfaces and working out how to make the most of the tools his company has created.

Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money
by Nathaniel Popper
Published 18 May 2015

While lounging at Blue Marlin, one of the trendy island’s most famous beach clubs, David noticed two tall men with waves of glossy brown hair, who would have drawn his attention even if they weren’t Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss. The Winklevoss twins had become a cultural phenomenon owing to their involvement with Mark Zuckerberg when they were all undergraduates at Harvard. Zuckerberg had initially teamed up with the brothers to build a social networking site, but when Zuckerberg went off on his own and created Facebook, the twins sued him, claiming he stole their idea. They eventually won a $65 million settlement and the story inspired the Oscar-winning film The Social Network.

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The next day Erik and Ira sent in their resignations and moved into the offices of Larry Lenihan and FirstMark Capital; Lenihan had always been more interested in investing in Erik than in Charlie. Charlie, Roger, and Erik were in constant conversation, contemplating whether Charlie should join Erik, and if the whole group should sue the Winklevoss twins. They ultimately decided not to sue—mindful of the way the twins had responded when Mark Zuckerberg left them out of Facebook. Charlie decided he couldn’t leave the company he created, but when he went to work the next day, he did not go in peace. He demanded that Maguire Ventures deliver the final installment of the investment it had agreed to make the previous fall: “You guys are screwing up my company, and Ira and Erik left because of it.

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But Charlie was clearly, and unsurprisingly, lacking skills as a manager. In many startups this is something that investors might notice, and help fix, by finding an experienced manager to come in and steer the ship. As it turned out, though, Charlie’s investors didn’t have much more experience working with startups than he did. The twins’ early experience with Mark Zuckerberg had been limited and, since setting out to become tech investors the previous year, they had worked with only a few young companies. With Charlie, the twins had initially adopted a hands-off attitude, despite all the bickering. But as problems became more evident, they talked with Charlie’s chief programmer about replacing Charlie as CEO.

Rich White Men: What It Takes to Uproot the Old Boys' Club and Transform America
by Garrett Neiman
Published 19 Jun 2023

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. —UPTON SINCLAIR, AMERICAN POLITICAL ACTIVIST, AND AUTHOR OF THE JUNGLE REALITY: Rich white men benefit from compounding unearned advantages. The wealthy philanthropist I interviewed in 2019 is an incredible American success story. I’ll call him Mark, after Mark Zuckerberg, because he, too, is a tech titan. The odds were against this Mark becoming a CEO of one of America’s most powerful companies. Mark describes his upbringing in a mostly white suburb in Colorado as “solid middle class, lower middle class,” but after he sold his pioneering company for $3 billion, he now lives among the ultrarich in a $20 million mansion in Atherton, California, the moneyed suburb that houses much of the Silicon Valley elite.

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At the same time, though, I don’t want to imply that height carries the equivalent weight of other identity-based hundred advantages like socioeconomic status, gender, and race. I couldn’t find a specific study that analyzes these intersections explicitly, but I find it telling that there are more short white men worth at least $50 billion—Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin, Michael Bloomberg, Michael Dell, Charles Koch, Jim Walton, Mark Zuckerberg are all at most five foot seven—than there are Black people of any height who are CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. Nor do I want to suggest that gender inequities specifically would be resolved if American society had more tall women, since height is also another prism through which women face a double bind: tall women are perceived to be more masculine,7 which may help to explain why they can sometimes access additional leadership opportunities, but that same perception also leads some men to conclude that they are less likable and less fit for promotions.

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Half of Jewish Americans report annual household incomes above $100,000, and one-quarter report incomes above $200,000.30 While Jewish Americans are less than 2 percent of the American population, they make up 9 percent of US senators and a third of America’s billionaires.31 Jewish billionaires Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Larry Ellison, and Michael Bloomberg—whose combined wealth exceeds $500 billion—are five of America’s ten wealthiest people.32 But every ethnic group that has accessed American power has one thing in common: rich white men eventually deemed their light skin as assimilable into whiteness.

Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now
by Alan Rusbridger
Published 14 Oct 2018

Should a newspaper become part of that network, or would its chances of survival be greatest by remaining separate, and distinct, from it? The talkboards were certainly ahead of their time. Someone later described them as ‘Web 2.0 social networking before Zuckerberg was a Harvard freshman’. It was when Mark Zuckerberg was a sophomore at Harvard in September 2003 that he started playing around with ways of linking up communities of students – four years after the first stumbling efforts on the Guardian and elsewhere. Reddit – with an equally unsophisticated interface – started five years after the Guardian talkboards as ‘the front page of the internet’ and, with 250 million unique monthly users, was by 2017 the ninth-biggest website in the world.

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• Everyone agreed that intelligence involved intrusion – and that it was vital that the work of the agencies was effectively and independently overseen. But were the oversight mechanisms up to the job? (We were later to see a public display of many legislators’ unfamiliarity with technology in April 2018 when Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg grappled with the incoherent questioning of several Senators who appeared to have rudimentary knowledge of what social media was, or how it was funded.) • Proportionality. Was there convincing evidence that bulk data collection and storage was necessary and proportionate? Security chiefs insisted yes.

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The minute you’d learned the basics of audio podcasting the commercial team (not to mention Facebook) were mouthing the latest mantra: pivot to video. You’d get up to speed on platforms, only to be told it was all about personalisation. You might think you understood data, only to learn it was now all about structured data. You’d crack your platform strategy only for Mark Zuckerberg to change his mind. Joanna Geary,10 whom we’d hired in 2011 to look after social media, posted on Facebook in late 2017: About 10 years ago I thought I might need to learn Ruby on Rails [to build web apps] to understand what’s going on in journalism. Then, about 5 years after that, I thought I might need an MBA.

Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire
by Brad Stone
Published 10 May 2021

Seven straight years of revenue declines tended to “focus the mind,” as Don Graham liked to say. Graham was beloved in the Post newsroom for his first-name familiarity with staff and his zeal for the journalistic mission. But under his cautious eye, the Post had reached an impasse. Graham had reached an agreement in 2005 with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to invest in the budding social network, but then he allowed Zuckerberg to withdraw from the deal and take money at a higher valuation from the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Accel instead. Having forfeited a historic company-enriching windfall, Graham joined Facebook’s board of directors, where for the next few years he listened to Zuckerberg preach that content on the web should be free.

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Sanchez claimed to be working as the middleman. Simpson and her editors in New York could only guess at the identities of the mystery lovers. In emails later made public as part of a lawsuit Michael Sanchez filed against AMI in L.A. district court, the journalists speculated about figures like Evan Spiegel, Mark Zuckerberg, and Michael Dell. For weeks, Sanchez kept them guessing and tried to bump up his asking price by hinting at the possibility that the story could end up with a British tabloid. In early October, he teased the matter further, meeting with Simpson and showing her text messages and photos with the faces obscured.

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For Bezos and his advisors though, who were still trying to positively spin the embarrassing events surrounding his divorce, such a cloud of uncertainty was at the very least distracting from the more unsavory and complicated truth. * * * As the entire mêlée quieted over the course of 2019, Bezos and Lauren Sanchez started appearing together in public. In July, they attended the Allen & Company conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, mingling with the likes of Warren Buffett, Tim Cook, and Mark Zuckerberg. A few days later, they watched the Wimbledon men’s finals from the Royal Box, three rows behind Prince William and Kate Middleton. In August, they gamboled in the western Mediterranean Sea on the super yacht of mogul David Geffen. There were also trips to Solomeo, Italy, for a summit organized by luxury designer Brunello Cucinelli and to Venice, aboard the mega yacht of Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg.

Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence
by Amy B. Zegart
Published 6 Nov 2021

And we haven’t even talked about information warfare or synthetic biology. The point is, good intelligence oversight requires much more technical knowledge than it used to—and Congress doesn’t have it. In 2020, Congress had 210 lawyers but just 32 engineers.144 There were only three engineers in the entire U.S. Senate.145 When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before a joint hearing of the Senate’s Commerce and Judiciary Committees in April 2018 to discuss privacy issues and Russian disinformation, it was a jaw-dropping moment revealing just how little senators knew about the products and companies that are transforming global politics, commerce, and civil society.146 Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) asked whether Twitter was the same thing as Facebook.

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Deepfake application tools are now widely available online and so simple to use that high school students with no coding background can create convincing forgeries. In May 2019, anonymous users doctored a video to make House Speaker Nancy Pelosi appear drunk, which went viral on Facebook. When the social media giant refused to take it down, two artists and a small technology startup created a deepfake of Mark Zuckerberg and posted it on Instagram. In August, the Wall Street Journal reported the first known use of deepfake audio to impersonate a voice in a cyber heist. Believing he was talking to his boss, an energy executive transferred $243,000. The voice turned out to be an AI-based imitation that was so real, it even had the boss’s slight German accent and lilt.

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The White House suspended Acosta’s press credential, prompting outcries.120 A few months later, a video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was distorted to make her sound drunk and posted on social media, where it was viewed two million times and made headline news.121 When Facebook refused to remove the fake Pelosi video, two British artists posted their own doctored video of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg claiming he wanted to “control billions of people’s stolen data, all their secrets” and thanking Spectre, the fictional evil organization from James Bond stories.122 These “cheapfakes” used rudimentary technology that was relatively easy to spot. Deception is going to get much worse, thanks to advances in artificial intelligence fueling the development of deepfake digital impersonation technology.

The Misfit Economy: Lessons in Creativity From Pirates, Hackers, Gangsters and Other Informal Entrepreneurs
by Alexa Clay and Kyra Maya Phillips
Published 23 Jun 2015

Its functionality was patented (now held by LinkedIn). In December 2000, Six Degrees was sold to Youthstream Media Networks for $125 million. A success by all accounts. We asked Weinreich whether it upset him to see Six Degrees fade away, only to be replaced by other, wildly successful social networking sites. Did he resent Mark Zuckerberg and the success of Facebook? “Absolutely not,” Weinreich told us. “When people copy stuff that is contemporaneous, it is more upsetting than when they do it later.” So time and space make copying easier to take. He added: “It’s weird today to come up with an idea that nobody is doing.” Six Degrees was launched eight years before Facebook.

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Hackers pioneered many principles of informality that have since come to infect mainstream work culture. These include: problem-based work, a culture of openness and transparency, reputational and peer-based accountability (instead of rigid hierarchies and managers), and the permission to act on new opportunities. In a letter to potential investors, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook described the company’s culture and unique management approach, which he dubbed “The Hacker Way.”16 “Hacking,” Zuckerberg wrote, “is a means of building something or testing the boundaries of what can be done.” He went on to describe hackers as people obsessed with continuous improvement and incessant iteration, believing that there is always room to do better and “that nothing is ever complete.”

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Charles Johnson, A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pirates (Conway Maritime Press, 2002). 9. Leeson, The Invisible Hook. 10. Ibid. 11. Rediker, Villains of All Nations. 12. Johnson, A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pirates. 13. Leeson, The Invisible Hook. 14. Rediker, Villains of All Nations. 15. Ibid. 16. Epicenter Staff, “Mark Zuckerberg’s Letter to Investors: ‘The Hacker Way,’ ” Wired, February 1, 2012, http://www.wired.com/2012/02/zuck-letter/. 17. Ivan Arreguín-Toft, “How the Weak Win Wars: A Theory of Asymmetric Conflict,” International Security 26, no. 1 (Summer 2001): 93–128. 18. Moises Naim, Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats Are Hijacking the Global Economy (London: Arrow, 2007). 19.

Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation
by Kevin Roose
Published 9 Mar 2021

Today, I upload my audio files to an automated transcription service, which uses a machine-learning-powered speech-to-text engine to transcribe my audio files in seconds. Automating my transcriptions hasn’t always gone smoothly. (The app tends to make some pretty amusing errors, like the time I was interviewing a confidant of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and it transcribed “Zuck’s inclination” as “sexy clinician.”) But it has saved me hundreds of hours over the years, and freed up time to report and write. But despite labor-saving innovations like these, there is no evidence that today’s workers are happier than workers of previous generations.

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“If your users feel friction using or signing up for your service, you have a problem,” Mulligan wrote. “Sometimes it’s unavoidable, but you should do everything in your power to remove as much friction as possible.” I first encountered the idea of frictionless design in 2011, when Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook was introducing a new feature called “frictionless sharing.” The feature—which allowed certain apps, like Netflix and Spotify, to post directly to users’ feeds, rather than having to ask for permission each time—was a failure, and Facebook killed it fairly quickly. But the idea of a “frictionless” product captured Silicon Valley’s imagination.

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The French researcher Camille Roth divides Camille Roth, “Algorithmic Distortion of Informational Landscapes,” Intellectica (2019). Amazon engineer Brent Smith Brent Smith and Greg Linden, “Two Decades of Recommender Systems at Amazon.com,” IEEE Computer Society (2017). Brenden Mulligan, a tech entrepreneur Brenden Mulligan, “Reduce Friction, Increase Happiness,” TechCrunch, October 16, 2011. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Brittany Darwell, “Facebook’s Frictionless Sharing Mistake,” Adweek, January 22, 2013. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos, “2018 Letter to Shareholders,” Amazon.com, 2018. Uber drivers lost out on millions of dollars Arik Jenkins, “Why Uber Doesn’t Want a Built-In Tipping Option,” Fortune, April 18, 2017.

Nothing but Net: 10 Timeless Stock-Picking Lessons From One of Wall Street’s Top Tech Analysts
by Mark Mahaney
Published 9 Nov 2021

Nothing other than Google is as widely used by so much of the human population. And this ubiquity itself has been controversial. How did Facebook become so large? Just how influential and powerful has Facebook become? And exactly who is in charge of this massive platform? What if Mark Zuckerberg were to be succeeded by Lex Luthor? What if Mark Zuckerberg secretly is Lex Luthor? Call it the curse of ubiquity. There are other reasons Facebook has been so controversial. Some of the content shared on its platform has been deeply disturbing. On March 15, 2019, Brenton Tarrant livestreamed on Facebook his mass murder of 51 innocent civilians in Christchurch, New Zealand.

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FB shares would eventually recover to that $218 high by early 2020 and then dramatically rise above it in the latter part of the year. But that 43% correction was massive and painful. And it was almost entirely self-inflicted. On July 25, 2018, Facebook announced its June quarter earnings, and its stock tanked (Figure 2.1). Here are the two key parts of that earnings call that did the damage (emphasis added). Mark Zuckerberg: Looking ahead, we will continue to invest heavily in security and privacy because we have a responsibility to keep people safe. But as I’ve said on past calls, we’re investing so much in security that it will significantly impact our profitability. We’re starting to see that this quarter. But in addition to this, we also have a responsibility to keep building services that bring people closer together in new ways as well.

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There’s one in particular that has done long-term shareholders a great service by maintaining a long-term orientation. I’m not talking Amazon or Google or Netflix. I’m talking Facebook. Perhaps none of the top tech founders highlighted at the beginning of this lesson has been more surrounded by controversy than Facebook cofounder Mark Zuckerberg. Bezos, Jobs, Gates, Page, Brin—none of them had a sensational Hollywood movie (The Social Network) released about them and their company while they were still running a private company. Their IPO roadshow attire didn’t stir investor debate in the way that Zuckerberg’s hoodie did—“Hoodiegate!”

Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work
by Alex Rosenblat
Published 22 Oct 2018

Tressie McMillan Cottom, Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy (New York: New Press, 2017), ch. 9; The Movement for Black Lives, “Platform,” n.d., https://policy.m4bl.org/platform/. 15. Chris Hughes, Fair Shot: Rethinking Inequality and How We Earn (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018). 16. Todd Haselton, “Mark Zuckerberg Joins Silicon Valley Bigwigs in Calling for Government to Give Everybody Free Money,” CNBC, May 25, 2017, www.cnbc.com/2017/05/25/mark-zuckerberg-calls-for-universal-basic-income-at-harvard-speech.html. 17. Eric A. Posner and Glen E. Weyl, “Property Is Only Another Name for Monopoly,” Journal of Legal Analysis (January 31, 2017), https://ssrn.com/abstract=2818494. 18.

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While Occupy Wall Street activists formed a tent city in Zuccotti Park on Wall Street, members of Black Lives Matter were staging protests across the country to advocate a political agenda that could address the root causes of inequality.14 Soon, more voices joined the chorus, this time from the top. Facebook cofounder and philanthropist Chris Hughes dedicated his intellectual thought leadership to promoting a universal basic income,15 and Mark Zuckerberg, his former roommate, mentioned it in the commencement speech he gave at Harvard.16 This quasi-moral solution to income inequality—and to expanding the definition of equality for this generation—finds its strongest American proponents in Silicon Valley. Home to the billion-dollar titans of industry, who form a slightly reluctant political elite in the New Economy, Silicon Valley and the culture of technology radiate influence across the business, political, and media culture of major American cities.

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Drivers aren’t “happiness engineers” or “code ninjas.”8 THE LEGEND OF SILICON VALLEY It shouldn’t be surprising that Uber has adopted the myth of tech entrepreneurship: after all, the company was started by such entrepreneurs. Travis Kalanick, the most visible cofounder of Uber, is hailed as one of Silicon Valley’s “Great Men.” The Great Man theory of success celebrates America’s technology founder-heroes for their business acumen and their passion, like Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates and Facebook cofounder Mark Zuckerberg. The Silicon Valley “Great Men” typically celebrated are white men. Equally accomplished founders who are not white men tend to get less play—like Yahoo founder Jerry Yang, according to longtime Silicon Valley journalist, Sarah Lacy.9 The meritocratic theory of success has crossed class lines and entered the culture of work embraced by most people in the United States.

The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It
by Yascha Mounk
Published 15 Feb 2018

On the United States, see Zeynep Tufekci, “Zuckerberg’s Preposterous Defense of Facebook,” New York Times, September 29, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/29/opinion/mark-zuckerberg-facebook.html?mcubz=3; Zeynep Tufekci, “Facebook’s Ad Scandal Isn’t a ‘Fail,’ It’s a Feature,” New York Times, September 23, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/23/opinion/sunday/facebook-ad-scandal.html; and Zeynep Tufekci, “Mark Zuckerberg Is in Denial,” New York Times, November 15, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/15/opinion/mark-zuckerberg-is-in-denial.html. 2. Jefferson Chase, “Facebook Slams Proposed German ‘Anti-hate Speech’ Social Media Law,” Deutsche Welle, May 29, 2017, http://www.dw.com/en/facebook-slams-proposed-german-anti-hate-speech-social-media-law/a-39021094. 3.

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Hate Speech on the Internet,” Insights on Law and Society 13, no. 2 (2013), https://www.americanbar.org/publications/insights_on_law_andsociety/13/winter_2013/who_decides_civilityvhatespeechontheinternet.html. 4. Though much remains to be done, the major social networks have started to take their responsibilities more seriously in this regard. See Todd Spangler, “Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook Will Hire 3,000 Staffers to Review Violent Content, Hate Speech,” Variety, May 3, 2017, http://variety.com/2017/digital/news/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-violent-hate-speech-hiring-1202407969/. See also this interesting proposal for a mix between regulation and self-government: Robinson Meyer, “A Bold New Scheme to Regulate Facebook,” Atlantic, May 12, 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/05/how-could-the-us-regulate-facebook/482382/.

Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup's Quest to End Privacy as We Know It
by Kashmir Hill
Published 19 Sep 2023

The company’s fresh start had a domino effect. The name change alerted Johnson to the existence of the corporate entity in Delaware that did not include him. He called Ton-That, irate. “Are you trying to Eduardo Saverin me?” he demanded, comparing himself to a Facebook co-founder elbowed out by Mark Zuckerberg in the social network’s early days. Johnson made threats, including a possible lawsuit. The conversation left Ton-That shaken and tearful, according to Schwartz, who was with him when he got the call. Ton-That told Schwartz he could deal with it, but it spiraled on for months. Johnson had a lot going on in his personal life at the time.

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Though the person-identifying hat-phone would be a godsend for someone with vision problems or face blindness, it was also risky, touching on the third-rail privacy issue that had already caused the company reputational and financial pain. An employee who saw the tech demo’d thought it was “supposed to be a joke.” But when the phone started correctly calling out names, he found it creepy. “It felt like something you see in a dystopian movie,” he later said. Facebook founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg saw the writing on the wall for social networks. When his users tired of posting vacation pics, hearting Instagram stories, and reading their uncles’ political rants, the social network risked becoming Hewlett-Packard, a dinosaur stuck in a previous era of computing. Zuckerberg wanted to be at the forefront of what he saw as the next big technological shift: the embodied internet, a future in which the digital world would surround us rather than just being something we looked at on a screen.

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Tommer Leyvand eventually left Facebook to go work on “machine perception” at Apple. The face-recognizing hat he’d helped develop stayed secret. In Facebook’s early days, the company’s motto had been “Move fast and break things,” but after class action lawsuits, government scrutiny, and tangles with privacy regulators around the world, Mark Zuckerberg had officially retired that motto. Facebook was now moving more cautiously. It didn’t need to be the first company to come out with a world-changing people-identifying product. It could afford to bide its time until some other company broke that particular taboo. Skip Notes *1 A key component to neural nets technology was powerful hardware; luckily for Taigman, Facebook had a few graphics processing units, or GPUs, sitting around, given to Facebook for free by Nvidia, the main company that made them.

Are Chief Executives Overpaid?
by Deborah Hargreaves
Published 29 Nov 2018

Walter Chrysler, who founded the eponymous car company, was profiled in 1928, and Harlow Curtice, president of General Motors, in 1955 – the year after GM became the first US company to post profits of more than $1 billion. After that was Ted Turner, who founded the TV channel CNN in 1991, Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, featured in 1999, and Mark Zuckerberg who started Facebook, in 2010. Mr Chrysler was paid $1 million in 1920 and 1921 – a huge amount at the time – when weekly wages at the firm were $31. Mr Chrysler’s annual income was 620 times that of his employees. By the 1950s, remuneration for top bosses had levelled off somewhat, with Mr Curtice earning $800,000 at his peak; with average pay at $3,301, he was taking home 242 times the norm.

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In 2013, Fortune magazine estimated his net worth at $2.2 billion. These riches are dwarfed by the personal fortunes of today’s technology entrepreneurs, however. In 2018, Jeff Bezos was the richest man in the world with net wealth of $115 billion, since he remains the largest shareholder in Amazon. Mark Zuckerberg takes a salary of only $1 from Facebook, but his shareholding in the social-networking company means he has a net worth of $73 billion. This is in the context of the stagnation in wages for the average American at just over $37,500 a year. Business at the heart of government One of the reasons for the huge growth in top pay in the West in the past 20 years is the establishment of the business culture at the heart of government.

On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything
by Nate Silver
Published 12 Aug 2024

“People would be like, ‘Look at that guy whose rocket company failed, he’s a loser.’ ” While Musk’s reputation in the Village has been on a negative trajectory since his acquisition of Twitter—which he renamed X—he’s still regarded highly in Silicon Valley, where most of the people I spoke with were willing to write off his flaws. Silicon Valley is a pattern-matching place: iconic founders like Musk, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg are archetypes whose examples will be followed for decades to come. So what to make of the fact that if that fourth Falcon rocket had crashed—or if that McLaren had landed on its hood instead of its wheels, perhaps gravely injuring Musk and Thiel—the world as Silicon Valley knows it would have turned out incredibly differently?

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That asshole was William Shockley, who was the recipient of the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics. A year earlier, he had set up a semiconductor facility in Mountain View, California, near his elderly mother in neighboring Palo Alto. Shockley had his pick of the litter in recruiting young engineers, as Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg might have had years later. But he was a difficult manager. He wrote everyone’s salaries down on a bulletin board. He had the employees rate one another. He recorded their phone calls and even had them take lie-detector tests. Nor was he paying them particularly well—somewhere between $90,000 and $135,000 a year in 2023 dollars.

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Specifically, fear of the founder who got away. “The mistakes of omission are much, much bigger mistakes,” said Andreessen. “We almost never kick ourselves for mistakes of commission; we do kick ourselves pretty hard for mistakes of omission. At some point, you just have to say yes. Like, whatever, Mark Zuckerberg walks in the door. You just have to not be so dumb that you say no.” Patrick Collison, the cofounder of Stripe (and another immigrant: he was born in Ireland), thinks it’s this fear of omission—and a corresponding lack of fear of commission—that makes Silicon Valley distinct. The math behind expected value—a 5 percent probability of success times a 100x payout makes for a worthwhile bet—isn’t difficult to grasp.

Wild Ride: Inside Uber's Quest for World Domination
by Adam Lashinsky
Published 31 Mar 2017

All the same, Kalanick was present nearly at the creation of Uber, and he supplied the critical insight that transformed someone else’s idea from merely interesting to undeniably groundbreaking. He has been Uber’s iron-fisted, omnipresent CEO from the time it first gained traction and began expanding beyond San Francisco. As a result, Uber has become as identified with Kalanick as Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook are with Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg, respectively. Whether or not Uber becomes as powerful and highly valued as these enduring technology-industry titans, its CEO already has become an object of fascination and, for many, repulsion. In the short period that Uber went from an idea to the biggest of the so-called unicorns—privately held start-ups valued at more than $1 billion, once a rarity—Kalanick became world famous for his ruthlessness, lack of empathy, and willingness to flout anybody else’s rules.

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It has built a substantial, global, sometimes profitable business that has wreaked havoc on incumbent players from taxi companies to rental-car agencies. Operating from a playbook he devised more or less himself, Travis Kalanick also has defied the odds. A college dropout like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg before him, unlike them he knew failure first and then only modest success. He burst onto the world stage more fully formed than those gawky youths, yet his edges were every bit as rough, his ambition possibly greater. As with all success stories, Kalanick’s path was anything but linear, and Uber’s continued dominance of its chosen markets is anything but guaranteed.

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“The first billion-dollar deal that blew people’s minds,” he exclaims proudly. We take an elevator to the eleventh floor, where Kalanick has created an austere setting, a place to mimic the entrepreneurial environment, with exposed drywall and smaller-than-usual desks. “When you’re an entrepreneur, at least the ninety-nine percent of entrepreneurs that are not Mark Zuckerberg, you have hard times,” he says. “So this right here is what I call the cave, because when you’re going through hard times you’re in the dark, you’re literally in some dark place. It’s a metaphor.” I ask if the desks, which Kalanick proudly tells me are “tighter by a foot,” are a nod to Jeff Bezos, who long decreed that desks at Amazon be made of doors, a common practice in the giant’s early days.

Without Their Permission: How the 21st Century Will Be Made, Not Managed
by Alexis Ohanian
Published 30 Sep 2013

Now any individual—an undergrad at UVA, a comedian from Austin with cerebral palsy, a farmer in Missouri, or a public school teacher from the Bronx—can transform the way we all live. As value creation shifts from well-connected MBAs to the innovators themselves, so does wealth creation. Whatever you think of the world’s youngest billionaires, Mark Zuckerberg and his Facebook crew, they’re just the beginning. The Forbes list of richest people—or its future equivalent—is going to have far fewer businesspeople and far more creators on it. If this seems obvious to you, great: I’ll be your Sacagawea-like guide as we meet scores of pioneers in their fields.

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Outliers are outliers, remember, so instead of being disappointed when you’re not the next Facebook, be happy to be your own company that solves a real problem with an elegant solution and wins in a market that’s underserved. Investors want to know they’re going to get a return on their money despite the terrible odds, and investors realize that Mark Zuckerbergs aren’t born every day (thankfully, given the identity crisis Mark would have—though there is at least one child named Facebook in Egypt).13 Experience is traditionally undervalued in the tech sector because we’re accustomed to the wunderkind myth. But that being said, there are so many things I’d end up being smarter about if I had reddit to do all over again.

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There’s a special kind of off-the-record camaraderie that exists within the walls of Y Combinator that allows guests to be far more candid than usual. This means that a roomful of hungry founders (remember, hungry for knowledge, because they’re full on glop) can probe the minds of leaders in their industry. Back then Y Combinator was so new that the speaker invite list was limited to Paul’s Boston network. But today the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and other famous startup CEOs show up. One of our speakers at that first dinner was a partner at Goodwin Procter, an international law firm, who patiently answered what must have seemed like inane questions from wide-eyed founders who at best had once taken a business law class. Afterward, the speakers lingered, and founders queued to follow up—the law partner not only ended up sticking around and chatting, he would also go on to represent us during our acquisition.

The Currency Cold War: Cash and Cryptography, Hash Rates and Hegemony
by David G. W. Birch
Published 14 Apr 2020

Visa and MasterCard, Amex and Discover, Unionpay and all the others have delivered convenient e-money to everyone on Earth (well, everyone on Earth with a bank account, plus some prepaid cards around the edges), and they have been astonishingly good at it. When I get off a plane in Sydney or Samarkand, I expect to be able to stroll into my hotel and pay with my chip-and-PIN Amex card. But I cannot yet send money to anyone in the world as easily as I can send them a photo (to steal a phrase from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg). For that, we need the e-cash that we do not yet have. Since the early days of the new internet age (which I date from 1994, the year of the Netscape IPO), the evolutionary tree of e-cash has been growing to the point where digital currency is now not only a possibility but a racing certainty.

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It suggests to us that new financial market infrastructure may be on the horizon, and that the lasting impact of shared ledger technology will not be implementing current banking processes in a new way but creating new kinds of markets and therefore new kinds of institutions. In the blue corner: Libra A scheme to implement a private digital currency based on a shared ledger has already been put forward by Facebook. And, because it is being put forward by Facebook, it is a big deal. A really big deal. Mark Zuckerberg once observed that ‘in a lot of ways, Facebook is more like a government than a traditional company’ (Conway 2019). Indeed it is, and perhaps it is about to become even more so, thanks to Facebook’s plans to introduce a currency of its own. This currency is called Libra, and the media has been full of commentary about both the new blockchain that will support it (created by the Libra Network) and the new wallets that will store it (created by Calibra, a Facebook subsidiary).

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We will still be able to do business together, because exchanges on our AI smartphones shall make it so. Who will win the currency wars? The truth is that, after setting down part 3 of this book, I do not know any more than anyone else knows. I can say that I doubt Libra is the future of digital currency (many observers have noted that Mark Zuckerberg’s ‘Vision for 2030’, published on Facebook in January 2020, did not mention Libra at all), but it is certainly a catalyst for thinking about the future of digital money. What I am more certain about is that there are some people who are taking the notion of an imminent currency cold war seriously, who have a strategy for the battles to come and a long-term plan to win them.

This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World
by Yancey Strickler
Published 29 Oct 2019

The economy is dominated by chains and market leaders that are too big, too powerful, and too aggressive to compete with. As chains have grown, businesses that were once low-hanging fruit have evolved into precise machines that are harder to take on by the day. It’s not like a new burger spot is competing against the McDonald brothers of the 1940s. It’s not like a new social app is competing against Mark Zuckerberg in his dorm room. They’re competing against the world’s most powerful companies right now. A new company has to start out offering a service far better than what the market leaders offered when they first started, and as good as—if not better than—what they offer now. And just as cheap. The bar to building a successful business keeps moving higher.

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In headlines: The war for tech dominance. The streaming media arms race. The Great Tech War of 2012. The Great AI War. Keeping count of Silicon Valley casualties. In news stories: Former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick’s texts and emails included phrases like “war time,” “burn the village,” and “pound of flesh.” Mark Zuckerberg was reported to have told his leaders that Facebook was at “war” after it faced criticism for its role in election interference. In everyday business vernacular: Destroy the competition. Poach employees. Capture a market. Make a killing. This kind of language had nothing to do with building a strong organization, making good decisions, or improving the status quo.

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These are the ten wealthiest people in the world in 2019: Jeff Bezos (Amazon) Bill Gates (Microsoft) Warren Buffett (Berkshire Hathaway) Bernard Arnault (LVMH) Carlos Slim Helu (America Movil) Amancio Ortega (Zara) Larry Ellison (Oracle) Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) Michael Bloomberg (Bloomberg LP) Larry Page (Alphabet/Google) Are these the ten happiest people in the world? Probably not. But they’re probably not the ten least happy people either. The costs of being not-rich are significant. Especially now.

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It
by Marc Goodman
Published 24 Feb 2015

Given the aforementioned privacy violations we’ve seen from the search giant, what else might it be capable of as we enter the age of wearable surveillance? The Social Network and Its Inventory—You Of course Google is not alone in its business model of selling you to its advertisers, and there are thousands of companies around the world that do the exact same thing, including most notably Facebook. Founded by Mark Zuckerberg in his dorm room at Harvard in 2004, Facebook is the iconic Silicon Valley success story. With more than 1.2 billion monthly active users, Facebook is by far the largest social network in the world. It has succeeded by getting people to talk about themselves in ways never previously imagined.

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Viewed another way, Facebook’s billion-plus users, each dutifully typing in status updates, detailing his biography, and uploading photograph after photograph, have become the largest unpaid workforce in history. As a result of their free labor, Facebook has a market cap of $182 billion, and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, has a personal net worth of $33 billion. What did you get out of the deal? As the computer scientist Jaron Lanier reminds us, a company such as Instagram—which Facebook bought in 2012—was not valued at $1 billion because its thirteen employees were so “extraordinary. Instead, its value comes from the millions of users who contribute to the network without being paid for it.”

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But I’ve Got Nothing to Hide In December 2009, when CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo asked Google’s own CEO, Eric Schmidt, about privacy concerns resulting from Google’s increasing tracking of consumers, Schmidt famously replied, “If you have something that you don’t want anybody to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” Schmidt, and others, dismiss privacy concerns by saying that if you haven’t done anything wrong, you should not be afraid of people (corporations, governments, or your neighbors) knowing what you are doing. This sentiment has been echoed by Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, who has argued that “privacy is no longer the social norm.” While privacy may no longer be the norm—at least for the general public—in his own life, Mr. Zuckerberg seems to treasure privacy quite a bit. In late 2013, it was revealed that the Facebook CEO spent $30 million to buy the four homes surrounding his own property in order to ensure his privacy would remain free from intrusion or disturbance.

Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World
by Timothy Garton Ash
Published 23 May 2016

Perry Link, ‘China: The Anaconda in the Chandelier’, New York Review of Books, 11 April 2001, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2002/apr/11/china-the-anaconda-in-the-chandelier/ 123. in a conversation I had about this with Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook headquarters on 15 September 2011, it was clear that she felt a very strong commercial interest in going into China but was well aware of the potential reputational damage if, for example, someone were to be persecuted in China as a result of something they had posted on the Chinese version of Facebook. See also Evelyn Walls, ‘Mark Zuckerberg’s speech: a political statement about the future of Facebook?’, http://freespeechdebate.com/en/discuss/mark-zuckerbergs-speech-a-political-statement-about-the-future-of-facebook/ 124. see Wekesa et al. 2014. I am most grateful to Markos Kounalakis for this reference and early sight of chapters of his forthcoming book. For a somewhat contrary view, see Iginio Gagliardone, ‘Is China Actually Helping Free Media in Africa?’

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New words must be coined to describe the number of bytes—the basic unit of digital memory, usually consisting of an ‘octet’ string of eight 1s and 0s—of information stored online: from the megabytes (MB, or 1,0002 bytes) and gigabytes (GB, or 1,0003 bytes) we have on our personal computers, all the way to the exabyte, zettabyte and yottabyte, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 individual bytes.23 According to an estimate by Cisco, it would take you about 6 million years to watch all the videos crossing global networks in a single month.24 As of 2015, there are already somewhere around 3 billion internet users, depending exactly how you define internet and user, and that number is growing rapidly.25 The fastest growth will come in the non-Western world, in wireless rather than wired and especially on mobile devices. There are perhaps 2 billion smartphones across the world and that is projected to reach 4 billion by 2020.26 Some 85 percent of the world’s population is within reach of a mobile phone tower which has the capacity to relay data. Tim Berners-Lee and Mark Zuckerberg have been among those campaigning to achieve internet access for all.27 Billions of people are still excluded from this unprecedented network of communication. As Map 1 shows, internet access is very unevenly distributed across the globe. Map 1. Unequal internet use worldwide Country sizes are proportionate to absolute numbers of users.

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In countries such as Indonesia and Thailand, surveys have found a larger number of respondents saying they use Facebook than say they use the internet. In Nigeria, Indonesia, India and Brazil, more than half those asked in a poll commissioned by Quartz magazine agreed with the statement ‘Facebook is the internet’. Mark Zuckerberg’s internet.org aims to ‘bring the internet to the two thirds of the world’s population that doesn’t have it’, but (at this writing) its showcase app only provides free access to Facebook, Facebook Messenger and a handful of other services. So is internet.org bringing the underprivileged of the world to the internet or just to Facebook?

The Happiness Effect: How Social Media Is Driving a Generation to Appear Perfect at Any Cost
by Donna Freitas
Published 13 Jan 2017

But at this highly prestigious institution, students are used to engaging critically with everything. They don’t need to be invited—they just do it. And knowledge—in the form of critical analysis—quite literally seems to translate into power. Being able to think clearly about social media, believing that they have the intellectual skills to best Mark Zuckerberg at his own game and understand some of the more manipulative ways that social media infiltrates our lives and relationships, gives them a healthier, more empowered relationship to it. Plus, their academics seem far more enticing and central to their lives than anything that can happen on social media; and this, too, provides them a sort of protective shield that I did not see among the rest of the interviewees—at least not so consistently.

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But, yeah, I think through people, because people are the ones that are using Facebook, and God can use people, so if He can use people to do anything, to preach in a pulpit, to sing a song, He can use them to type an encouraging message on Facebook, or spread hope or love through a post that could uplift others, or encourage them to continue, you know, the fight or whatever.” It’s not as if social media is holy, Jennifer wants to reassure me, it’s just that the Lord works in mysterious ways and sometimes it’s through Mark Zuckerberg, even if he doesn’t realize it. “I’m pretty sure [social media] wasn’t created to glorify God, but it doesn’t really matter, I don’t think, because God can use anything.” Jennifer goes on to say that social media can also be a distraction from God if you’re not careful, and anything that distracts from God leads to unhappiness.

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Take Javier, a senior philosophy major at a Midwestern Catholic college, who had been completely off social media accounts for eight months when we met. He and his girlfriend decided to quit together. He was thrilled about it. His relationship to social media had a definitive emotional arc: it started with amusement, then led to disenchantment and eventually full-on depression, which is why he stopped. Mark Zuckerberg makes it really hard to quit, he tells me, because Facebook keeps trying to lure you back. Javier has resisted so far and says he will continue to do so. He felt like he had a “chemical addiction” to social media, and quitting was really difficult at first—it created a “hole” in his life that he needed to find ways to fill—but it helped that he and his girlfriend were in it together.

Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked
by Adam L. Alter
Published 15 Feb 2017

VR has been around for decades, but it’s now on the cusp of going mainstream. In 2013, a VR company called Oculus VR raised $2.5 million on Kickstarter. Oculus VR was promoting a headset for video games called the Rift. Until recently, most people thought of VR as a tool for gaming, but that changed when Facebook acquired Oculus VR for $2 billion in 2014. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg had big ideas for the Oculus Rift that went far beyond games. “This is just the start,” Zuckerberg said. “After games, we’re going to make Oculus a platform for many other experiences. Imagine enjoying a court side seat at a game, studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world or consulting with a doctor face-to-face—just by putting goggles in your home.”

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But the biggest difference between the apps came on April 9, 2012, when Facebook acquired Instagram for one billion dollars. When Dorshorst read about the acquisition, he was convinced he was reading a headline from satirical newspaper The Onion. He had to double-check. Laura Polkus, a former designer at Hipstamatic, remembered, “We saw Mark [Zuckerberg]’s blog post, and it was like, “Wait, one billion? Like, a billion dollars? What does that mean for us? Does that mean Instagram won?” Hipstamatic and Instagram offered the same core features, so why did Hipstamatic falter while Instagram continues to grow? The answer lies in two critical decisions that Systrom and Krieger made before they released the app.

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Users paid just six dollars to join the site—a number that Hong and Young chose because it matched the price of two beers in a bar in the Midwest. At its peak, the site was generating $4 million in revenue each year, of which 93 percent was profit. The overhead for their lean, unintentionally addictive start-up was incredibly low. Rumor had it that Hong and Young’s early success inspired Mark Zuckerberg to create FaceMash, the face-rating site that paved the way for Facebook. In 2008 the pair sold the site for $20 million to a Russian tycoon who specialized in online dating websites. When they designed Hot or Not, James Hong and Jim Young were smart to include the same feature that made Instagram so successful: an engine for social feedback.

Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
by Jia Tolentino
Published 5 Aug 2019

* * * — The final, and possibly most psychologically destructive, distortion of the social internet is its distortion of scale. This is not an accident but an essential design feature: social media was constructed around the idea that a thing is important insofar as it is important to you. In an early internal memo about the creation of Facebook’s News Feed, Mark Zuckerberg observed, already beyond parody, “A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.” The idea was that social media would give us a fine-tuned sort of control over what we looked at. What resulted was a situation where we—first as individuals, and then inevitably as a collective—are essentially unable to exercise control at all.

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And still, colleges sell themselves as the crucible through which every young person must pass to stand a chance of succeeding. Into this realm of uncertainty has come a new idea—that the path to stability might be a personal brand. The Social Media Scam The most successful millennial is surely thirty-five-year-old Mark Zuckerberg, whose net worth fluctuates around the upper eleven digits. Lowballing it at $55 billion means that Zuckerberg has nearly five million times as much money as the median American household, which is worth $11,700. He is the eighth-richest person in the world. As the founder of Facebook, he effectively controls a nation-state: with a quarter of the world’s population using his website on a monthly basis, he can sway elections, and change the way we relate to one another, and control broad social definitions of what is acceptable and true.

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In fact, substance may actually be anathema to the game. And with that, the applause roars, the iPhone cameras start snapping, and the keynote speaker at the women’s empowerment conference comes onstage. The Girlbosses The superficially begrudging self-styled icon Sophia Amoruso was born in 1984, the same year as Mark Zuckerberg. She appeared on the cover of her 2014 memoir #GIRLBOSS in a black deep-V dress with structured shoulders, short hair blown back by a wind machine, hands planted on her hips. She was the CEO of Nasty Gal, an online fashion retailer that she’d started in 2006 as a shoplifting anarchist who sold thrift-store clothes out of her San Francisco apartment.

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World
by Anand Giridharadas
Published 27 Aug 2018

A social media billionaire keen to profit from the higher advertising revenue that video posts draw, compared to text ones, might recast that interest—and his rewriting of the powerful algorithms he owns to get what he wants—as a prediction that “I just think that we’re going to be in a world a few years from now where the vast majority of the content that people consume online will be video.” (New York magazine had skewered Mark Zuckerberg after he issued that prediction at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona: “The Vast Majority of Web Content Will Be Video, Says Man Who Can Unilaterally Make Such a Decision.”) In the Valley, prediction has become a popular way of fighting for a particular future while claiming merely to be describing what has yet to occur.

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It is hard to overstate how influential this belief has become in MarketWorld, especially in Silicon Valley: The world may be cruel and unfair, but if you sprinkle seeds of technology on it, shoots of equality will sprout. If every girl in Afghanistan had a smartphone…If every classroom were linked to the Web…If every police officer wore a body camera…Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan have vowed to connect the unconnected as part of their philanthropic work, because the Internet “provides education if you don’t live near a good school. It provides health information on how to avoid diseases or raise healthy children if you don’t live near a doctor. It provides financial services if you don’t live near a bank.

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He was on the boards of the city’s ballet, of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, of Friends of the High Line. He began to be first-name-dropped. You know, Darren was saying the other day…Darren and I were on a panel, and…One day he would be at a White House state dinner for the Chinese president; another day he would be in Silicon Valley helping Mark Zuckerberg reflect on his giving. Even as he was establishing himself in big philanthropy, there were constant reminders of what his and his colleagues’ efforts were persistently failing to change. He was at a gala one night when he received a text from his sister with photographs from the funeral of his aunt Bertha.

Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America
by Christopher Wylie
Published 8 Oct 2019

Do you believe there was a nexus of Russian state-sponsored activity in London during the 2016 presidential election and Brexit campaigns? Yes. Was there communication between Cambridge Analytica and WikiLeaks? Yes. I finally saw glimmers of understanding coming into the committee members’ eyes. Facebook is no longer just a company, I told them. It’s a doorway into the minds of the American people, and Mark Zuckerberg left that door wide open for Cambridge Analytica, the Russians, and who knows how many others. Facebook is a monopoly, but its behavior is more than a regulatory issue—it’s a threat to national security. The concentration of power that Facebook enjoys is a danger to American democracy. Dancing a delicate ballet among multiple jurisdictions, intelligence agencies, legislative hearings, and police authorities, I have given more than two hundred hours of sworn testimony and handed over at least ten thousand pages of documents.

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Mark D’Arcy, the BBC’s parliamentary correspondent covering the hearing, said, “I think the [DCMS committee] hearing with Chris Wylie is, by a distance, the most astounding thing I’ve seen in Parliament.” In Washington, the Federal Trade Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission launched investigations, while lawmakers in the United States and the U.K. began calling for Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, to testify under oath. The Department of Justice and the FBI flew to Britain to meet me in person on a Royal Navy base a few weeks after the story broke. The NCA had borrowed the building from the Royal Navy. As Facebook’s stock slid, Zuckerberg remained out of sight. He finally emerged on March 21, with a Facebook post saying he was “working to understand exactly what happened” and saying there had been a “breach of trust between Kogan, Cambridge Analytica and Facebook.”

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The hashtag #DeleteFacebook started trending on Twitter, with Elon Musk stoking the fire by tweeting that he’d deleted the Facebook pages of SpaceX and Tesla. As I prepared for my public testimonies, I listened to Cardi B, the American rapper who had released her debut album only a few weeks after the story broke. The record’s (purely coincidental) title, Invasion of Privacy, quickly prompted memes to circulate on social media with Mark Zuckerberg’s face appended to an edited version of the now-platinum album’s cover. It began to look as if the story was tipping into the zeitgeist, and people who had already been feeling uneasy about how Facebook operates were now having their fears confirmed in the most public fashion. In the throes of this PR nightmare, Zuckerberg bought ad space in major newspapers to publish a letter of apology, only a couple of weeks after Facebook first threatened to sue The Guardian in an attempt to shut down the story, but the letter did little to quell the anger.

Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork
by Reeves Wiedeman
Published 19 Oct 2020

A successful real estate mogul might convince investors that his company was worth five times its revenue, while tech founders who promised exponential growth from the networks they were building could suddenly command valuations that were ten or even twenty times the amount of money they were bringing in. David Fincher’s film The Social Network, about Facebook’s rise, had offered an unflattering portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg while still feeding the notion that Silicon Valley cowboys were a new breed of celebrity—a billion was the new million. Adam had begun trying to work his way into that world. “He liked sitting at the big kids’ table,” Aber Whitcomb, one of the cofounders of MySpace, who made an early $100,000 investment in WeWork, said.

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But as part of the deal, Adam engineered a change to WeWork’s charter with the help of Jen Berrent, WeWork’s new general counsel, that gave him ten votes for each share of the company he owned. The arrangement would give him roughly 65 percent of the votes on any company matter. These “supervoting” shares had become popular in Silicon Valley, where founders feared losing control of their companies. Mark Zuckerberg had negotiated a similar deal, as had Travis Kalanick at Uber. Many investors were so eager to get in on the small group of start-ups that could make plausible arguments for world domination that they often believed they had no choice but to accept such founder-friendly terms. But giving so much control of a company to an entrepreneur who had never run a business of this size before was a risk.

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After a few months, Gomel was moved out of his job managing WeWork’s core office-leasing business and tasked with WeWork’s tangential push into real estate investing. Shifting fortunes were a familiar pattern for WeWork executives. Gomel had taken his initial title from Artie Minson, who had been Adam’s heir apparent during two years as the metaphorical adult in the room—the Sheryl Sandberg to Adam’s Mark Zuckerberg. Minson was a foot shorter than Adam and had followed a more traditional path to the upper echelons of American business: private high school in New York, an accounting degree from Georgetown, then an MBA at Columbia. He had worked for founders before, and in each case, the brazen impulses that led them to start their companies in the first place had tempered as they grew into large corporations.

Data-Ism: The Revolution Transforming Decision Making, Consumer Behavior, and Almost Everything Else
by Steve Lohr
Published 10 Mar 2015

Not incidentally, the instructor was Paul Bamberg, a cofounder of Dragon Systems, a commercial pioneer in speech recognition software. The programming involved tasks like implementing a fast Fourier transform algorithm, which converts time or space to frequency, and vice versa. The seminar was for students with serious math muscles, and there were only five students in the class. One of them was Mark Zuckerberg, who would found Facebook a year later. But the two did not get to know each other at Harvard. “Zuck was socially awkward then, so we didn’t talk much,” Hammerbacher recalls. Socially awkward is not a phrase anyone uses to describe Hammerbacher. Rude at times, certainly. He misses meals and meetings.

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The Facebook years were Hammerbacher’s formative years as a data scientist, the source of his financial freedom, and, to some degree, his professional reputation as “the guy who built the data team at Facebook,” even though he left more than six years ago. When he showed up at Facebook in early 2006, Hammerbacher was twenty-three, older than most. Mark Zuckerberg, founder and chief executive, was twenty-one. Zuckerberg, along with two early Facebook employees, Charlie Cheever and Dave Fetterman, were all acquaintances from Harvard. Another person Hammerbacher talked to before he signed on was Jeff Rothschild, who was fifty at the time. Rothschild had been sent over from the venture capital firm Accel Partners, a major investor in Facebook, to provide the proverbial adult supervision that so many start-ups require, and he stayed.

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Hammerbacher’s boss was Adam D’Angelo, the chief technology officer at Facebook. A young computer whiz, D’Angelo had excelled in national and international programming contests in high school and college, attending the California Institute of Technology. At Facebook he had the added advantage of knowing Mark Zuckerberg since high school, at Phillips Exeter Academy, an elite prep school. Hammerbacher urged D’Angelo to make the investment to build up a data analysis team and create the computing engine for the job. At the time, Facebook was moving beyond its origins as a service for university students. In September 2006, it opened up to anyone thirteen years old or older with a valid e-mail address.

Don't Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in LIfe
by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
Published 9 May 2022

But then there are some people whose life story goes against this commonsense idea. Some extremely young people achieve enormous business success—say, Mark Zuckerberg. Because these people’s life stories go against common sense, they make for great stories—“Who would think that a nineteen-year-old could create a multibillion-dollar business?” People love telling the surprising stories—or making movies about them. Aaron Sorkin wrote The Social Network about nineteen-year-old Mark Zuckerberg and not The Thermostat about forty-one-year-old Tony Fadell. So many people hear so many of these initially surprising stories.

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In fact, the new data busts some myths about entrepreneurs. Myth: The Advantage of Youth Think of a successful founder of a business. Who is the first person who comes to mind? Unless you have spent the past few minutes Googling around for how to create a Tony Fadell poster, it is probably someone like Steve Jobs. Or Bill Gates. Or Mark Zuckerberg. One feature these world-famous founders all have in common is the stage of life at which they founded their business empires. They were all young. Jobs started Apple when he was twenty-one years old. Gates began Microsoft at nineteen. Zuckerberg created Facebook at the age of nineteen. It is not a coincidence that so many young people come to mind when we think of successful entrepreneurs.

Rage Inside the Machine: The Prejudice of Algorithms, and How to Stop the Internet Making Bigots of Us All
by Robert Elliott Smith
Published 26 Jun 2019

Moving towards this new way of using algorithms first requires an understanding of them, the simplifying way they see us all, and how we can all act to change their minds. 2 Doctor Illuminatus The problems here are complex, both technically and philosophically. MARK ZUCKERBERG, CEO of Facebook, 20161 Mark Zuckerberg was discussing the difficulty of distinguishing truth from misinformation. He is right on both counts, and I don’t envy him being faced with the challenges of ‘fake news’, and getting algorithms to determine what is ‘true’ and ‘false’ in the millions of shares, statuses, comments, photos and videos posted per minute on Facebook.

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One theory is that personal computers were essentially gaming systems and marketed specifically to men, but a more likely explanation may be that once the role shifted from relative obscurity to a high-profile, highly paid career, then entrenched social bias deemed the role better suited to (mainly white) men, fostering a ‘brogrammer’ culture, with alienating fringe elements like the ‘manosphere’, which has probably played a substantial role in moving women out of the field, and implicitly shifting perceptions towards computer science being something women shouldn’t (and perhaps can’t) do. Computer scientists like Bill Gates, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are now not only enormously rich, but world famous. They have a position in society that far exceeds that of Edwards, Wollstonecraft, Lovelace or Taylor-Mill, and there are no contemporary female equivalents to them. In opening a 2005 debate on the issue of the relative abilities of men and women in science, then Harvard University President (and former Treasury Secretary under US President Clinton) Larry Summers made comments that were interpreted as endorsing the idea that women may be innately inferior to men in that regard, prompting widespread outrage and condemnation.12 However, far more interesting was the content of the actual debate, which pitted two Harvard psychologists against one another.

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Turner’s site even boasts of how optimizing algorithms generate ad placement ‘in the style of CNN editorial content, with the ability to be placed directly in editorial streams of content and alongside relevant CNN editorial videos and articles’.3 Some are concerned that this has created a whole genre of ‘fake news’. While Wikipedia defines ‘fake news’ as a synonym for news satire, more recently it has become at worst a condemnation of real human journalism, and at best an umbrella term for the uncontrolled explosion of misleading information dispersed on social media. Mark Zuckerberg has pledged to make Facebook impede fake news. But it’s unclear how, as in the past his company has eliminated human editors and curators in favour of algorithms, ironically to ensure less bias in their presentation of news. As we’ve seen before, being able to determine what is true and what is fake is not a goal that algorithms can achieve easily.

Woke, Inc: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam
by Vivek Ramaswamy
Published 16 Aug 2021

According to British corporate historians Leonardo Davoudi, Christopher McKenna, and Rowena Olegario chartered companies in the Old World waged wars with their own private armies and fleets, built forts and infrastructure, conquered territories, negotiated treaties, and, in the case of the Dutch East India Company, even minted their own corporate currency.4 I heard echoes of the Dutch East India Company’s voice in Mark Zuckerberg’s statement in 2020 that he wanted Facebook to launch its own cryptocurrency. At the same time, the Dutch East India Company also pursued philanthropic causes back at home, like donating funds to relieve poverty, build hospitals, and establish schools. And they were assiduous about noting those charitable activities in the company minutes.

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In a live TV interview with Tucker Carlson, Bobulinski presented text messages that appeared to refer to Joe Biden as the “Chairman” and suggested that he often weighed in on business transactions.14 When asked to comment on the New York Post story, the Biden campaign declined to deny the accuracy of the story. The Biden campaign and family also didn’t dispute Tony Bobulinski’s allegations. Whether or not the story was actually true is a separate question. I certainly don’t know. Neither does Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey. It is noteworthy that after Biden had won the election, the news quietly came out that the DOJ had been investigating Hunter Biden.15 Regardless, factual disputes like these are a feature of modern politics. The general public weighs different pieces of information from various sources, listens to the candidates, and then makes an electoral decision.

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During Senate testimony in response to a probe surrounding these issues, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey feigned humility, effectively saying “we screwed up” with respect to the company’s handling of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden story. Dorsey claimed that blocking the article was in accordance with Twitter’s policies with respect to materials obtained through hacking while expressing contrition for making a hasty decision without sufficient evidence.16 Mark Zuckerberg was similarly self-critical. But don’t be fooled by their practiced vulnerability. Was it merely a coincidence that Facebook and Twitter adopted the exact same policies with the exact same political effect at the exact same time? Nope. This wasn’t a case of two bumbling gentle giants that simply couldn’t get out of their own way.

In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
by Steven Levy
Published 12 Apr 2011

Rosenstein believed that his new employer not only was as relentlessly technical as his former one but was embarked on its own audacious quest, one that threatened to eclipse Google’s. Facebook was at the vanguard of social networking, a movement with the goal of organizing people through the network of personal connections they collected throughout their lives. Barely three years after its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, had begun the company in a Harvard dorm room, Facebook was signing up millions of users and was on a trajectory to sign up most of the literate world. The same month Rosenstein wrote his letter, Facebook launched a new strategy that allowed software developers to write applications inside its website, almost as if the site were its own little Internet.

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(Facebook would eventually allow its user profile pages to be exposed on Google.) Facebook was a scary competitor because in some ways it was very much like Google. True, Facebook wasn’t built on a brilliant scientific advance as Google was, and there was no technical innovation at Facebook even close to the breathtaking Google infrastructure. But Mark Zuckerberg was in the Larry Page mold, a wildly ambitious leader with a quasi-religious trust in engineering. Zuckerberg said that Facebook would have hacker values. Ten years younger than Page and Brin—a generation in Internet time—Zuckerberg respected Google’s values but believed that the older company had lost its nimbleness and focus.

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One of the hottest was called Foursquare. Its cofounder was Dennis Crowley. Google had a built-in disadvantage in the social networking sweepstakes. It was happy to gather information about the intricate web of personal and professional connections known as the “social graph” (a term favored by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg) and integrate that data as signals in its search engine. But the basic premise of social networking—that a personal recommendation from a friend was more valuable than all of human wisdom, as represented by Google Search—was viewed with horror at Google. Page and Brin had started Google on the premise that the algorithm would provide the only answer.

Wealth and Poverty: A New Edition for the Twenty-First Century
by George Gilder
Published 30 Apr 1981

Despite the achievements of such heroic creators as John D. Rockefeller, J. J. Hill, Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, George Eastman, Henry Ford, Walt Disney, A. P. Giannini, Estée Lauder, Charles Merrill, Chester Carlson, Bill Gates, Ray Kroc, Norman Borlaug, Michael Milken, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and so many others, commerce is perceived as a somewhat-grubby, less-than-exalted undertaking. It is portrayed as something of a Faustian bargain: businesspeople succeed by appealing to our baser instincts; they are motivated by greed and too often may bend the rules.

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America’s entrepreneurs live in a world with four billion poor people. Why on a planet riven with famine, poverty, and disease, it is plausibly asked, should this tiny minority be allowed to control riches thousands of times greater than their needs for subsistence and comfort? More specifically, why should Mark Zuckerberg, the proprietor of Facebook, be estimated to command a fortune worth some $17 billion, while Suzie Saintly, the social worker, makes a mere $40,000 a year, almost half a million times less? Or why should Bill Gates, Microsoft founder, be worth over $50 billion while Dan Bricklin, the inventor of the pioneering VisiCalc spreadsheet that launched the personal computer into business applications, be reduced to tilling his tiny consultancy “Software Garden” with a handful of colleagues?

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It is embodied in a vast web of enterprise that retains its worth only through constant work and sacrifice. Nevertheless, even dismissing the charge that the “one percent of the one percent” engage in a carnival of greed, we do not explain, or justify, their huge wealth. Some apologists will say that Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook billions were a reward for his brilliant entrepreneurship and software coding, while penury is the just outcome of alcoholism and improvidence. But Suzy Saintly, Barack Obama, and Dan Bricklin are neither improvident nor necessarily less brilliant than Mark. All these arguments are beside the point.

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech
by Brian Merchant
Published 25 Sep 2023

It’s not until the monster has killed the doctor’s brother, his best friend, and his wife that Victor resolves to do anything meaningful about it—even if it is to fruitlessly pursue the monster until he dies, unable to correct its behavior. It’s uncanny: Dr. Frankenstein could be Richard Arkwright, or Mark Zuckerberg, or William Horsfall, or Travis Kalanick. The warnings, just as acute and insightful now, continue to go unheeded. “Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge,” Dr. Frankenstein says, “and how much happier the man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.”

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These certain people, whom Yang calls “my friends in Silicon Valley,” are the entrepreneurs who have disrupted key elements of the economy, accumulating unprecedented levels of wealth and power in the process. The names will be familiar: Bezos, the modern Arkwright, and Uber’s Travis Kalanick, a Horsfall, but also Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page. But these men—just like two hundred years ago, they are almost all men—have power on a scale that a nineteenth-century titan could not even begin to dream of. The tech giants have dramatically transformed and squeezed countless livelihoods—not just taxi drivers and delivery workers, but small-business owners who depend on their company’s placement in Google search results, or getting a fair deal on Amazon’s third-party vendor marketplace.

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Because they’ve made it easy,” the Washington Post mused in 2019. Beyond a matter of optics, their influence over politics is increasingly considered malign, and that includes the tech billionaires—once the twenty-first century’s most revered businessmen. Polls conducted in 2021 show that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is deeply unpopular, and more people dislike Amazon founder Jeff Bezos than like him. The scorn is increasingly bipartisan; while liberals take them to task for amassing monopoly power and for the poor labor conditions at their companies, conservatives accuse them of political bias and censorship.

A World of Three Zeros: The New Economics of Zero Poverty, Zero Unemployment, and Zero Carbon Emissions
by Muhammad Yunus
Published 25 Sep 2017

“Retail Florist License,” Louisiana Horticulture Commission, http://www.ldaf.state.la.us/consumers/horticulture-programs/louisiana-horticulture-commission/. 3. The Giving Pledge, https://givingpledge.org. 4. Kerry A. Dolan, “Mark Zuckerberg Announces Birth of Baby Girl & Plan to Donate 99% of His Facebook Stock,” Forbes, December 1, 2015, https://www.forbes.com/sites/kerryadolan/2015/12/01/mark-zuckerberg-announces-birth-of-baby-girl-plan-to-donate-99-of-his-facebook-stock/#16d43dc218f5. 5. Muhammad A. Yunus and Judith Rodin, “Save the World, Turn a Profit,” Bloomberg View, September 25, 2015, https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015–09–25/save-the-world-turn-a-profit.

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All eight of have signed the Giving Pledge, by which they promise to give away half of their wealth for charity after their death. These eight people are among the many billionaires around the world who have signed the Giving Pledge. (As of mid-2016, the number had surpassed 150, with more signatories continuing to join the list.)3 One of the eight wealthiest billionaires is Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook. In 2015, when his first child, a daughter named Max, was born, Zuckerberg issued a public statement announcing plans to make a charitable donation of 99 percent of his Facebook shares—the vast bulk of his personal wealth. The statement was accompanied by a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission making the gift official.

No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State
by Glenn Greenwald
Published 12 May 2014

It is breaking the law.” This was a rather odd line of defense: in effect, it told the rest of the world that the NSA does assault the privacy of non-Americans. Privacy protections, apparently, are only for American citizens. This message prompted such international outrage that even Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, not exactly known for his vehement defense of privacy, complained that the US government “blew it” in its response to the NSA scandal by jeopardizing the interests of international Internet companies: “The government said don’t worry, we’re not spying on any Americans. Wonderful, that’s really helpful for companies trying to work with people around the world.

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When Google CEO Eric Schmidt was asked in a 2009 CNBC interview about concerns over his company’s retention of user data, he infamously replied: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” With equal dismissiveness, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a 2010 interview that “people have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people.” Privacy in the digital age is no longer a “social norm,” he claimed, a notion that handily serves the interests of a tech company trading on personal information.

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Google insisted on a policy of not talking to reporters from CNET, the technology news site, after CNET published Eric Schmidt’s personal details—including his salary, campaign donations, and address, all public information obtained via Google—in order to highlight the invasive dangers of his company. Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg purchased the four homes adjacent to his own in Palo Alto, at a cost of $30 million, to ensure his privacy. As CNET put it, “Your personal life is now known as Facebook’s data. Its CEO’s personal life is now known as mind your own business.” The same contradiction is expressed by the many ordinary citizens who dismiss the value of privacy yet nonetheless have passwords on their email and social media accounts.

Evil by Design: Interaction Design to Lead Us Into Temptation
by Chris Nodder
Published 4 Jun 2013

They probably visit the ISP’s site rarely, if ever. However, it seems that people are just as lax when it comes to the products they use every day. Facebook launched in 2004 with the concept that only your friends get access to the personal information you post. Over the years, this philosophy has changed, with Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, claiming in a 2010 interview that the new social norm is openness, not privacy. “We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are. … [We asked ourselves] what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it.”

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Although 71 percent of 18–29-year-old social network users say they’ve changed privacy settings, only 55 percent aged 50–64 have moved from the defaults. Only 44 percent of young adult Internet users say they’ve taken steps to limit how much personal information is available about them online, and that figure reduces to 25 percent of users who are aged 50–64. In Facebook’s defense, getting privacy right is hard. As Mark Zuckerberg says, “The paradox is that people share their phone number in the telephone book but want to keep it private online.” The interesting disingenuity in that statement is that there’s a difference between public information and publicized information. Marketers must know either someone’s name or their address to retrieve their phone number from the book, but on Facebook they get name, address, friends list, phone number, photos, Likes, and many other pieces of information delivered to them all wrapped up with a neat little bow.

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“Key Lawmakers Question Local Provider Over Use of NebuAd Software Without Directly Notifying Customers” (markey.house.gov). July 15, 2008. Retrieved December 2012. Embarq’s two responses: Letter from David W. Zesiger, SVP Regulatory Policy & External Affairs, Embarq, July 21, 2008; and letter from Tom Gerke, president and CEO, Embarq, July 23, 2008, to the Committee on Energy and Commerce. Facebook privacy: Mark Zuckerberg interview with Michael Arrington at the 2010 “Crunchie” awards, San Francisco. Privacy setting stats: Mary Madden and Aaron Smith. Reputation Management and Social Media. Pew Internet and American Life Project, 2010. Negative options: Don’t not sign up! E-mail opt-in rates: Steven Bellman, Eric J.

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next
by Jeanette Winterson
Published 15 Mar 2021

Life expectancy was around 30 years for the slum-housed factory workers. So much money. So little equality. Folks called Manchester the Golden Sewer. * * * Marx, writing in chapter one of The Communist Manifesto, had this to say, and it sounds eerily like the 21st-century ‘move fast and break things’ (Mark Zuckerberg – Facebook) mentality we associate with Big Tech: Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones … All that is solid melts into air. For Marx, on the ground at the time, technological progress was the guarantee of social revolution, because progress was being driven without any regard for the human cost of the soaring profits.

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Usually a dystopia for the hero and friends, and a utopia to those who benefit from or accept the situation. I suspect that the future will not be so binary. As Arthur C. Clarke put it in 1964 – ‘The future will not be merely an extension of the present.’ What’s for sure is that ‘privacy is an anachronism’ (thank you, Mark Zuckerberg). Like every other system in the coming world, I too will always be on, always be known, always be available, even while I sleep, dream, or think about things. My ‘own’ self will not be owned by me. My own self and my known self will become the same data set. Soon the interface between me and mini-me – my Google self and myself – will be redundant.

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While there is no consensus on the future, there is consensus that total connectivity will happen – to the internet, to our devices, to our machines, to each other. When you customise your connectivity it will feel like yours. Actually, it will feel like you. And you will feel as if you have chosen it. An avatar Sinatra singing I did it My-Wi. And a whole new questioning of what is ‘you’ comes bubbling up. My-wi is religious in its own way. Mark Zuckerberg has talked about Facebook as a ‘global church’, connecting people to something bigger than themselves. It may be bigger – it may be smaller – but it will be connected. Here’s George Orwell in his novel 1984: You had to live – did live, from habit that became instinct – in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinised.

Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software
by Nadia Eghbal
Published 3 Aug 2020

CONCLUSION 341 Kara Swisher, “A Wise Man Leaves Facebook,” The New York Times, September 27, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/27/opinion/facebook-instagram-systrom.html. 342 Ian Sullivan, “Re: Things That Happened in November,” email to author, December 20, 2018. 343 Nadia Eghbal, “The Developer’s Dilemma,” Nadia Eghbal, February 8, 2018, https://nadiaeghbal.com/developers-dilemma. 344 Shauna Gordon-McKeon, No Subject, email to author, March 22, 2019. 345 Ben Thompson, “Faceless Publishers,” Stratechery, May 31, 2017, https://stratechery.com/2017/the-faceless-publisher/. 346 Eugene Wei, “Status as a Service (StaaS),” Remains of the Day, February 19, 2019, https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2019/2/19/status-as-a-service. 347 Yancey Strickler, “The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet,” OneZero, May 20, 2019, https://onezero.medium.com/the-dark-forest-theory-of-the-internet-7dc3e68a7cb1. 348 Nick Statt, “Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Says the ‘Future Is Private,’” The Verge, April 30, 2019, https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/30/18524188/facebook-f8-keynote-mark-zuckerberg-privacy-future-2019. 349 Sarah Perez, “Twitter Launches Its Controversial ‘Hide Replies’ Feature in the US and Japan,” TechCrunch, September 19, 2019, https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/19/twitter-launches-its-controversial-hide-replies-feature-in-the-u-s-and-japan/.

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Yancey Strickler, who cofounded Kickstarter, calls this the “dark forest theory” of the internet: “an increasing number of the population has scurried into their dark forests” to avoid the mainstream web, which has become “a relentless competition for power.”347 He points to newsletters, podcasts, and group chats as examples of dark forests, while Facebook and Twitter are examples of the mainstream, which will continue to exist alongside more private channels. Mark Zuckerberg himself declared to a crowd at Facebook’s 2019 F8 conference that “the future is private,” insisting, “Over time, I believe that a private social platform will be even more important to our lives than our digital town squares.”348 The public stage increasingly reflects a one-way mirror pattern, where anybody can consume content but interactions with its creator are limited.

Company of One: Why Staying Small Is the Next Big Thing for Business
by Paul Jarvis
Published 1 Jan 2019

But setting these almost outrageous goals and expectations was not enough; they had to be accompanied by the confidence that they could be achieved. Gandhi did this through countless examples of peaceful protest, and Machida did it by convincing his engineering team that they could achieve this goal and that he trusted them to do so, and by giving them the resources to realize it. Because Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, is a classic introverted leader, he enlists the help of COO Sheryl Sandberg, who offers him social and political guidance. Mark leans on smaller, genuine, collaborative connections rather than attempting to keep a large number of employees or subordinates under his rule.

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By focusing on customer success and happiness, Peldi avoids the dangers of “thinking big” or pushing aside profit in the hope that one day margins will be huge. Even business moguls like Richard Branson started small: the entire Virgin brand began with a single magazine called Student. Google began as a research project at Stanford. Facebook was targeted only at Harvard undergraduates when Mark Zuckerberg started it. For Peldi and his team at Balsamiq, focusing on better, not bigger, removes any pressure to take shortcuts in software development. He gets to spend his time talking to customers instead of in board meetings or at investor pitches. Moreover, Peldi says, “I’m Italian. Italians measure things in generations, not quarters.”

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Next, customers need to admire your “whole person”—not just how you act when you’re trying to sell them something. What charities do you support? How do you act outside of work? With everyone sharing everything on social media, your entire life is available to anyone with access to Google. CEOs are sharing the news when their own babies are born (like Mark Zuckerberg or Marissa Mayer). Tim Cook, an incredibly private man, shared an essay about being gay and campaigns against anti-transgender laws. Customers admire businesses that feel and act similarly to them. Admiration develops when you do this well, and once you have their admiration, customers develop an interest in your success and accomplishments instead of a sense of resentment or jealousy.

Automating Inequality
by Virginia Eubanks

. $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015. Garza, Alicia. “A Herstory of the #Blacklivesmatter Movement.” http://blacklivesmatter.com/herstory/. [Accessed June 28, 2017.] Gillespie, Sarah. “Mark Zuckerberg Supports Universal Basic Income. What Is It?” CNN Money, May 26, 2017. http://money.cnn.com/2017/05/26/news/economy/mark-zuckerberg-universal-basic-income/index.html. [Accessed June 28, 2017.] Hiltzik, Michael. “Conservatives, Liberals, Techies, and Social Activists All Love Universal Basic Income: Has Its Time Come?” Los Angeles Times, June 22, 2017. http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-ubi-20170625-story.html.

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“We need a program that can provide a temporary cash cushion,” they write, “because no matter what strategies we implement, work … will sometimes fail.”4 In the face of fears that automation promises a jobless future, a cash assistance plan, the universal basic income (UBI) is enjoying a resurgence. Experiments in UBI are currently being conducted in Finland and in Ontario, Canada. In May 2017, Hawaii adopted a bill declaring that “all families … deserve basic financial security” and began to explore instituting a UBI. High-tech entrepreneurs such as Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, and Elon Musk, founder of Tesla Motors, believe that a UBI will provide a cushion allowing everyone to innovate and try new ideas. UBI plans usually offer between $8,000 and $12,000 a year. In principle, a UBI would be truly universal—offered to every citizen—but in political practice, guaranteed adequate income programs tend to be offered to those who are unemployed or who fall below a minimum income line.

Hello World: Being Human in the Age of Algorithms
by Hannah Fry
Published 17 Sep 2018

Just ask the residents of Scunthorpe in the north of England, who were blocked from opening AOL accounts after the internet giant created a new profanity filter that objected to the name of their town.3 Or Chukwuemeka Afigbo, the Nigerian man who discovered an automatic hand-soap dispenser that released soap perfectly whenever his white friend placed their hand under the machine, but refused to acknowledge his darker skin.4 Or Mark Zuckerberg, who, when writing the code for Facebook in his dorm room in Harvard in 2004, would never have imagined his creation would go on to be accused of helping manipulate votes in elections around the globe.5 Behind each of these inventions is an algorithm. The invisible pieces of code that form the gears and cogs of the modern machine age, algorithms have given the world everything from social media feeds to search engines, satellite navigation to music recommendation systems, and are as much a part of our modern infrastructure as bridges, buildings and factories ever were.

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In those examples, the human judgement made far better predictions, outperforming anything the algorithm could manage – suggesting there are some things so intrinsically human that data and mathematical formulae will always struggle to describe them. Data BACK IN 2004, SOON AFTER college student Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook, he had an instant messenger exchange with a friend: ZUCK: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard ZUCK: Just ask. ZUCK: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses . . . [REDACTED FRIEND’S NAME]: What? How’d you manage that one? ZUCK: People just submitted it.

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Ten scenes from life in calculated publics’, Science, Technology and Human Values, vol. 41, no. 1, 2016, pp. 77–92. 3. Scunthorpe Evening Telegraph, 9 April 1996. 4. Chukwuemeka Afigbo (@nke_ise) posted a short video of this effect on Twitter. Worth looking up if you haven’t seen it. It’s also on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87QwWpzVy7I. 5. CNN interview, Mark Zuckerberg: ‘I’m really sorry that this happened’, YouTube, 21 March 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6DOhioBfyY. Power 1. From a private conversation with the chess grandmaster Jonathan Rowson. 2. Feng-Hsiung Hsu, ‘IBM’s Deep Blue Chess grandmaster chips’, IEEE Micro, vol. 19, no. 2, 1999, pp. 70–81, http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/755469/. 3.

Tech Titans of China: How China's Tech Sector Is Challenging the World by Innovating Faster, Working Harder, and Going Global
by Rebecca Fannin
Published 2 Sep 2019

But in the span of little more than a decade since I wrote Silicon Dragon,1 which was the first chronicle of China’s emerging Silicon Valley, the world’s second-largest economy and its expanding tech empire can no longer be underestimated. Today, young people in China looking for role models think of Robin Li, Jack Ma, and Pony Ma (founders of Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent, respectively) more than they do Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, or Steve Jobs of Apple. High-tech China is inventing the next new thing at a rapid clip in frontier technologies: artificial intelligence, biotech, green energy, robotics, and superfast mobile communications. China also is angling to get ahead in fifth-generation wireless standards, which is being compared in impact to the invention of the Gutenberg printing press.2 Large sweeps of the Chinese economy—transportation, commerce, finance, health care, entertainment, and communications—are being reimagined and reshaped by China’s assertive effort to forge ahead by leveraging technology.

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The tech universe of the future will be regional innovation powerhouses moving in parallel with neither dominating worldwide. One thing US tech leaders can’t do much about is the uneven playing field—American companies can’t get beyond the Great Firewall of China’s internet censorship and reach Chinese consumers directly. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg meets with Chinese leaders, jogs in front of the Forbidden City, and is learning Mandarin, but Facebook remains off-limits in China. Blocks remain on Google, Twitter, and Instagram too—though Google has been making plans to reenter China with its controversial Project Dragon, a censored search app for China, in the face of White House pressure to scrap it.

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Tencent’s CEO, a press-shy engineer born and educated in southern China, has been described as a scorpion who will lie in wait before attacking, has a $44 billion fortune.2 His QQ instant messaging service was based on the Israeli invention ICQ, initially acquired by AOL and then bought by Russia’s largest internet company, Mail.Ru. Today, China’s titans have left copying behind and are managing broad and deep power bases in tech. With that power comes lots of headaches. Like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Larry Page, who confront a tech backlash and constant challenges to their clout, China’s leaders face daunting issues that could weaken them: privacy concerns, counterfeit charges, restrictions on their most addictive products, and competitive threats. Baidu faces a possible reentry of Google to the Middle Kingdom some 10 years after googling didn’t knock out China’s search leader.

The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite
by Daniel Markovits
Published 14 Sep 2019

elite labor income: Saez, “Reported Incomes and Marginal Tax Rates,” 158, Figure 8 (calculation from the figure, following the practice noted earlier of treating 70 percent of profits from S-corporations, partnerships, and sole proprietorships as labor income). an open letter: Mark Zuckerberg, “A Letter to Our Daughter,” Facebook, December 1, 2015, www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/a-letter-to-our-daughter/10153375081581634/. When Zuckerberg wrote the letter, he was the sixth-richest person in the world. Kerry A. Dolan and Luisa Kroll, “Forbes 2016 World’s Billionaires: Meet the Richest People on the Planet,” Forbes, March 1, 2016, www.forbes.com/sites/luisakroll/2016/03/01/forbes-2016-worlds-billionaires-meet-the-richest-people-on-the-planet/#5d8c660277dc.

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The working rich have risen by fundamentally transforming class conflict and then winning the new battle between elite and middle-class labor. The claim that meritocratic inequality reflects earned advantage may ultimately be a moral error. But it rests on economic facts. A CULTURE OF INDUSTRY Shortly after his first child was born, Mark Zuckerberg—whose labor income from creating Facebook (paid to him in founder’s shares) has created the fifth-largest fortune in the world—wrote his new daughter an open letter. The letter, expounding on the hopes of the meritocratic elite, admired human creativity and innovation, lamented inequality, and pledged to donate 99 percent of Zuckerberg’s Facebook fortune to “advance human potential and promote equality for all children in the next generation.”

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This is why total education expenditure today grows more rapidly with rising income than does expenditure on any other major category of consumption, and why inequality in expenditures on education has in recent decades increased more rapidly even than income inequality. Indeed, meritocracy’s imaginative hold over today’s elite is so powerful that even the super-rich—who own enough physical and financial capital to secure dynastic succession through traditional bequests—nevertheless commonly give their children a meritocratic inheritance, often (as in Mark Zuckerberg’s case) as their principal or exclusive bequest. The economic and social transformation from a society led by a hereditary leisured elite to a society led by the working rich rationalizes these practices. The meritocratic inheritance—the immense excess investments that rich parents make in their children’s human capital, over and above what middle-class children receive—dominates dynastic succession in a meritocratic world.

Fortunes of Change: The Rise of the Liberal Rich and the Remaking of America
by David Callahan
Published 9 Aug 2010

Scores of private jets swarmed into Davos for the event, which included a dissection of such matters as whether a carbon tax would be better than a capand-trade system at saving the planet. The Google Guys flew in on their 767 and then sparked nonstop gossip at the conference about who would get to fly back with them to Silicon Valley. (Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was among the lucky who were chosen.) NetJets Europe, the continent’s largest private jet operator, booked no fewer than fifty flights to Davos to handle all of the demand for the conference. These flights were a small fraction of the sixty-five thousand private trips the company operated in Europe in 2006—the equivalent to a plane taking off or landing every eight minutes.

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Jeff Bezos of Amazon was born in 1964. The eBay billionaires Jeff Skoll and Pierre Omidyar were born in 1965 and 1967, respectively. Sergey Brin and Larry Page were both born in 1973. Marc Andreessen made a fortune on Netscape in the 1990s and would seem to be a senior statesman in Silicon Valley; he was born in 1971. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who could well emerge as one of the richest technologists of the twenty-first century, was born in 1984. Political scientists have long noted that civic participation rises with age. Young people have the lowest rates of voting and volunteerism; the retired have the highest. Young adults are often too caught up in early life challenges to think much about influencing the broader world, while people at the height of very busy careers may not have time to do much beyond vote.

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Dobbs Ferry draws a lot of two-income professional couples, people such as Edward and Karen Zuckerberg, both in the medical field. (Edward is a dentist in town.) The couple has gotten a lot of attention lately because their son, Mark, who was born and raised in Dobbs Ferry, started Facebook. Mark went to public schools in the area before spending his senior year at Phillips Andover Academy and then going to Harvard. Mark Zuckerberg hasn’t given many hints as to his politics, but his basic stats—professional parents, blue-state upbringing, elite T 269 both.indd 269 5/11/10 6:27:54 AM 270 fortunes of change education, years spent in the Bay Area—all point to probable liberal leanings. Zuckerberg is still very young—he was born in 1984—and given how busy he’s been with work, he may not even have wellformed political beliefs.

Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again
by Eric Topol
Published 1 Jan 2019

Many experts take the opposite point of view, including Alan Bundy of the University of Edinburgh74 or Yann LeCun (“there would be no Ex Machina or Terminator scenarios, because robots would not be built with human drives—hunger, power, reproduction, self-preservation”).75 Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, LeCun’s employer, Mark Zuckerberg, isn’t worried either, writing on Facebook, “Some people fear-monger about how A.I. is a huge danger, but that seems far-fetched to me and much less likely than disasters due to widespread disease, violence, etc.”76 Some AI experts have even dramatically changed their views, like Stuart Russell of UC Berkeley.77 There’s no shortage of futurologists weighing in, one way or another, or even both ways, and even taking each other on.78 I especially got a kick out of the AI and Mars connection, setting up disparate views between Andrew Ng and Elon Musk.

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Texts from the very popular Chinese platform Weibo were analyzed with machine learning with some word classifiers detected.41 At a much larger scale, Facebook is mining its wall posts of users who report risk of self-harm. After Facebook Live was rolled out in 2016, it has been used by several people to broadcast their suicide. With a heightened awareness of the opportunity to prevent such tragedies, in 2017, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced new algorithms that look for patterns of posts and words for rapid review by dedicated Facebook employees: “In the future, AI will be able to understand more of the subtle nuances of language and will be able to identify different issues beyond suicide as well, including quickly spotting more kinds of bullying and hate.”

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(Similar to voice recognition, deep neural networks are now mastering lip reading to help the deaf.)16 Nonetheless, there are clearly downsides that need to be underscored. Even though Alexa and the others have to be activated by the wake word—calling their name out—having a listening device in your home surely qualifies as creepy. It reminds me of Mark Zuckerberg putting tape over his laptop webcam, fearing that someone could be watching. You can shut down the “always-on” setting to alleviate some privacy concerns, but when the devices are activated, we know that the companies are taping some of the conversations to train and improve their platform, even though users have the ability to delete all the content (something that few people bother to do).

Conscience of a Conservative: A Rejection of Destructive Politics and a Return to Principle
by Jeff Flake
Published 31 Jul 2017

At issue was the “Trending Topics” feature of Facebook, which is supposed to be based on the volume of interest a given subject is achieving at a given time and determines how many people on Facebook will be exposed to the subject. A report on the tech website Gizmodo quoted a former Facebook “news curator” who said that conservative viewpoints were sometimes “black-listed,” which, if true, was a very disturbing allegation. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg denied the claim but, recognizing the seriousness of the issue, convened a roundtable in May 2016 with conservative media figures, including Glenn Beck, S. E. Cupp, Dana Perino, and Brent Bozell (Breitbart.com, then still run by Steve Bannon, was invited but declined to attend) to give assurances and seek solutions.

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Vintage Books, 2014. Judis, John B. The Populist Explosion. Columbia Global Reports, 2016. ———. William F. Buckley: Patron Saint of the Conservatives. Simon & Schuster, 2001. Klososky, Scott, editor. The Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House. G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1994. Lien, Tracey. “Mark Zuckerberg Says Many Conservatives Don’t Trust Facebook to Show ‘Content Without a Political Bias’.” Los Angeles Times, May 18, 2016. Nunez, Michael. “Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News.” Gizmodo, May 9, 2016. Orwell, George. Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays. Harcourt, Inc., 2008.

Snowden's Box: Trust in the Age of Surveillance
by Jessica Bruder and Dale Maharidge
Published 29 Mar 2020

Barr, UK home secretary Priti Patel, acting US homeland security secretary Kevin McAleenan, and Australian minister for home affairs Peter Dutton — had begun pressuring Facebook to create a back door in WhatsApp and its other messaging services that would allow law enforcement agencies to spy on users’ private communications. ‘‘Companies should not deliberately design their systems to preclude any form of access to content even for preventing or investigating the most serious crimes,’’ they wrote in a letter to Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook fired back. ‘‘End-to-end encryption already protects the messages of over a billion people every day,’’ Andy Stone, a company spokesman, told the New York Times. ‘‘We strongly oppose government attempts to build backdoors because they would undermine the privacy and security of people everywhere.’’

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p. 138 snail mail: Scott Shane and Sarah Kliff, “A Scoop about Neil Armstrong Arrived in a Plain Brown Envelope,” New York Times, August 1, 2019. p. 139 NSA cracks VPNs: “NSA Broke into Secure Network of Al Jazeera and Others: Report,” Al Jazeera, August 16, 2018. p. 140 laptop cameras: Katie Rogers, “Mark Zuckerberg Covers His Laptop Camera. You Should Consider It, Too,” New York Times, June 22, 2016. p. 140 Little Snitch: “Little Snitch 4,” Objective Development, https://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html. p. 140 cute stickers: Electronic Frontier Foundation, eff.org. p. 142 Mobile Justice: “ACLU Apps to Record Police Conduct,” Aclu.org.

Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now
by Jaron Lanier
Published 28 May 2018

Here’s Sean Parker, the first president of Facebook: We need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever.… It’s a social-validation feedback loop … exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.… The inventors, creators—it’s me, it’s Mark [Zuckerberg], it’s Kevin Systrom on Instagram, it’s all of these people—understood this consciously. And we did it anyway … it literally changes your relationship with society, with each other.… It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.1 Here’s Chamath Palihapitiya, former vice president of user growth at Facebook: The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works.… No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth.

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They send us money as we watch. The imbalanced power relationship is in your face all the time. Don’t you feel humiliated using one of the Facebook brands, like Instagram or WhatsApp? Facebook is the first public company controlled by one person.32 I mean, I don’t personally have anything against Mark Zuckerberg. It isn’t about him. But why would you subordinate a big part of your life to any one stranger? When I was growing up there were big politicians, rich people, pop stars, captains of industry, and all that, but none of them got to run my life in any substantial way. They influenced me now and then by saying something that caught my attention, but that was it.

The New Geography of Jobs
by Enrico Moretti
Published 21 May 2012

“Tech insiders thought it was trying to compete more effectively with Twitter. But Facebook was really after FriendFeed’s dozen well-regarded product managers and engineers,” including its cofounder Bret Taylor. The price tag for FriendFeed is estimated to be $47 million, or $4 million per employee. “We really wanted to get Bret,” Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, remarked at the time. “Someone who is exceptional in their role is not just a little better than someone who is pretty good,” he went on to say. “They are 100 times better.” Zuckerberg’s comments are particularly revealing. The rise of the innovation sector is associated with an increase in the value of talent, for a simple reason: economic value depends on talent as never before.

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For example, studies have shown that among doctors, specialists perform a narrower set of activities in large cities than in small ones. But market size does not matter very much for unskilled workers; manual laborers and carpenters perform similar tasks in large and small cities. Think about the history of Facebook. As everyone who has seen the movie The Social Network knows, Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook in his dorm room at Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Cambridge boasts the most impressive concentration of top universities in the world and is one of the best-educated cities in America. Plenty of innovative companies are in the area, and there is definitely no shortage of talent.

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When Bill Gates decided that working for Microsoft was more important than finishing Harvard, it was a turning point for the software industry. If he had finished college first, Microsoft might not have become the dominant force it later became, and Gates himself would have been several billions poorer today. If Mark Zuckerberg had stayed in college, his nemeses, the Winklevoss twins, might have developed a social networking site before him. In 2010 the venture capitalist Peter Thiel launched a controversial charity that offers $100,000 scholarships to twenty-year-olds with exceptionally promising business ideas to enable them to drop out of college.

Automate This: How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World
by Christopher Steiner
Published 29 Aug 2012

When they reached college, often an elite university, they could already string together thousands of lines of code, create the guts of a stable application, or bolt up an original Web site design in a matter of hours. During the three months I spent there in the summer of 2011, I learned how Mark Zuckerbergs are created: not from spontaneous explosions of intellect and technology, but from years and years of staring at a computer screen, getting to know code as intuitively as a seasoned copy editor knows idioms, punctuation, and style. These stylists of code and writers of algorithms are the preeminent entrepreneurs of this generation.

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There’s little doubt that the collapse of the financial industry changed the course of the economy. But just as with any great story, there are other branches of this tale. Wall Street’s nadir of 2008 and early 2009 may have been the main act onstage, but there were other, more subtle plays taking place. One wasn’t so subtle: Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook in early 2004, and he was at the time of this writing worth more than $25 billion. His company’s value, meanwhile, has soared past $100 billion. Zuckerberg’s story is well known; the people who use Facebook aren’t tech nerds or finance guys—they’re exceedingly normal people, many of whom have become addicted to the constant updates, news, and chat that Facebook provides.

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The gears of Bear’s quant operations, whose math and programming work had been manipulated into endorsing what, we now can see, was an insane volume of mortgage-backed securities, had turned Hammerbacher off. If he wasn’t going to pursue further learning within the structured setting of academia, he surely didn’t want to waste his time on this. Through a Harvard friend in the spring of 2006, Mark Zuckerberg reached out to Hammerbacher, who was well known for his math prowess. A week later, Hammerbacher was relocating to California. He was an early employee at Facebook—one of the first hundred—and Zuckerberg gave him the fancy title of research scientist. It was Hammerbacher’s job to use math and algorithms to figure out how people were using Facebook, broken down by age, gender, location, and income, and why Facebook thrived in some places and flopped in others.

The Glass Cage: Automation and Us
by Nicholas Carr
Published 28 Sep 2014

Through the statistical “discovery” of potential friends, the provision of “Like” buttons and other clickable tokens of affection, and the automated management of many of the time-consuming aspects of personal relations, they seek to streamline the messy process of affiliation. Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, celebrates all of this as “frictionless sharing”—the removal of conscious effort from socializing. But there’s something repugnant about applying the bureaucratic ideals of speed, productivity, and standardization to our relations with others. The most meaningful bonds aren’t forged through transactions in a marketplace or other routinized exchanges of data.

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Many computer companies and software houses now say they’re working to make their products invisible. “I am super excited about technologies that disappear completely,” declares Jack Dorsey, a prominent Silicon Valley entrepreneur. “We’re doing this with Twitter, and we’re doing this with [the online credit-card processor] Square.”27 When Mark Zuckerberg calls Facebook “a utility,” as he frequently does, he’s signaling that he wants the social network to merge into our lives the way the telephone system and electric grid did.28 Apple has promoted the iPad as a device that “gets out of the way.” Picking up on the theme, Google markets Glass as a means of “getting technology out of the way.”

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Facebook, through its Timeline and other documentary features, encourages its members to think of their public image as indistinguishable from their identity. It wants to lock them into a single, uniform “self” that persists throughout their lives, unfolding in a coherent narrative beginning in childhood and ending, one presumes, with death. This fits with its founder’s narrow conception of the self and its possibilities. “You have one identity,” Mark Zuckerberg has said. “The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly.” He even argues that “having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”35 That view, not surprisingly, dovetails with Facebook’s desire to package its members as neat and coherent sets of data for advertisers.

The Doomsday Calculation: How an Equation That Predicts the Future Is Transforming Everything We Know About Life and the Universe
by William Poundstone
Published 3 Jun 2019

Corporate parent Alphabet is establishing well-funded AI centers across the globe. “I don’t buy into the killer robot [theory],” Google director of research Peter Norvig told CNBC. Another Google researcher, the psychologist and computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton, said, “I am in the camp that it is hopeless.” Mark Zuckerberg and several Facebook executives went so far as to stage an intervention for Musk, inviting him to dinner at Zuckerberg’s house so they could ply him with arguments that AI is okay. It didn’t work. Ever since, Musk and Zuckerberg have waged a social media feud on the topic. Asked about Musk, Zuckerberg told a Facebook Live audience, “I think people who are naysayers and try to drum up these doomsday scenarios—I just, I don’t understand it.

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BBC News, December 2, 2014. bbc.in/1vgH80r. Chown, Marcus. “Dying to Know: Would You Lay Your Life on the Line for a Theory?” New Scientist, December 20/27, 1997, 50–51. Clark, Nicola, and Dennis Overbye. “Scientist Suspected of Terrorist Ties.” New York Times, October 9, 2009. Clifford, Catherine. “Mark Zuckerberg Doubles Down Defending A.I. After Elon Musk Says His Understanding of It Is ‘Limited.’” CNBC, July 26, 2017. Coleman, Sidney, and Frank De Luccia. “Gravitational Effects on and of Vacuum Decay.” Physical Review D 21 (1980): 3305–3315. Collins, Daniel P. “William Eckhardt: The Man Who Launched 1,000 Systems.”

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The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes’ Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, & Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011. Merali, Zeeya. “Quantum Physics: What Is Really Real?” Nature 521 (2015): 278–280. Metz, Cade. “Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and the Feud over Killer Robots.” New York Times, June 9, 2018. Military History Now, uncredited. “The Men Who Saved the World—Meet Two Different Russians Who Prevented WW3.” 2013. bit.ly/1PbhTli. Moravec, Hans. Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988.

Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero
by Tyler Cowen
Published 8 Apr 2019

To make that more concrete, CEOs who are one decile higher in the distribution of these credentials earn about 5 percent higher pay, or about an extra $280,000 a year.11 Another factor is that, on average, top CEO talent helps larger firms proportionally more than smaller firms, and high salaries can be useful as a means of allocating the best talent to their most important uses. If Mark Zuckerberg had been running a midsized financial services company rather than Facebook, that would have been a waste of his talents, and likely Facebook would not have taken off as it did. A study found that when we take such “matching” factors into account, the optimal highest marginal tax rate on CEOs probably should be in the range of 27 to 34 percent.

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OK, so Google looks pretty strong as an innovator. What about Facebook? Facebook has consistently upgraded the quality and diversity of its product since its inception. In 2006, Yahoo offered to buy out Facebook for $1 billion, and at the time many commentators thought this was a no-brainer offer for Mark Zuckerberg. Of course, he declined it and proceeded to invest further, making the company worth many times more than that—more than $50 billion as of 2017. Arguably Zuckerberg has done a better job allocating capital within his company than any other recent American CEO. Most of those increases in value have sprung from service and quality upgrades, innovations at the time they were instituted.

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It remains to be seen how well they will succeed in this endeavor, but at the very least they are helping to drive this highly competitive race. Just to be up-front, I should note that, in my own personal life, I am not a fan of Facebook in the same way that I am a fan of Google. I consider it to be an amazing company and believe that Mark Zuckerberg has been one of the most impressive CEOs of our time. Still, I have two complaints. The first is mostly personal and subjective: I find their page confusing to look at and use, and their changes in page organization over time have confused me as well (too much innovation, from my point of view).

Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century
by Jeff Lawson
Published 12 Jan 2021

Understanding the value of Agile, as well as how your teams have implemented it, will help make sense of the sometimes counterintuitive, and often frustrating answers you get when you seek certainty from your product teams. Chapter 11 Invest in Infrastructure Move fast and break things. —Mark Zuckerberg, 2009 Move fast with stable infra. —Mark Zuckerberg, 2014 Mark Zuckerberg’s famous tagline “Move fast and break things” was brilliant, but ultimately insincere. So it was unsurprising that he ended up changing it in 2014 to the far less memorable “Move fast with stable infra[structure].” The tension between those two statements is what this chapter is about.

Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America's Future
by Jean M. Twenge
Published 25 Apr 2023

Some of these luminaries are still famous, while others were well-known in decades past and have since faded, so might provide a pleasant surge of nostalgia if you remember them when. Listing people by generation provides a new perspective outside of the usual prototypical representatives of a generation. Most people know that Kurt Cobain of Nirvana was a Gen X’er—but so are Jimmy Fallon, Kanye West, Blake Shelton, Julia Roberts, Elon Musk, and Jennifer Lopez. Mark Zuckerberg is a quintessential Millennial, but the generation also includes Beyoncé, Michael Phelps, and Lady Gaga. You may find a few surprises: Until I made these lists, I didn’t realize that Melania Trump was a Gen X’er. There are also some intriguing parallels: Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were born in the same year, 1955.

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Twitter was founded by Jack Dorsey (b. 1976), and Uber by Travis Kalanick (b. 1976) and Garrett Camp (b. 1978). Sean Parker (b. 1979) cofounded Napster, the file-sharing music site later shut down over copyright issues, and served as the first president of Facebook. Gen X’er Sheryl Sandberg (b. 1969) didn’t found Facebook—that would be Millennial Mark Zuckerberg—but she helped run it for a decade. So, when it comes to the internet, Gen X was first. Gen X was also last. Gen X is the last generation to have had a mostly analog childhood. They are the last to use rotary phones instead of push-button or wireless; the last to languish in a childhood without cable TV or videotapes; the last to spend their high school years without the internet; the last to learn to type as teens instead of as children; the last to use a typewriter for their college essays; the last to look things up in bound encyclopedias; the last to use cameras with film; the last to use a radio with a dial, buy cassette tapes, or attempt to scam the Columbia Record Club (thirteen records or tapes for $1!)

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MOST POPULAR FIRST NAMES * First appearance on the list Boys Michael Christopher Joshua* Matthew* Jason David James Daniel* Andrew* Tyler* Girls Jessica Ashley* Jennifer Sarah* Amanda Brittany* Melissa* Samantha* Emily* FAMOUS MEMBERS (BIRTH YEAR) Actors, Comedians, Filmmakers Kim Kardashian (1980) Lin-Manuel Miranda (1980) Chris Pine (1980) Chris Evans (1981) Amy Schumer (1981) Elijah Wood (1981) Kirsten Dunst (1982) Colin Jost (1982) Seth Rogen (1982) Ali Wong (1982) Constance Wu (1982) Adam Driver (1983) Aziz Ansari (1983) Michael Che (1983) Jonah Hill (1983) Mila Kunis (1983) Dan Levy (1983) Donald Glover (1983) America Ferrera (1984) Khloe Kardashian (1984) Gina Rodriguez (1984) Olivia Wilde (1984) Scarlett Johansson (1984) Kate McKinnon (1984) Issa Rae (1985) Kaley Cuoco (1985) Hasan Minhaj (1985) Lena Dunham (1986) Lindsay Lohan (1986) Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen (1986) Elliot Page (1987) Zac Efron (1987) Blake Lively (1987) Awkwafina (1988) Emma Stone (1988) Haley Joel Osment (1988) Rachel Brosnahan (1990) Jennifer Lawrence (1990) Kristen Stewart (1990) Bowen Yang (1990) Shailene Woodley (1991) Miley Cyrus (1992) Dylan and Cole Sprouse (1992) Beanie Feldstein (1993) Pete Davidson (1993) Dakota Fanning (1994) Musicians and Artists Josh Groban (1981) Beyoncé Knowles (1981) Britney Spears (1981) Alicia Keys (1981) Justin Timberlake (1981) Jennifer Hudson (1981) LeAnn Rimes (1982) Kelly Clarkson (1982) Adam Lambert (1982) Nicki Minaj (1982) Miranda Lambert (1983) Carrie Underwood (1983) Katy Perry (1984) Mandy Moore (1984) Ciara (1985) Lady Gaga (1986) Kevin Jonas (1987) Kendrick Lamar (1987) Zoë Kravitz (1988) Joe Jonas (1989) Taylor Swift (1989) Nick Jonas (1992) Demi Lovato (1992) Selena Gomez (1992) Cardi B (1992) Ariana Grande (1993) Chance the Rapper (1993) Justin Bieber (1994) Entrepreneurs and Businesspeople Mark Zuckerberg (1984) Evan Spiegel (1990) Politicians, Judges, and Activists Pete Buttigieg (1982) Ilhan Omar (1982) Sarah Huckabee Sanders (1982) Katie Britt (1982) Elise Stefanik (1984) J. D. Vance (1984) Jon Ossoff (1987) Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (1989) Athletes and Sports Figures Venus Williams (1980) Eli Manning (1981) Hope Solo (1981) Serena Williams (1981) Andy Roddick (1982) Aaron Rodgers (1983) LeBron James (1984) Ryan Lochte (1984) Kyle Busch (1985) Megan Rapinoe (1985) Michael Phelps (1985) Allyson Felix (1985) Shaun White (1986) Colin Kaepernick (1987) Steph Curry (1988) Kevin Durant (1988) Brittney Griner (1990) Bethany Hamilton (1990) Damian Lillard (1990) Mike Trout (1991) Bryce Harper (1992) Johnny Manziel (1992) Journalists, Authors, and People in the News Chelsea Clinton (1980) Jenna Bush Hager (1981) Paris Hilton (1981) Meghan Markle (1981) Nicole Richie (1981) Ivanka Trump (1981) Misty Copeland (1982) Anita Sarkeesian (1983) Edward Snowden (1983) Elizabeth Holmes (1984) Ben Shapiro (1984) Eric Trump (1984) Chrissy Teigen (1985) Daniel M.

Googled: The End of the World as We Know It
by Ken Auletta
Published 1 Jan 2009

Because Google was already warring in the courts with publishers and the Authors Guild, this battle with Viacom opened a second front in the war with old media. And soon there would be other skirmishes, including those with new media companies like Facebook, the fastest growing social network. With more than forty million active users in the summer of 2007, Facebook “doubles in size every six months,” said founder Mark Zuckerberg. Then twenty-two, Zuckerberg is a Harvard dropout who in the early days of his company’s life slept on a mattress on the floor of a Palo Alto apartment he rented near his office, allowing him to move effortlessly between work and sleep. His baby face is framed with curly hair, and because he is thin, with a relatively long torso, one is surprised that he stands only five feet eight inches tall.

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Frustrated by what friends say was sometimes chaotic management at Google, and wanting broader responsibilities to address these, Sandberg left in March 2008 to accept the title of chief operating officer at Facebook. Venture capitalist Roger McNamee, an investor in Facebook and a close friend of Sandberg‘s, introduced her to founder Mark Zuckerberg. “Sheryl created AdWords,” he said. “The idea had many parents, but the execution was hers.” Her title, vice president, global online sales and operations, did not reflect her importance, he said. And he believed she was junior to some “tired executives.” In the effort to keep her, Google offered her the CFO job, which she declined.

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She was the friendly face at Google that some traditional media company executives trusted enough to let their hair down and ask: How can Google help my troubled business? Google executives were stumped as to why Sandberg would take the job at Facebook. She wasn’t given the same broad responsibilities as most COOs: vital parts of Facebook—product management and development, engineering, and finance—would continue to report to founder Mark Zuckerberg. And they didn’t understand why she would leave for a company that, according to one Facebook insider, had generated only $150 million in revenues in 2007 and was bleeding money. Google was already anxious about Facebook, and Sandberg’s defection elevated their discomfort. True, Facebook wasn’t making money, but neither had Google in its first four years.

The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine Is in Your Hands
by Eric Topol
Published 6 Jan 2015

A. Srivastava, “2 Billion Smartphone Users by 2015: 83% of Internet Usage from Mobiles,” Daze Info, January 23, 2014, http://www.dazeinfo.com/2014/01/23/smartphone-users-growth-mobile-internet-2014-2017/. 12. M. Zuckerberg, “Mark Zuckerberg on a Future Where the Internet Is Available to All,” Wall Street Journal, July 7, 2014, http://online.wsj.com/articles/mark-zuckerberg-on-a-future-where-the-internet-is-available-to-all-1404762276. 13. “The Rise of the Cheap Smartphone,” The Economist, April 5, 2014, http://www.economist.com/node/21600134/print. 14. M. Honan, “Don’t Diss Cheap Smartphones.

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They’re About to Change Everything,” Wired, May 16, 2014, http://www.wired.com/2014/05/cheap-smartphones/. 71. H. Vogt, “Using Free Wi-Fi to Connect Africa’s Unconnected,” Wall Street Journal, April 13, 2014, http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303287804579447323711745040. 72. M. Zuckerberg, “Mark Zuckerberg on a Future Where the Internet Is Available to All,” Wall Street Journal, July 7, 2014, http://online.wsj.com/articles/mark-zuckerberg-on-a-future-where-the-internet-is-available-to-all-1404762276. 73. D. Fletcher, “Daniel Fletcher: Why Your iPhone Upgrade Is Good for the Poor,” Wall Street Journal, September 20, 2013, http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887324492604579083762147495666. 74.

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World
by Malcolm Harris
Published 14 Feb 2023

Filip Novokmet et al., “From Communism to Capitalism: Private versus Public Property and Inequality in China and Russia,” AEA Papers and Proceedings 108 (May 2018): 111. 22. Ibid., 112. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. Sebastian Mallaby, The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future (New York: Penguin Press, 2022), 273–75. 26. Michael Arrington, “Exclusive Video: Mark Zuckerberg and Yuri Milner Talk about Facebook’s New Investment,” TechCrunch, May 26, 2009, https://techcrunch.com/2009/05/26/mark-zuckerberg-and-yuri-milner-talk-about-facebooks-new-investment-video. 27. “Alisher Usmanov: What Makes the Russian Britain’s Richest Person?” Guardian, April 22, 2013. 28. Juliette Garside, “Russia’s Richest Man Cashes In on Facebook Share Recovery,” Guardian, September 5, 2013. 29.

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But considering that, Google’s core function held a contradiction: By trying to get users to the perfect site, Google was throwing them off its own pages. Search remains the world’s biggest product monopoly, and yet there was another layer of the web no one had been able to hold. It took one more scraper to figure it out. Born in 1984, Mark Zuckerberg grew up in Westchester County, New York, the socially awkward son of a technologically inclined dentist whose practice operated out of the family home. If his father was part of the personal revolution—a small businessman working on a PC—then Mark was an internetworking kid, coding a messenger program to communicate between the dental office and house computers.

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Zuck didn’t get kicked out, but Facemash was the beginning of the end for him at school. The god’s-eye view of his fellow students’ private and public behavior, watching them condemn the site while flocking to it in droves, seems to have only spurred his contempt for the hypocrite masses and their bureaucrat leaders. So how did Mark Zuckerberg become the world’s crown prince of friendship? There were a lot of people building online social networks in the early 2000s. As David Fincher’s film The Social Network dramatizes, several people were trying to build a social network at Harvard in the early 2000s. Zuckerberg wasn’t even the first guy to finish an online social network at an elite college—that was Stanford’s Orkut Büyükkökten, who later repeated the feat for his employer, Google.

Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 1 Mar 2016

Making matters worse, remember, in a successful corporate environment total economic activity decreases as money is sucked up into share value. It’s as if the business world is morphing into a video game. We can only wonder who the eventual winner of the growth game will be as the Gini number creeps upward toward one. Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos . . . ? They’re playing in a winner-takes-all competition. Google is trying to leverage its platform monopoly to become a shopping platform, Facebook is leveraging its monopoly in social media to become an advertising service, and Amazon is leveraging its store to become a cloud service.

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Vicarious claims to have succeeded, and its first Turing test demonstrations appear to back up its claim.76 How would such a technology be deployed or monetized? Vicarious doesn’t need to worry about that just yet. As a flexible purpose corporation, Vicarious can work with the long-term, big picture, experimental approach required to innovate in a still-emerging field such as AI. Although investors including Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel have invested $56 million in the company, the flexible purpose structure prevents them from exerting the sort of pressure to get to market that venture capitalists typically put on their investments. The company can’t be forced to sell out or to abandon scientific curiosity for commercial viability.

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If they were actually to catch on, investors reasoned, those who got in early would have cornered the market on an entire currency. That’s why from 2012 to 2013, the price of a single bitcoin skyrocketed, from ten dollars in November 2012 to a thousand dollars a year later.35 There are now bitcoin investment funds—one famously started by the Winklevoss twins, known best for hiring college student Mark Zuckerberg to build their social network platform and subsequently losing it to him. They may be missing the nature of this opportunity as well. Bitcoin money is only a utility—not the thing of value in itself. It’s a label. If bitcoins become too precious and scarce, there are always plenty of alternative blockchain currencies to use instead.

The New Gold Rush: The Riches of Space Beckon!
by Joseph N. Pelton
Published 5 Nov 2016

Indeed this New Space push is fueled by who we call the space billionaires. At the head of the space billionaire pack are Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com; Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft; Elon Musk (founder of Space X, Paypal, and Tesla); Robert Bigelow, owner of Budget Suites; Sir Richard Branson, head of Virgin Galactic; Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook; and electronic game inventor John Carmack, who created “Doom” and “Quake.” It is these people that are upending the world of technology and global enterprise at planetary levels who will be prominent in the space business during the twenty-first century. This book is intended to reveal to a broader audience the cornucopia of new enterprises that could be opening up in the next few years.

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These initiatives include new cost efficient launch systems, 3D manufacture of new types of satellite networking constellations and even high altitude balloons to support Internet connectivity. Silicon Valley has apparently discovered the “New Space religion” and how it can change the world. Space commerce now represents a part of their growth strategy. With very moxie corporate titans who embrace disruptive technologies—such as Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos—the world of space will apparently change at an even faster pace. Even Paul Allen of Microsoft fame is in on the act via his Vulcan Technologies that is now leading the development of the huge Strato launch vehicle that will serve as a high altitude carrier plane for new types of commercial launch vehicles.

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It is even advanced building materials systems, housing built by 3-D printers, and “smart” building systems designs. These state of the art sustainable products are not being promoted by bleeding heart liberal environmentalists but are being developed by today’s leading figures, such as Tim Cook of Apple, Mark Zuckerberg of FaceBook, Elon Musk of Tesla, and other forward-looking smart industrialists around the world. 3. Planetary Protection to Preserve Modern Infrastructure and Avoid Global Destruction. One of the keys to the future of human survival is for the world’s space agencies to finally recognize that their top strategic objective is to deploy space systems that would save Earth from massive destruction.

How to Be the Startup Hero: A Guide and Textbook for Entrepreneurs and Aspiring Entrepreneurs
by Tim Draper
Published 18 Dec 2017

They said, “We want to delight our users.” This is the mindset that helped build Skype, Baidu, Tesla and SpaceX. And it probably should be the mindset you use as you become a Startup Hero. I recently talked to my friend Marc Benioff, who is the founder, chairman and CEO of Salesforce. He told me that when he spoke to Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Mark said, “You don’t have much of a technology orientation, do you?” Marc responded, “We have a customer orientation.” The customer is always right, and if you delight your customer, your brand will expand in a positive way, your business will thrive, and you will move the world forward.

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However, the music industry got a worse deal than they would have had with Napster, and Napster had to shut down its service. Incidentally, this failure didn't deter the founders from trying again. Both have become enormously successful with their post-Napster efforts. Sean Parker went on to help Mark Zuckerberg in the founding of Facebook, and Shawn Fanning started a flurry of companies around derivations of the file sharing theme. Fail and fail again until you succeed. ✽✽✽ Make a list of all your failures. Your failures should make you proud. Keep failing. Keep living. Keep trying. ✽✽✽ As much as I recommend trying and failing, I also believe a Startup Hero should be wise and learn from their mistakes.

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We teach future instead of history, we have a team-based approach rather than individualistic one, and while other schools fall in line with anything that ensures safety, we proudly declare ourselves to be a dangerous school, complete with survival training and open-ended projects and challenges. We believe that students, put to the task, can perform at a much higher level than ever imagined by other schools, and we believe that a student with a purpose can achieve anything in his or her imagination. Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, Elizabeth Holmes, Michael Dell, and many others dropped out of school to pursue their dreams. And they were enormously successful -- in some cases, in spite of their formal education. At Draper University, we embrace and support people who have the gumption to break from the pack to start businesses that might transform industries.

Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism
by John Elkington
Published 6 Apr 2020

PROFIT The social responsibility of business, according to Milton Friedman, is to increase its profits. So with profits of some $5 billion a quarter, you would have thought that Facebook would be sitting pretty. But recent times have seen the social media company attacked from many directions. Indeed, late in 2018 Wired magazine listed Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg as one of the “Most Dangerous People on the Internet in 2018.”21 Zuckerberg appeared alongside people like Russian president Vladimir Putin and Min Aung Hlaing, head of Myanmar’s (Burma’s) armed forces. The reason why Min Aung Hlaing made the list was that he had used social media to promote hate speech, inflaming the country’s genocidal war against the Rohingya people.

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Did they see the writing on Carillion’s wall even as they signed off on this propaganda? Nor is it just businesses in such everyday sectors getting into trouble. Take Facebook again. As 2019 dawned, the company was still in the dock after what the media described as a “tsunami of crises.” Speaking on behalf of the company he founded as recently as 2006, CEO Mark Zuckerberg protested the following: We’re a very different company than we were in 2016, or even a year ago. We’ve fundamentally altered our DNA to focus more on preventing harm from all our services, and we’ve systematically shifted a large portion of our company to work on preventing harm.22 That is a seriously charitable—some might argue self-serving—picture of what has actually been going on as Facebook scrambled to protect and grow its $5 billion of profit each quarter.

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You’re doing a brilliant job of listening, Jack, but can you actually dial up the urgency and move on this stuff?” That anger suggests a growing awareness of the Black and Gray Swan potentials of our fast-evolving electronic habitats. The day before Dorsey appeared at TED, interestingly, a well-known journalist had issued a challenge to all the “gods of Silicon Valley,” listing them—Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and, yes, Jack Dorsey. Carole Cadwalladr was the brilliant journalist who broke the story about the role of Cambridge Analytica in distorting the UK vote on Brexit.6 Here is what she had to say: “This technology you have invented has been amazing, but now it is a crime scene.

Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy
by George Gilder
Published 16 Jul 2018

As a speculative investment, the virtual “coins” have engendered scores of real millionaires and even billionaires, with actual addresses, not merely URLs, in places like San Francisco, New York, Woodside, Greenwich, Palo Alto, Shanghai, London, Malta, Seattle, and Buenos Aires. At the 2014 Bitcoin Summit, joining the fray of Satoshistas is Chamath Palihapitiya, a ferociously smart near-billionaire from Sri Lanka, a former force and friend of Mark (Zuckerberg) at Facebook. Virtually the only man at the summit wearing a suit and tie, Palihapitiya at the time owns some fifty million dollars’ worth of bitcoins. Tall, dark, and lean, the physical opposite of the Nordic bear Andreessen, the Sri Lankan warns against “hyperbolic bullshit” from others. But as for himself, “When I buy bitcoin, I am using capital to support a way of ripping apart the financial system.”

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From one point of view, Thiel’s fellowships are an ingenious way for a venture capitalist to find the most driven, capable, and even impatient entrepreneurial talent in the new generation of students. Thiel’s fortune began with PayPal, but it reached its apogee when he persuaded eighteen-year-old Mark Zuckerberg to move Harvard’s Facebook to Silicon Valley and open it to the world. When Internet bulletin boards and social networks such as MySpace were seething with murky anonymity, Thiel saw that what the Internet needed was faces. He sought the accountability of real identities behind Internet posts.

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Entering the “happening” phase, virtual reality pervades the venerable Internet Trends Report by Mary Meeker of Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers. She reports that consumers are buying headsets at a slow but steady rate, while gaming companies pull in real money on VR titles. Entrepreneurs are often fans of gaming, Meeker notes, citing Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, and Mark Zuckerberg. Global interactive gaming is becoming mainstream, with 2.6 billion gamers in 2017, up twenty-six-fold in little more than a decade. Global gaming revenue surged more than $100 billion in 2017, and China is now the top market. I tell the Strivr team—Hillenmeyer and Belch—that OTOY is planning a global computer platform for VR rendering anywhere on the cheap.

How to Spend a Trillion Dollars
by Rowan Hooper
Published 15 Jan 2020

is a fruitless one – I often go back to the ‘what if’ of the Florida recount in 2000 and the election of George W. Bush – but the Nixon ‘what if’ is similarly intriguing and dismaying.) Even before coronavirus hit, the idea of UBI – universal basic income – was being floated by a range of backers as diverse as Charles Murray of the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Black Lives Matter. When the pandemic changed the world, the calls for UBI were renewed. A guaranteed income would, say supporters, cushion the economic impact of the virus, and even slow its spread, because many workers would not be obliged to return to work when ill.

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$ $ $ WHEN HER DAUGHTER was still a baby, in September 2016, Priscilla Chan declared that she wanted to ensure not only that the infant would thrive, but that she and her entire generation would grow up free from disease. ‘We’ll be investing in basic science research with the goal of curing disease,’ she declared. Not merely curing breast cancer or Alzheimer’s or diabetes or strokes – curing all disease. Chan, a medical doctor who is married to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, was launching the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), and announcing the investment of $3 billion into research aimed at preventing, curing or managing all diseases by the end of the twenty-first century. It seems that most of the couple’s Facebook stock (currently worth around $60 billion) will eventually be ploughed into this project.

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It’s already fast. The average person today can expect to live for 72.6 years, which is longer than people in the best country in the world (Norway) in 1950. But the average value conceals a big inequality, from an average of 53 years in the Central African Republic to 85 in Japan.18 In 2020 Mark Zuckerberg predicted that by the end of the decade, we would all be living longer lives. ‘Scientific research will have helped cure and prevent diseases to extend our average life expectancy by another 2.5 years,’ he posted on Facebook. That’s not controversial. A 2017 paper in the Lancet assessing long-term trends around mortality and longevity predicted something similar, even without CZI investment.19 If we could achieve the incredible feat of eradicating, preventing or curing all disease, we would all be living to around 100, which is about the natural human maximum, give or take.

Goodbye, Things: The New Japanese Minimalism
by Fumio Sasaki
Published 10 Apr 2017

Reducing the number of items that we own does not reduce our satisfaction. 2: Find your unique uniform. Steve Jobs always wore the same clothes: a black turtleneck by Issey Miyake, Levi’s 501s, and a pair of New Balance sneakers, which even served as his attire for public presentations. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg seems to be fond of a gray T-shirt. Einstein is said to have always worn the same type of jacket. These people took the time that others spend on choosing clothes and chasing trends and turned their attention instead to the things that mattered most to them. We don’t need to have a lot of clothes to live a clean, comfortable life.

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—ICHIRO KISHIMI AND FUMITAKE KOGA, KIRAWARERU YUKI (COURAGE TO BE DISLIKED) Steve Jobs didn’t get nervous In the process of minimizing, I went through my clothes and minimized my wardrobe as well. As I explained in chapter 3, it’s possible to create more time and focus on the important things if we consider personal uniforms. Steve Jobs had his black turtleneck, and Mark Zuckerberg has his gray T-shirt. They agreed that it’s a waste of time selecting which clothes you want to wear. They would rather spend that time doing something creative. There’s another benefit to a minimalist wardrobe. Because we choose items that are timeless, we don’t need to worry about being out of style.

Better, Stronger, Faster: The Myth of American Decline . . . And the Rise of a New Economy
by Daniel Gross
Published 7 May 2012

The crowd listened closely to words of wisdom from the Nobelist Elie Wiesel and President Shimon Peres of Israel and to a brief talk on the week’s Torah portion by Israel’s onetime Ashkenazi chief rabbi, Yisrael Meir Lau. But things really perked up when Randi Zuckerberg, the sister of Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg and a senior executive at the company, sang “Jerusalem of Gold” in a bright vibrato. In violation of both good taste and the laws of Shabbat, Zuckerberg, one of the emerging It Girls of the global economic scene, proceeded to post the clip on Facebook. Throughout the week at Davos, insiders swapped tales of glimpsing Mark Zuckerberg the way people on safari note the sighting of a cheetah. The social networking site had definitely arrived, and it was staking its claim as a hot new player.

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But consider this: in 2002, in the wake of the previous meltdown and crisis in American confidence, none of these companies existed in anything like their current form. Their combined market capitalization was a few billion dollars, consisting mostly of Apple, an also-ran personal computer maker whose stock traded for less than the value of the cash on its balance sheet. Google was a piece of code, not one of the most profitable businesses known to man. Mark Zuckerberg was just entering Harvard. All three exploded from nothing, gained mass and scale during the long expansion of the 2000s, and boomed in the years after the Lehman Brothers crash. For these companies, the period of decline has been an era of triumph. Eight hundred billion dollars in market capitalization can vanish rather quickly.

Forward: Notes on the Future of Our Democracy
by Andrew Yang
Published 15 Nov 2021

A bunch of us said yes, and he opened his jacket pockets and produced all of these experimental KIND Bars that none of us had seen before; he was the Batman of snacks.) Even for people at this level, our function was mostly ceremonial. We convened at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit in Palo Alto in 2016. The highlight of the event was Mark Zuckerberg sitting on a stage and advising young entrepreneurs from around the world. Some of these entrepreneurs were from Africa and clearly of modest means. I felt like screaming out, “Mark, cut these folks a check!” from my seat in the tenth row. But no. It seemed that the entrepreneurs walked away with a photo of being onstage with Mark and some advice.

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Progressives on the other hand argue that hateful and racist language and ideologies have been allowed to spread unchecked on these platforms. The latter concern led to a boycott of Facebook known as “Stop Hate for Profit” in July 2020 that included hundreds of companies like Pfizer, Ford, Unilever, and Verizon. In response, Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, reportedly told people that these companies account for a tiny slice of Facebook’s revenue and there was nothing to worry about: the top hundred advertisers on Facebook are less than 6 percent of the company’s revenue. The Stop Hate for Profit campaign continued with celebrities like Rosario Dawson and Katy Perry taking a break from Instagram.

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There is no reason to protect a company from the consequences of an affirmative decision it makes to maximize its own profitability, as distinct from allowing the initial post. At present, Facebook has been arguing for itself as something of a public commons that should be left to its own devices and allowed to self-moderate while having all of the for-profit benefits of a private company. Mark Zuckerberg is worth $100 billion running a social network that reaches billions but still pretends to be the town bulletin board. Amending section 230 is thus immensely powerful and a historic opportunity. Instead of saying “Platforms are not responsible for the content they publish that is created by someone else,” we could change the standard to “Social media platforms are responsible for any content they amplify.”

Masters of Scale: Surprising Truths From the World's Most Successful Entrepreneurs
by Reid Hoffman , June Cohen and Deron Triff
Published 14 Oct 2021

Margaret recalls how she once shared this observation at a business conference. “When the next speaker, a chief technology officer, came onstage, somebody in the audience asked him, ‘Who helped you in the course of your career?’ He couldn’t think of anybody. And there was this sort of stunned, horrified silence.” Another don’t is from Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, who says: Don’t hire someone to work for you unless you would work for them in an alternate universe. “Which doesn’t mean that you should give them your job,” Zuckerberg adds, “but just imagine if the tables were turned and you were looking for a job—would you be comfortable working for this person?”

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You’ll be wasting not only your time; you’ll also be wasting your window of opportunity. You can read more about this topic in Blitzscaling, where “Launch a Product That Embarrasses You” is #4 on my list of Counterintuitive Rules of Blitzscaling. * * * — One of the biggest champions of experimentation in Silicon Valley has been Mark Zuckerberg, whose early mantra—“Move fast and break things”—was a foundation for Facebook’s success. And the company continues to experiment constantly today, even at its current size—though its mantra now is “Move fast with stable infrastructure.” As Mark says, “At any given point in time, there isn’t just one version of Facebook running—there are probably ten thousand.

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An essential skill for anyone bringing a new product or service into the world is to balance those two forms of user feedback—and when in doubt, watch what they do, not what they say. The problem with predicting the future Something similar happened at Facebook, which famously began as a service for Harvard students before spreading to other universities and then the wider world. But if founder Mark Zuckerberg had listened to what those early users told him, it would’ve been a different story. It seemed clear that the one thing Harvard students loved most about Facebook was its exclusivity. So when Facebook first launched at Yale, Mark says, “All the people at Harvard were like, ‘Oh, come on. Them?’

Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?
by Bill McKibben
Published 15 Apr 2019

AI, he says, is “a story we computer scientists made up to help us get funding once upon a time.”30 Imperfect software, Lanier says, not ever-faster hardware, puts an effective limit on our danger. “Software is brittle,” he says. “If every little thing isn’t perfect, it breaks.”31 For his part, Mark Zuckerberg has described Musk’s worries as “hysterical,” and indeed, a few weeks after the Tesla baron made public his fears, the Facebook baron announced that he was building a helpful AI to run his house. It would recognize his friends and let them in. It would monitor the nursery. It would make toast.

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Dowd, “Elon Musk’s Billion Dollar Crusade,” p. 90. 33. Sam Thielman, “Is Facebook Even Capable of Stopping an Influence Campaign on Its Platform?” Talking Points Memo, September 15, 2017. 34. James Walker, “Researchers Shut Down AI that Invented Its Own Language,” digitaljournal.com, July 21, 2017. 35. Cade Metz, “Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and the Feud over Killer Robots,” New York Times, June 9, 2018. 36. Dowd, “Elon Musk’s Billion Dollar Crusade,” p. 91. 37. Khatchadourian, “Doomsday Invention.” CHAPTER 16 1. Knoepfler, GMO Sapiens, p. 177. 2. Rachel Nuwer, “Babies Start Learning Language in the Womb,” smithsonianmag.com, January 4, 2013. 3.

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Preetika Rana, “China, Unhampered by Rules, Races Ahead in Gene-Editing Trials,” Wall Street Journal, January 21, 2018. 13. “Biggest AI Startup Boosts Fundraising to $1.2 Billion,” Bloomberg News, May 30, 2018. 14. James Vincent, “Putin Says the Nation that Leads in AI ‘Will Be the Ruler of the World,’” theverge.com, September 4, 2017. 15. Maureen Dowd, “Will Mark Zuckerberg ‘Like’ This Column?” New York Times, November 23, 2017. 16. Susan Ratcliffe, ed., “J. Robert Oppenheimer 1904–67, American Physicist,” oxfordreference.com, 2016. 17. Barrat, Our Final Invention, p. 52. 18. Julian Savulescu, “As a Species, We Have a Moral Obligation to Enhance Ourselves,” ideas.ted.com, February 19, 2014. 19.

Messing With the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News
by Clint Watts
Published 28 May 2018

But we often forget, as I did when crowdsourcing terrorism analysis, that the “core,” the technological and academic elite, dominated the internet and were the first to arrive on social media. The initial members of the crowd were those privileged enough to have internet access and afford a smartphone. An early crowd member—from the mid-1990s until the late 2000s—needed some education and training to create and moderate content on forums, blogs, and chatrooms. Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook at Harvard, after all, not in the failed state of Somalia. The first crowds on the internet and social media were more educated, experienced, and privileged—collectively smarter than the core. The experts at the core still held a repository of experience, reasoning, and knowledge to effectively harness the crowd’s energy for discrete tasks and specified disciplines, determining what insights and innovations were outpacing existing pre-internet libraries and industry practices.

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Facebook took the greatest leaps to tackle its fake news problem, focusing on three key areas to improve the integrity of information on its platform: disrupting economic incentives, building new products to curb the spread of false news, and helping people make more informed decisions when they encounter false news.34 The company routinely closed accounts in 2018, tested and innovated new fact-checking methods, worked with governments to counter inauthentic activity, and constructed an elaborate war room for the midterm elections. Even when dragged in front of Congress, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, known for public awkwardness, sailed through testimony, fully overmatching his congressional interrogators, who seemed ill equipped or laughably out of touch with regard to how today’s technology works. Facebook’s second-in-command, Sheryl Sandberg, did equally well, and it looked for most of the past year as if the public’s and regulators’ ire toward Facebook would wane.

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Two years of public outrage and congressional hearings would lead one to believe that government regulation would have been instituted, but that would not be true. Every congressional session with the social media giants showed just how unlikely lawmakers are to effectively regulate tech companies. Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Jack Dorsey, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai—introverted techies—all handled congressional grilling well and outmatched the legislators who would regulate them. Even when bipartisan support for legislation exists, Congress has been unable to move laws forward to help defend the 2018 midterm elections.

Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans
by Melanie Mitchell
Published 14 Oct 2019

Kelly, “The Three Breakthroughs That Have Finally Unleashed AI on the World,” Wired, Oct. 27, 2014.   6.  J. Despres, “Scenario: Shane Legg,” Future, accessed Dec. 4, 2018, future.wikia.com/wiki/Scenario:_Shane_Legg.   7.  Quoted in H. McCracken, “Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s Bold Plan for the Future of Facebook,” Fast Company, Nov. 16, 2015, www.fastcompany.com/3052885/mark-zuckerberg-facebook.   8.  V. C. Müller and N. Bostrom, “Future Progress in Artificial Intelligence: A Survey of Expert Opinion,” in Fundamental Issues of Artificial Intelligence, ed. V. C. Müller (Cham, Switzerland: Springer International, 2016), 555–72.   9.  

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AI: Narrow and General, Weak and Strong Like every AI spring before it, our current one features experts predicting that “general AI”—AI that equals or surpasses humans in most ways—will be here soon. “Human level AI will be passed in the mid-2020s,”6 predicted Shane Legg, cofounder of Google DeepMind, in 2016. A year earlier, Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, declared, “One of our goals for the next five to 10 years is to basically get better than human level at all of the primary human senses: vision, hearing, language, general cognition.”7 The AI philosophers Vincent Müller and Nick Bostrom published a 2013 poll of AI researchers in which many assigned a 50 percent chance of human-level AI by the year 2040.8 While much of this optimism is based on the recent successes of deep learning, these programs—like all instances of AI to date—are still examples of what is called “narrow” or “weak” AI.

Artificial Whiteness
by Yarden Katz

Platform companies have been promoting this vision, and appeals to AI are part of the strategy.20 For if supposedly superhuman AI systems can guide or replace scientists, then metrics that quantify “good” science will be needed—otherwise, what would AI systems “maximize”? Companies like Google are in the business of defining these metrics via platforms such as Google Scholar. Other platform companies are also using their computational capital to gain influence within science. The Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, a for-profit company cofounded by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, recently acquired a startup company whose “AI” software supposedly “helps scientists read, understand and prioritize millions of scientific papers” by analyzing these metrics.21 As platform companies promote this vision of science, the metrics they collect are being held up as indicators of scientific worth.

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Philip Mirowski, Science-Mart: Privatizing American Science (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011), 25.   20.   For an analysis of the interest of major platform companies (such as Facebook) in scientific research, see Philip Mirowski, “The Future(s) of Open Science,” Social Studies of Science 48, no. 2 (2018): 171–203.   21.   Kurt Wagner, “Mark Zuckerberg’s Philanthropy Organization Is Acquiring a Search and AI Startup Called Meta,” Recode, January 24, 2017.   22.   Antonio Regalado, “Google’s AI Explosion in One Chart,” MIT Technology Review, March 25, 2017.   23.   Jeremy Gillula and Daniel Nazer, Stupid Patent of the Month: Will Patents Slow Artificial Intelligence?

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“Show and Tell: A Neural Image Caption Generator.” In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 3156–64. 2015. Vishwanath, Arun. “When a Robot Writes Your News, What Happens to Democracy?” CNN, February 27, 2018. Vitale, Alex S. The End of Policing. New York: Verso Books, 2018. Wagner, Kurt. “Mark Zuckerberg’s Philanthropy Organization Is Acquiring a Search and AI Startup Called Meta.” Recode, January 24, 2017. Wakabayashi, Daisuke, and Scott Shane. “Google Will Not Renew Pentagon Contract That Upset Employees.” New York Times, June 1, 2019. Wallis, Brian. “Black Bodies, White Science: Louis Agassiz’s Slave Daguerreotypes.”

Hype: How Scammers, Grifters, and Con Artists Are Taking Over the Internet―and Why We're Following
by Gabrielle Bluestone
Published 5 Apr 2021

Despite the town’s values and some of his best efforts, however, Billy had managed to graduate high school without any felony arrests. He matriculated at Pennsylvania’s Bucknell University in the fall of 2010, with the intention of studying computer engineering, but by the spring of 2011, he was no longer a student. Billy’s friends remember him framing his decision to drop out as a Mark Zuckerberg–inspired move that would enable him to immediately start squeezing big money out of a start-up he had founded called Spling. Early pitch decks show that Spling had originally been intended to be a sort of mash-up of Reddit and Pinterest, a site where users could share links with their friends in an “intersection between social networking and microblogging with a scope refined for entertainment.”

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With dozens of featured talks each day on topics ranging from “Four Automated Email Series That Get Serious Results” to “Convincing Customers to Swipe Right on Your Brand,” the summit was a whirlwind of persuasive tactics for just about every program and device you could think of, whether you were approaching it from a direct-to-consumer or business-to-business background. This particular North Carolina Glengarry Glen Ross cosplay convention also included a keynote address in which a woman most famous for being Mark Zuckerberg’s sister performed a parody song about the internet, the Marriott did a thirty-minute ad for its Las Vegas property and called it a talk on FOMO, and I gave up my email address at a kiosk in exchange for a two-dollar bill stamped with the name of an SEO company. But the interesting thing about Atkins’s appearance was that he wasn’t being billed as some sort of cautionary tale—he was being presented as a marketing legend.

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And 42West, working until the last minute, planted a positive Vanity Fair piece that, while a total puff piece, did note one major risk associated with Fyre: concerns that all the publicity might “compromise the islands’ exclusivity.”143 * * * In retrospect, social media users and the influencers who star on these platforms couldn’t have been more primed to get snookered en masse by something like the Fyre Festival. The only surprise is that it took so long to happen. For one thing, we’re hopelessly addicted to social media. What started out as a way for Mark Zuckerberg to rate attractive Harvard students quickly turned into a way for all of us to judge—and be judged. It was so fun and exciting, consuming this constantly updated feed of all the things our friends, family, and the celebrities we identify with were consuming that we didn’t even mind as we became the product and our feeds turned into lifestyle catalogs.

Designing for the Social Web
by Joshua Porter
Published 18 May 2008

Figure 5.15 The protest group “Students Against Facebook News Feed” was created and grew within the very framework it was protesting. Mark Zuckerberg, the twenty-two-year-old CEO of Facebook, had a response for them. He wrote a blog post telling everyone to “calm down,” pointing out that the feature didn’t expose anything that wasn’t already on the site. He said that it was Facebook’s highest priority to protect its members, and pointed out that none of the information on the news feed features was actually new. The only difference was that now all that information had been aggregated into one place. Figure 5.16 Mark Zuckerberg’s first attempt at calming down the masses during the news feed blowup.

The New Class War: Saving Democracy From the Metropolitan Elite
by Michael Lind
Published 20 Feb 2020

This could be because native dropout minorities are the closest native substitutes for immigrants.”26 A related argument attributes a magical economic multiplier effect to immigrants. To lobby for more H-1B guest worker visas for foreign nationals, who are legally bound as indentured servants to their sponsoring corporations or intermediary firms known as “body shops,” Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and other Silicon Valley executives have formed a lobbying group named FWD.us. In the Washington Post Zuckerberg wrote: “Why do we offer so few H1B visas for talented specialists that the supply runs out within days of becoming available each year, even though we know each of these jobs will create two or three more American jobs in return?”

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“The Impact of Illegal Immigration on the Wages and Employment Opportunities of Black Workers: A Briefing Before the United States Commission on Civil Rights” (Washington, DC: U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, August 2010). 26. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2017). 27. Mark Zuckerberg, “Immigrants Are the Key to a Knowledge Economy,” Washington Post, April 10, 2013. 28. Michael Lind, “Reich Is Wrong: Immigration Won’t Solve Entitlement Mess,” Salon, April 13, 2010. 29. Steven A. Camarota and Karen Zeigler, “Projecting the Impact of Immigration on the U.S. Population: A Look at Size and Age Structure through 2060,” Center for Immigration Studies, February 4, 2019. 30.

100 Things We've Lost to the Internet
by Pamela Paul
Published 14 Oct 2021

The coronavirus quarantine, in which everyone was forced to present online all the time, only exacerbated this process, our home selves melding with our work selves and our social selves, all of us put into BBC Dad’s awkward shoes. On Facebook, you become the same “you” to your friends, your co-workers, your parents, and your future children. As Mark Zuckerberg puts it, “The days of having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly…. Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.” Is it a lack of integrity? Or is it flexibility—the ability to flub things and learn, to change, to take comfort in a deeply human inconstancy, something we rely on to stretch ourselves and grow?

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The worse things look—within a certain safe zone—the more likely the compulsion to fling it out there. Now that we all can share, we do, amplifying a minor flub well beyond its natural proportions. It’s almost creepy how much we’ve taken the call to share our lives to heart. “We’ll share everything, even our worst!” we seem to be collectively assuring Mark Zuckerberg. Perhaps, if we’re honest with ourselves, we do it to ward off the possibility of something truly awful happening to us and being exposed online. These are the small, superstitious sacrifices we are willing to make. We are also willing participants in the outing of others’ petty crimes, compelled to say, “I saw that.”

Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley
by Antonio Garcia Martinez
Published 27 Jun 2016

Plus, the additional cash or Twitter stock would have served as a hedge to my all-in position in Facebook. Morality, such as it exists in the tech whorehouse, is an expensive hobby indeed. Part Three Move Fast and Break Things Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission—to make the world more open and connected. —Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook Inc. IPO documents (2012) Boot Camp Once having traversed the threshold, the hero moves in a dream landscape of curiously fluid, ambiguous forms, where he must survive a succession of trials. The hero is covertly aided by the advice, amulets, and secret agents of the supernatural helpers whom he met before his entrance into this region.

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How it went from advertising zero to hero is the crux of this story. Google Delenda Est By itself, genius can produce original thoughts just as little as a woman by herself can bear children. Outward circumstances must come to fructify genius, and be, as it were, a father to its progeny. —Arthur Schopenhauer, “On Genius,” The Art of Literature JUNE 2011 Mark Zuckerberg is a genius. Not in the Asperger’s, autistic way depicted in the very fictional movie The Social Network, the cognitive genius of exceptional ability. That’s a modern definition that reduces the original meaning. Nor would I claim he was the Steve Jobsian product genius either. Anyone claiming as much will have to explain the crowded graveyard of forgotten Facebook product failures.

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Facebook can’t wait for the developing world to get to First World standards of connectivity, so it must create it for them, using ad revenues in the developed world to subsidize this new air force’s deployment. In time, monetization will follow usage, as it always does. Money follows eyeballs, even if slowly. Eventually Russia, Iran, India, Brazil, and parts of Africa will fall to the Growth team’s patient ministrations. Then, Mark Zuckerberg, like a young Alexander the Great at the Indus River, will weep for having no more world to conquer. This all sounds very airy-fairy, so here’s a real example of the Ads versus Growth dialectic to illustrate: Among the various weird products I happened to manage while at Facebook, one is particularly relevant.

The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, a Philosophy, a Warning
by Justin E. H. Smith
Published 22 Mar 2022

Special thanks also to Augustus Amund Wellner, for sharing my taste in memes. And thanks finally, as always, immeasurably, to Adina Ruiu. THE INTERNET IS NOT WHAT YOU THINK IT IS Introduction “Let us calculate!” “TO STRENGTHEN our social fabric and bring the world closer together.” This, maintains Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook Corporation, is his enterprise’s reason for being. Yet it would not take a particularly critical mind to notice that strengthening the social fabric and bringing the world closer together are not, in fact, what Facebook is doing. No, Facebook and the other big tech companies are, plainly, tearing the social fabric to threads, and pulling people apart.

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With this in mind it will be worthwhile, in the following chapter, to continue to look at some other, and certainly less familiar, dimensions of the early history of computing, where, although the theorists and inventors were not specifically focused on developing networked systems of machines, they were nonetheless interested in thinking about the natural, cosmic, and mathematical principles that structure the world as a whole, and that thereby enable a particular machine in a particular location to do its beautiful work. 4 “How closely woven the web” THE INTERNET AS LOOM Warp and Woof “To strengthen our social fabric and bring the world closer together.” In this seemingly straightforward description of Facebook’s reason for being, which we have already considered in the introduction, Mark Zuckerberg is relying on two metaphors so subtle that they might easily pass unnoticed. Society is not actually woven, and telecommunication does not shrink physical distances between people, but only creates the appearance of proximity. These metaphors are deeply rooted in human history, in the way human beings in different places and times have conceptualized society, nature, and society’s place in nature.

Lying
by Sam Harris
Published 31 Aug 2011

The boundary between lying and deception is often vague. In fact, it is even possible to deceive with the truth. I could, for instance, stand on the sidewalk in front of the White House and call the headquarters of Facebook on my cellphone: “Hello, this is Sam Harris. I’m calling from the White House, and I’d like to speak to Mark Zuckerberg.” My words would, in a narrow sense, be true—but the statement seems calculated to deceive. Would I be lying? Close enough. To lie is to intentionally mislead others when they expect honest communication.[2] This leaves stage magicians, poker players, and other harmless dissemblers off the hook, while illuminating a psychological and social landscape whose general shape is very easy to recognize.

The Nanny State Made Me: A Story of Britain and How to Save It
by Stuart Maconie
Published 5 Mar 2020

and he called it ‘a trust fund for all’. Even broadly sympathetic people still find it necessary to frame the idea humorously like this as if to admit that it is essentially nuts or at least crazy, new-fangled, snowflake thinking. So when you hear that Bernie Sanders supports it, you think, ‘That figures.’ When you hear that Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk and Richard Branson support it, you wonder what’s in it for those creepy rich hippies/high-minded technocrats. But when you find out that the idea begins with Thomas Paine and came very close to being implemented in 1969 as US government policy by one Richard Nixon (rich and creepy maybe, but certainly no hippie and certainly no Thomas Paine) you begin to think again.

…

As I mentioned in the Introduction, Billy Bragg said recently that capitalism is like fire: controlled it can give you heat and light and energy; but uncontrolled it will consume and destroy everything in its path. I fear that the same can be said for technology. When the only limit to what can be invented is what can be imagined, we are left with only ethics and morals to guide us. And I’m not at all convinced about Mark Zuckerberg’s. According to academic David Runciman, Facebook ‘is both the most and least democratic thing ever, a community of 2 billion people that is the plaything of a thirty-something billionaire. It makes no sense.’ James Ball in Prospect magazine suggests that the internet ‘poses the biggest threat of monopoly in a century’ and cites how America dealt with the threat of a rail monopoly by the Sherman Anti-Trust Laws and Teddy Roosevelt’s actions as a trust-buster back when America (and the West) was rightly mistrustful of big business rather than in thrall to it.

…

But we are getting wise. In America, the genie is out of the bottle because of Elizabeth Warren. I think one day soon maybe one of them will be broken up.’ Elizabeth Warren, who as I write is the Democrat’s favourite contender to unseat Trump, may well be the next president of the United States. Mark Zuckerberg will probably do everything in his murky, data-harvesting, email-leaking, algorithmic power to stop her though. As Paul Mason says, she has the tech giants in her sights. ‘Today’s big tech companies have too much power – too much power over our economy, our society, and our democracy. They’ve bulldozed competition, used our private information for profit, and tilted the playing field against everyone else.’

Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control
by Stuart Russell
Published 7 Oct 2019

In response to any mention of risks from advanced AI, one is likely to hear, “What about the benefits of AI?” For example, here is Oren Etzioni:18 Doom-and-gloom predictions often fail to consider the potential benefits of AI in preventing medical errors, reducing car accidents, and more. And here is Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, in a recent media-fueled exchange with Elon Musk:19 If you’re arguing against AI, then you’re arguing against safer cars that aren’t going to have accidents and you’re arguing against being able to better diagnose people when they’re sick. Leaving aside the tribal notion that anyone mentioning risks is “against AI,” both Zuckerberg and Etzioni are arguing that to talk about risks is to ignore the potential benefits of AI or even to negate them.

…

A description of a reinforcement learning system that learns to play a capture-the-flag video game: Max Jaderberg et al., “Human-level performance in first-person multiplayer games with population-based deep reinforcement learning,” arXiv:1807.01281 (2018). 48. A view of AI progress over the next few years: Peter Stone et al., “Artificial intelligence and life in 2030,” One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence, report of the 2015 Study Panel, 2016. 49. The media-fueled argument between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg: Peter Holley, “Billionaire burn: Musk says Zuckerberg’s understanding of AI threat ‘is limited,’” The Washington Post, July 25, 2017. 50. On the value of search engines to individual users: Erik Brynjolfsson, Felix Eggers, and Avinash Gannamaneni, “Using massive online choice experiments to measure changes in well-being,” working paper no. 24514, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2018. 51.

…

In his analysis he argues that anyone who expects superhuman AI to take more than twenty-five years—which includes this author as well as Nick Bostrom—is not concerned about the risks of AI. 19. A news article with quotations from the Musk–Zuckerberg “debate”: Alanna Petroff, “Elon Musk says Mark Zuckerberg’s understanding of AI is ‘limited,’” CNN Money, July 25, 2017. 20. In 2015 the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation organized a debate titled “Are super intelligent computers really a threat to humanity?” Robert Atkinson, director of the foundation, suggests that mentioning risks is likely to result in reduced funding for AI.

Talk to Me: How Voice Computing Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Think
by James Vlahos
Published 1 Mar 2019

Titans 39 Decades before he founded Amazon: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos on how he got a role in Star Trek Beyond, posted to YouTube on October 23, 2016, https://goo.gl/RJKBL1. 39 “build space hotels”: Luisa Yanez, “Jeff Bezos: A rocket launched from Miami’s Palmetto High,” Miami Herald, August 5, 2013, https://goo.gl/GxFrx8. 40 After the discussion with Hart: Greg Hart, interview with author, April 27, 2018. 41 “If we could build it”: this and subsequent quotes from Greg Hart come from interview with author, April 27, 2018. 41 “We think it [the project] is critical to Amazon’s success”: this and subsequent quotes from Al Lindsay, unless otherwise identified, come from interview with author, April 4, 2018. 42 Rohit Prasad, a scientist whom Amazon hired: Rohit Prasad, interview with author, April 2, 2018. 44 Bezos was reportedly aiming for the stars: Joshua Brustein, “The Real Story of How Amazon Built the Echo,” Bloomberg Businessweek, April 19, 2016, https://goo.gl/4SIi8F. 44 “hero feature”: Prasad, interview with author. 44 An article in Bloomberg Businessweek : Brustein, “The Real Story of How Amazon Built the Echo.” 45 “Amazon just surprised everyone”: Chris Welch, “Amazon just surprised everyone with a crazy speaker that talks to you,” The Verge, November 6, 2014, https://goo.gl/sVgsPi. 45 “Don’t laugh at or ignore”: Mike Elgan, “Why Amazon Echo is the future of every home,” Computerworld, November 8, 2014, https://goo.gl/wriJXE. 45 “the happiest person in the world”: this and other quotes from Adam Cheyer, unless otherwise indicated, come from interviews with author, April 19 and 23, 2018. 45 “Apple’s digital assistant was delivered”: Farhad Manjoo, “Siri Is a Gimmick and a Tease,” Slate, November 15, 2012, https://goo.gl/2cSoK. 46 Steve Wozniak, one of the original cofounders of Apple: Bryan Fitzgerald, “‘Woz’ gallops in to a horse’s rescue,” Albany Times Union, June 13, 2012, https://goo.gl/dPdHso. 46 Even Jack in the Box ran an ad: Yukari Iwatani Kane, Haunted Empire: Apple After Steve Jobs (New York: HarperCollins, 2014), 154. 46 Years later, some people who had worked: Aaron Tilley and Kevin McLaughlin, “The Seven-Year Itch: How Apple’s Marriage to Siri Turned Sour,” The Information, March 14, 2018, https://goo.gl/6e7BxM. 48 “artificially-intelligent orphan”: Bosker, “Siri Rising.” 48 “Siri’s various teams morphed”: Tilley and McLaughlin, “The Seven-Year Itch.” 48 John Burkey, who was part: John Burkey, interview with author, June 19, 2018. 49 “it’s really the first time in history”: Megan Garber, “Sorry, Siri: How Google Is Planning to Be Your New Personal Assistant,” The Atlantic, April 29, 2013, https://goo.gl/XFLPDP. 49 “We are not shipping”: Dan Farber, “Microsoft’s Bing seeks enlightenment with Satori,” CNET, July 30, 2013, https://goo.gl/fnLVmb. 50 CNN Tech ran an emblematic headline: Adrian Covert, “Meet Cortana, Microsoft’s Siri,” CNN Tech, April 2, 2014, https://goo.gl/pyoW4v. 50 “feels like a potent mashup of Google Now’s worldliness”: Chris Velazco, “Living with Cortana, Windows 10’s thoughtful, flaky assistant,” Engadget, July 30, 2015, https://goo.gl/mbZpon. 50 “arrogant disdain followed by panic”: Burkey, interview with author. 51 “I’ll start teaching it”: Mark Zuckerberg, “Building Jarvis,” Facebook blog, December 19, 2016, https://goo.gl/DyQSBN. 51 Zuckerberg might have to say a command: Daniel Terdiman, “At Home With Mark Zuckerberg And Jarvis, The AI Assistant He Built For His Family,” Fast Company, December 19, 2016, https://goo.gl/qJNIxW. 51 One lucky user who tested M: Alex Kantrowitz, “Facebook Reveals The Secrets Behind ‘M,’ Its Artificial Intelligence Bot,” BuzzFeed, November 19, 2015, https://goo.gl/bwmFyN. 52 “an experiment to see what people would ask”: Kemal El Moujahid, interview with author, September 29, 2017. 54 “just the tip of the iceberg”: Mark Bergen, “Jeff Bezos says more than 1,000 people are working on Amazon Echo and Alexa,” Recode, May 31, 2016, https://goo.gl/hhSQXc. 59 “When you speak”: Robert Hoffer, interview with author, April 30, 2018. 4.

…

The company’s reaction to the release of the Echo, he says, was one of “arrogant disdain followed by panic.” Alexa and Siri had made big splashes when they came out. But it wasn’t until the first half of 2016 that tech’s biggest players, acting as if they had all read the same memo, made full-throated declarations that conversation was the future of computing. CEO Mark Zuckerberg set the tone for the year on January 3 when he told the world that he was trying to create his own artificially intelligent assistant—like Jarvis from Iron Man. “I’ll start teaching it to understand my voice to control everything in our home—music, lights, temperature and so on,” Zuckerberg posted on Facebook.

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet
by Klaus Schwab
Published 7 Jan 2021

Some also point to an ongoing war for tech hegemony, mostly between the US and China, where excessive restrictions on US companies could make them lose this fight. I had the opportunity to meet all the leaders of these Big Tech companies over the last years and to follow many of them closely in their journey toward success. For example, I visited Mark Zuckerberg in a warehouse in Palo Alto, when he had just 18 employees, and designated Jack Ma a World Economic Forum “Young Global Leader” when he had just started Alibaba. I am convinced that they, after an initial period of feeling perhaps a bit like Alice in Wonderland, have become increasingly aware of the enormous impact they have on individuals’ lives and identities.

…

He laid out four principles that he believed should guide legislation in the United States, which lacked rules similar to the EU's General Data Protection Regulation: minimum personal data use, the “right to know” who uses your data, the “right to access” your data, and the “right to data security,” “without which trust is impossible.” In 2020 Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg joined the chorus to ask for regulation. He suggested the European Commission look at implementing tighter rules on political advertising, the portability of user data, and the oversight over tech companies like his, so regulation could “hold companies accountable when they make mistakes.”28 But importantly, he also supported new rules on taxation: “Tech companies should serve society,” he wrote.

…

Remain in Crisis,” Heather Knight, San Francisco Chronicle, 2014, https://www.sfchronicle.com/archive/item/A-decade-of-homelessness-Thousands-in-S-F-30431.php. 24 Trailblazer, Marc Benioff, October 2019, pp. 12–13. 25 “Marc Benioff Says Companies Buy Each Other for the Data, and the Government Isn't Doing Anything about It,” April Glaser, Recode., November 2016, https://www.vox.com/2016/11/15/13631938/benioff-salesforce-data-government-federal-trade-commission-ftc-linkedin-microsoft. 26 Trailblazer, Marc Benioff, October 2019, pp. 12–13. 27 “You Deserve Privacy Online. Here's How You Could Actually Get It,” Tim Cook, TIME Magazine, January 2019, https://time.com/collection/davos-2019/5502591/tim-cook-data-privacy/. 28 “Big Tech Needs More Regulation,” Mark Zuckerberg, Financial Times, February 2020, https://www.ft.com/content/602ec7ec-4f18-11ea-95a0-43d18ec715f5. 29 “Benioff Comes Out Strong for Homeless Initiative, although Salesforce Would Pay Big,” Kevin Fagan, San Francisco Chronicle, October 2018, https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Benioff-comes-out-strong-for-homeless-initiative-13291392.php. 30 “The Social Responsibility of Business,” Marc Benioff, The New York Times, October 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/24/opinion/business-social-responsibility-proposition-c.html. 31 “We can now measure the progress of stakeholder capitalism.

Reset
by Ronald J. Deibert
Published 14 Aug 2020

Social media platforms are in a race to accumulate profits, corner market share, ship products and services before their competitors, and extract data from as many users as possible. Ensuring the security of their users, and of their users’ data, is largely an afterthought. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s flippant mantra “move fast and break things” fully embodies this negligence. To be sure, data security is not entirely ignored. But security is prioritized only to the extent that it makes sense from a business perspective, that it helps mitigate some kind of liability. Fortunately for many digital companies, liabilities are light and entirely manageable relative to the monumental revenues.

…

* * * In 2018, a new term circulated widely: “techlash” — not only a growing irritation with social media’s ill effects but a major pushback against the entire roster of technology platforms. Let’s face it: people are fed up with social media. Just about everyone has some kind of complaint, not just about the applications or the platforms, but also about the billionaire executives who run it all, people like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg or Twitter’s Jack Dorsey. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard friends and family members complain, Twitter is a Dumpster fire! Or, I can’t stand Facebook! Zuckerberg is creepy! And yet, everywhere I look, I see the same people still glued to their devices. Numbers bear it out too. In February 2020, the Economist reported that “in the past 12 months the shares of America’s five biggest technology firms have been on an astonishing bull run, rising by 52%.”103 Facebook was notoriously fined $5 billion by the U.S.

…

The goal is to have business executives acknowledge certain principles and govern their business practices accordingly, but without any kind of specific enforcement mechanism to hold them to their promises. It’s easy to be cynical and dismiss corporate social responsibility principles as futile, especially when companies so often and flagrantly abuse them. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly made promises to be more responsible and protect users’ privacy (usually in response to some scandal). We hear you, and understand we need to do better. He’s even advocated for certain types of regulation, which he says the company would welcome. You’d be naive to think these statements are not calculated to ward off what Facebook considers to be undesirable laws, and to channel regulation in directions that benefit Facebook.

How I Built This: The Unexpected Paths to Success From the World's Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs
by Guy Raz
Published 14 Sep 2020

The great irony, of course, is that the history of modern entrepreneurship is littered with the stories of founders whose success we roundly celebrate today but whose loved ones worried in the beginning about the same thing that Jim did—that they’d waste their lives—but only if they did take that leap in pursuit of their ideas. When Steve Jobs and Bill Gates dropped out of college in 1972 and 1975, respectively, to go on to found Apple and Microsoft, you can be sure their parents weren’t high-fiving and sleeping soundly those first years, just as Mark Zuckerberg’s parents weren’t a generation later when he left school to start Facebook. Or Evan Williams’s parents, when he left the University of Nebraska after a year and a half to work in the nascent tech startup sector before eventually founding Blogger and Twitter and then Medium. Leaving a stable, well-paying career or dropping out of a prestigious university has simply never been something you did if you wanted to be successful in life, even if you did have a world-altering idea.

…

The Hangover finished its first week at $70 million, landed at number one for a second weekend in a row, and then went on to complete its unheard-of (for modern comedies) six-month theatrical run that netted more than $275 million at the box office in the United States alone. Two years before The Hangover came out, during the announcement of a new Facebook user-centered advertising program, Mark Zuckerberg told an assembled group of tech journalists and advertisers that “nothing influences people more than a recommendation from a trusted friend.” The Hangover franchise would prove Zuckerberg correct over the next several years. It developed such a loyal fan base that today the first two films in the series are two of the top ten highest-grossing R-rated films of all time, with more than $1 billion in ticket sales between them worldwide.

…

See ideas; luck; privilege Oprah Winfrey Show, 8–9, 122 organic growth Airbnb, 60–61 Carol’s Daughter products, 9 vs. professional money, 244 for Stacy’s Pita Chips, 184 See also specific companies by name Original Cookie Company, 77 origin stories, 63 other people’s money (OPM), 74–75 See also professional money Outdoor Voices, 151 ownership employee stock ownership plan, 259 partner threats, 167–68 patents and intellectual property rights, 160–68 See also professional money P Page, Larry, xii Panera Bread, 77, 269 Pao, Ellen, 227 parental influence on Bill Gates, 18 on Daymond John, 29, 74–75 on Eric Ryan, 45 on Gary Erickson, 90 on Gary Hirshberg, 139–40 on Jane Wurwand, 30 on Jim Koch, 15–16 on Lara Merriken, 91 on Lisa Price, 6–7 on Mark Zuckerberg, 18 on Michael Dell, 18–20 on Ron Shaich, 79 on Steve Jobs, 18 worry and concern, 18 Parsons, Richard, 239 partnerships buying out a partner, 245–47 conflict in, post-merger, 238–39 importance of, 42–50 resolving issues in, 234–38 tension in, 222–31 See also co-founders passion Adam Lowry on, 47 Alice Waters on, 210 vs. attention, 116 bootstrapping and, 61–62 definitions, 11 ideas and, 8–9 Lisa Price on, 7–9, 11 Michael Dell on, 19–20 Steve Wasserman on, 244 Stewart Butterfield on, 187 vs. utility, 10 Whitney Wolfe on, 67 See also money vs. deeper purpose Patagonia, 260–64 patents, protecting, 160–68 paternity leave, 261 Paulson, John, 15 Peloton, 270 PepsiCo, 184 perfectionism, 87–88 Perkins, Melanie, 155–56 perspective, 145, 267 Phillips, John, 108 Pierson, Rich, 200–201 Pinterest, 215 Pipkin, Chet, 216–17, 270 pitfalls of monarch CEOs, 205–8 in product development, 87–88 research and, 38 scaling of business vs. you, 186, 200–201, 212 of startup to CEO transition, 243–44 See also crisis management pivots, 180–90 examples of, 186–87 for Slack, 187–90 speed of, 180–81 for Stacy’s Pita Chips, 181–84 for Twitch, 185–86 PowerBar, 245 Price, Lisa brand building, 122 on business growth, 8–10 entrepreneurial success of, 12 on idea for Carol’s Daughter, 4–7 partnership and, 43 on problem solving, 11 Prince, as inspiration, 5, 11 privilege, 79–83, 270 problem solving Alli Webb on, 134 Chet Pipkin on, 217–18 Daymond John on, 26 ideas and, 8, 10–11 Michael Dell and, 21 Tobi Lütke on, 107 by Tristan Walker, 154 Tristan Walker on, 152 Whitney Wolfe on, 69–70 Procter & Gamble, 51, 63–64, 157 product development.

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet
by Klaus Schwab and Peter Vanham
Published 27 Jan 2021

Some also point to an ongoing war for tech hegemony, mostly between the US and China, where excessive restrictions on US companies could make them lose this fight. I had the opportunity to meet all the leaders of these Big Tech companies over the last years and to follow many of them closely in their journey toward success. For example, I visited Mark Zuckerberg in a warehouse in Palo Alto, when he had just 18 employees, and designated Jack Ma a World Economic Forum “Young Global Leader” when he had just started Alibaba. I am convinced that they, after an initial period of feeling perhaps a bit like Alice in Wonderland, have become increasingly aware of the enormous impact they have on individuals’ lives and identities.

…

He laid out four principles that he believed should guide legislation in the United States, which lacked rules similar to the EU's General Data Protection Regulation: minimum personal data use, the “right to know” who uses your data, the “right to access” your data, and the “right to data security,” “without which trust is impossible.” In 2020 Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg joined the chorus to ask for regulation. He suggested the European Commission look at implementing tighter rules on political advertising, the portability of user data, and the oversight over tech companies like his, so regulation could “hold companies accountable when they make mistakes.”28 But importantly, he also supported new rules on taxation: “Tech companies should serve society,” he wrote.

…

Remain in Crisis,” Heather Knight, San Francisco Chronicle, 2014, https://www.sfchronicle.com/archive/item/A-decade-of-homelessness-Thousands-in-S-F-30431.php. 24 Trailblazer, Marc Benioff, October 2019, pp. 12–13. 25 “Marc Benioff Says Companies Buy Each Other for the Data, and the Government Isn't Doing Anything about It,” April Glaser, Recode., November 2016, https://www.vox.com/2016/11/15/13631938/benioff-salesforce-data-government-federal-trade-commission-ftc-linkedin-microsoft. 26 Trailblazer, Marc Benioff, October 2019, pp. 12–13. 27 “You Deserve Privacy Online. Here's How You Could Actually Get It,” Tim Cook, TIME Magazine, January 2019, https://time.com/collection/davos-2019/5502591/tim-cook-data-privacy/. 28 “Big Tech Needs More Regulation,” Mark Zuckerberg, Financial Times, February 2020, https://www.ft.com/content/602ec7ec-4f18-11ea-95a0-43d18ec715f5. 29 “Benioff Comes Out Strong for Homeless Initiative, although Salesforce Would Pay Big,” Kevin Fagan, San Francisco Chronicle, October 2018, https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Benioff-comes-out-strong-for-homeless-initiative-13291392.php. 30 “The Social Responsibility of Business,” Marc Benioff, The New York Times, October 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/24/opinion/business-social-responsibility-proposition-c.html. 31 “We can now measure the progress of stakeholder capitalism.

Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture
by Kyle Chayka
Published 15 Jan 2024

Monopolistic growth is more important to these entities than the quality of user experience and certainly more important than the equitable distribution of culture through the services’ feeds. (A digital platform has none of the curatorial responsibility of, say, an art museum.) According to Silicon Valley ideology, the pursuit of scale far outweighs any negative consequence it might have, as a memo written by Andrew Bosworth, a deputy of Mark Zuckerberg’s at Facebook, demonstrated in 2016: So we connect more people. That can be bad if they make it negative. Maybe it costs someone a life by exposing them to bullies. Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools. And still we connect people. The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is *de-facto* good.

…

The company pioneered this kind of collision of content, less because users demanded it and more because it served its own interests—like Walmart or Amazon, if Facebook could offer everything at once, then its users would have less reason to use a competing service. From total specialization in the form of hand-built HTML sites, the Internet was moving toward a one-size-fits-all approach. Facebook was a personal blog, a forum, a news feed, and a photo dump all at once. It was clear that Mark Zuckerberg didn’t want it to be just a website, but the entirety of our digital lives. The Internet had begun to congeal into a small set of giant platforms. Facebook did have competition in the early 2010s. Twitter, which launched two years after Facebook’s debut, offered a real-time, chronological feed of information for news addicts who wanted to consume as much information in as small a space as possible, hence the appeal of the original 140-character limit.

…

As the platform became inescapable, I felt myself losing interest in it as well, because it’s impossible to serve every purpose at once and remain successful at all of them. If Facebook was everything, it was also nothing, an undifferentiated mass of content. Other platforms decayed in the same way: Instagram under Mark Zuckerberg, Spotify under Daniel Ek, Twitter under Elon Musk. By 2023, social media seems to have entered a new phase in which its downsides are more obvious than its advantages. I feel somewhat stifled online these days, in part because I can’t express myself as much as I once could, in the days of personal blogs and slowly developed conversation with other people.

The Participation Revolution: How to Ride the Waves of Change in a Terrifyingly Turbulent World
by Neil Gibb
Published 15 Feb 2018

That pink is the dust off the desert. It’s real. When you know that, it changes everything.” The rise of social economics 1. Generation why “Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission – to make the world more open and connected” Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook When Sergey Brin and Larry Page first set-up Google in a friend’s garage in Menlo Park in the autumn of 1998, they were very clear why they were doing it: “to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” They also had a great tool to achieve this: a search engine they had developed while they were PhD students, which used very different algorithms to any other on the market.

…

On 3 April 2012, Instagram released a version of the app for the Android operating system, opening it up for the first time to non-iPhone users. On that first day alone, more than a million copies were downloaded, pushing its overall user base to over 30 million. Just seven days after the Android release, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, announced that his company was buying Instagram for $1 billion in cash and stock, rocketing Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, Instagram’s two twenty-something founders, into the super-rich list overnight. Start-up to billion-dollar buyout in under two years – it was a dizzying tale of success.

The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race
by Walter Isaacson
Published 9 Mar 2021

That offered many advantages, one of which was that people tended to underestimate her. On the other hand, she had never been a CEO, so she had some learning to do. That led her to join a local professional development group for young CEOs, the Alliance of Chief Executives, which met for a half-day each month to share problems and solutions. It’s hard to imagine Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg joining such a support group, but Haurwitz, like her mentor Doudna, had a self-awareness and humility not usually found among alpha males. Among other things, her Alliance group coached her on how to create a team with different types of expertise. Today the mere appearance of the word CRISPR in a prospectus is enough to cause venture capitalists to go into heat.

…

Part of the goal of the Des Moines enrichment programs was to help students do projects to compete in the Intel Science Search, a national competition. Zhang’s virus experiment won him third place, which carried a hefty $50,000 prize. He used it to help pay his tuition when he got into Harvard in 2000. Harvard and Stanford Zhang was at Harvard at the same time as Mark Zuckerberg, and it’s interesting to speculate on which of them will end up having the most impact on the world. It’s a proxy for the larger question, which future historians will answer, of whether the digital revolution or the life-science revolution will end up being the more important. Majoring in both chemistry and physics, Zhang initially did research with Don Wiley, a crystallographer who was a master at determining the structure of complex molecules.

…

The citation heralded them “for harnessing an ancient mechanism of bacterial immunity into a powerful and general technology for editing genomes.” The prize, which carries a $3 million award for each recipient, had been established a year earlier by the Russian billionaire and early Facebook funder Yuri Milner, along with Sergey Brin of Google, Anne Wojcicki of 23andMe, and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. Milner, an ebullient fanboy of scientists, staged a glittering televised award ceremony that infused the glory of science with some of the glamor of Hollywood. The 2014 black-tie event, cohosted by Vanity Fair, was held in a spacecraft hangar at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley.

Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, From the Ancients to Fake News
by Eric Berkowitz
Published 3 May 2021

The Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. found it difficult to imagine such an agenda being pushed by these leftists’ “activist counterparts in the sixties, who defined themselves through their adversarial relations to authority and its institutions.” Now, writes Gates, “the aim is not to resist power, but to enlist power.”16 It is not just governments that are being asked to censor. As of early June 2020, many Facebook employees were in revolt against their CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, for not removing Donald Trump’s inflammatory postings.17 This misplaced trust in institutions to censor in the public interest has received an assist from a “What’s the big deal?” outlook emerging from some of the more rarified confines of the ivory tower. Starting with the work of Michel Foucault and followed up by a stream of academics, the idea is that censorship is not merely something enforced by authorities; it’s also hardwired into the oppressive power dynamics of everyday life, communication, and thought formation—including what Frederick Schauer calls “the ways some discourses marginalize others by displacing them” and what Ruth Gavison identifies as “self-restraint by speakers themselves, a variety of market devices [and] social implementation of norms of unacceptability.”18 That does not leave much out.

…

Yet they decide which of their billions of users will be heard and by whom, and which will not. That abuses occur countless times daily can be no surprise. They are built into the system. It comes down to money—what the technology writer Charlie Warzel calls the “original sin” of Big Tech’s prioritization of growth over the interests of users.58 When an aging senator asked Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg in 2018 how the platform can be free to users, Zuckerberg replied (to snickers worldwide), “Senator, we run ads.” He might have also explained to the befuddled politician that the ads don’t work like those in paper publications: platforms curate and promote content for maximum “engagement,” that is, the intensity and frequency with which users interact with them.

…

Charlie Warzel, “Big Tech Was Designed to Be Toxic,” New York Times, April 3, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/03/opinion/facebook-youtube-disinformation.html. 59. Sean Burch, “‘Senator, We Run Ads’: Hatch Mocked for Basic Facebook Question to Zuckerberg,” The Wrap, April 10, 2018, https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/mark-zuckerberg-gives-orrin-hatch-quick-explainer-facebook-202404519.html; Jeff Gary and Ashkan Soltani, “First Things First: Online Advertising Practices and Their Effects on Platform Speech,” Knight First Amendment Institute, August 21, 2019, https://knightcolumbia.org/content/first-things-first-online-advertising-practices-and-their-effects-on-platform-speech. 60.

Value of Everything: An Antidote to Chaos The
by Mariana Mazzucato
Published 25 Apr 2018

Between 1975 and 2015 real US GDP - the size of the economy adjusted for inflation - roughly tripled from $5.49 trillion to $16.58 trillion.11 During this period, productivity grew by more than 60 per cent. Yet from 1979 onwards, real hourly wages for the great majority of American workers have stagnated or even fallen.12 In other words, for almost four decades a tiny elite has captured nearly all the gains from an expanding economy. You do not have to look far to see who is in that elite. Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard at the age of nineteen to launch Facebook. He is now in his early thirties. According to Forbes,13 Zuckerberg's fortune increased by $18 billion in the year to mid-2016, making his current total estimated worth $70.8 billion. He is the fourth-richest man in the US and the fifth-richest in the world.14 It defies reason to maintain, as the dominant narrative does, that the inequality that has increased in the US, and in many other economies, is due to very smart individuals doing particularly well in innovative sectors.

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The ingenuity of these people has undoubtedly been instrumental in changing how we communicate, transact business and live our lives. Their products and services epitomize our contemporary idea of progress. Silicon Valley's entrepreneurs are often viewed as heroic do-gooders. Indeed, Google's stated mission is Do No Evil. In April 2016 a front cover of the Economist showed the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg dressed like a Roman emperor under the headline ‘Imperial Ambition'. Meanwhile, innovation is seen as the new force in modern capitalism, not just in Silicon Valley but globally. Phrases like the ‘new economy', ‘the innovation economy', ‘the information society' or ‘smart growth' encapsulate the idea that it is entrepreneurs, garage tinkerers and their patents that unleash the ‘creative destruction' from which the jobs of the future come.

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Peter Bach's interactive calculator can be accessed at www.drugabacus.org 9. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/10/silicon-valleys-secessionists.html 10. Plato, The Republic, translated and with an Introduction by H. D. P. Lee (London: Penguin Books, 1955), p. 115. 11. http://www.multpl.com/us-gdp-inflation-adjusted/table. 12. http://www.epi.org/publication/stagnant-wages-in-2014/ 13. http://www.forbes.com/sites/katiasavchuk/2016/05/25/mark-zuckerberg-makes-18-billion-in-a-year-now-richest-person-in-california-facebook-billionaire/#490a62e5479c 14. Forbes, 2017. INTRODUCTION: MAKING VERSUS TAKING 1. Bill Haywood, Bill Haywood's Book: The Autobiography of Big Bill Haywood (New York: International Publishers, 1929). 2. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/apr/25/bhs-philip-green-family-millions-administration-arcadia 3. https://www.ft.com/content/cc58c190-6ec3-11e6-a0c9-1365ce54b926 4. https://www.ft.com/content/3e0172a0-6e1b-11e6-9ac1-1055824ca907 5. http://databank.worldbank.org/data/download/GDP.pdf 6.

The Great Firewall of China
by James Griffiths;
Published 15 Jan 2018

Durov’s story shows how the Kremlin evolved from its classic model of surveillance and intimidation, which had proved to be ill-suited to the internet, to one of filters and blacklists, intentionally modelled on the Great Firewall and helped along by its creators. Like Facebook, VKontakte was the product of a tech prodigy studying at an elite college. Durov, like Mark Zuckerberg, was born in 1984, and got his start developing apps and websites for his fellow students at Saint Petersburg State University. A friend who was studying in the US at the time, Vyacheslav Mirilashvili, showed Durov Facebook, and the two quickly realised the potential for a Russian copycat service.

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Like Baidu, which overtook Google in China in part by helping users search for illegal MP3s, VK was a hub for finding and sharing copyrighted materials, becoming one of the largest violators of intellectual property in the world.5 This didn’t win it any favours with the motion picture or recording industries, but it gave it an edge with users that Facebook simply couldn’t match. By July 2007, there were more than 1 million VK accounts.6 As VK’s userbase ballooned, Durov became an internet celebrity, courted by both the foreign press and the Kremlin as ‘Russia’s Mark Zuckerberg’. Initially press shy, with money and fame came a reputation for cockiness, even arrogance. In the most famous incident, Durov challenged an employee to throw his cash bonus out of a window of the company’s swanky St Petersburg headquarters. As pink 5,000 rouble notes (worth around $157 at the time), folded into paper aeroplanes, floated down onto the street below, a large crowd gathered and scuffles broke out.7 The paper plane throwing was widely covered in the Russian and foreign press, increasing Durov’s notoriety.

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The following year, Twitter hired its first ever managing director for China, Kathy Chen, a former employee of the People’s Liberation Army and China’s Ministry of Public Security, who in her first act as company executive posted a public message to Chinese state media saying: “Let’s work together to tell great China [sic] story to the world!”11 Chen left the company eight months later after Twitter struggled to make any headway and moved its China ad sales team to Singapore.12 No company has been more shameless in its attempts to woo Beijing than Facebook. Founder Mark Zuckerberg has posed for photos running in the Beijing smog, given employees copies of Xi Jinping’s On the Governance of China, and even reportedly asked Xi to name his first child (Xi declined). According to The New York Times, Facebook also developed a confidential internal tool to suppress posts from appearing in users’ news feeds in specific countries, which employees who spoke to the paper said was designed to help Facebook get into China.13 Asked to respond to the news, Facebook would only say: “We have long said that we are interested in China, and are spending time understanding and learning more about the country.”

Chokepoint Capitalism
by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow
Published 26 Sep 2022

Facebook, which has a similar playbook but focused on social media rather than search, had even higher returns—a ludicrous 50 percent.11 In a competitive market, publishers would sell their ads elsewhere. But the Google-Facebook duopoly gives them no such choice. Facebook’s strategy has also focused on integration, though more horizontal than vertical. As CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained in a 2008 email, “It is better to buy than compete.” That’s why it paid $1 billion in 2012 for Instagram, then a tiny company with thirteen employees. It snapped up WhatsApp for $19 billion just two years later. At the time these were jaw-dropping prices, but the acquisitions soon came to make sense.

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Some of those works turn out to be valuable in the marketplace, but a copyright doesn’t grant market power by default. When copyrights are aggregated on an industrial scale, however, they bestow the power to shape markets. One of the few antitrust violations still enforced by regulators is “maintenance of monopoly,” or taking actions in the market to ensure that no one can compete with you. This is why Mark Zuckerberg is in so much trouble for admitting that Facebook acquired Instagram so that he could continue to dominate the digital lives of the millions of Facebook users who were bailing on FB and joining Insta. But there’s no rule against maintaining your copyright monopoly. An antitrust regulator won’t punish UMG for “defending their copyrights,” even if that makes their market monopoly more pervasive and powerful.

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If it wants to avoid YouTube becoming another MySpace, it needs stronger fortifications—ones that lock customers in and competitors out. That’s what Warren Buffett is looking for as he seeks out “economic castles protected by unbreachable moats.”45 With help from the European Union, Google might have found its best moat yet. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg once observed, “It is better to buy than to compete.”46 Big businesses know it’s better to comply with expensive regulation than to compete too. While they naturally prefer power without responsibility, power with responsibility can be almost as good. The Bell Telephone Company was once entitled to go to your house, inspect the device you had plugged into your phone line, and, if it came from a competitor and you refused to remove it, to cut off your service.47 That allowed it to transform its state-bestowed right to regulate the telephone utility into a state-backed right to control its competition.

Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions
by Temple Grandin, Ph.d.
Published 11 Oct 2022

When Katherine Johnson calculated orbital paths, I imagine she saw multidimensional patterns in her brilliant mind. What is the profit in holding back any student with clear aptitude beyond their grade level? What if we routinely let students who love math double down by increasing their math courses or taking classes at local colleges? Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk all dropped out of college or graduate programs. They were eager to test and apply their advanced skills in the marketplace, heading straight for Silicon Valley. But in Jobs’s case, at least, there was also a desire to skirt required courses in which he had no interest. I would wager that the curriculum on offer just wasn’t challenging enough for any of them.

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They can develop, refine, and market an idea but cannot originate it. Of the five major tech companies, four started as a garage operation or in a college dorm room, with two brilliant minds tinkering and dreaming together: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak created Apple, Bill Gates and Paul Allen created Microsoft, Sergey Brin and Larry Page created Google, and Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin created Facebook. In the late 1930s, the Sperry Corporation hired two brothers, Russell and Sigurd Varian, who exemplify the concept of complementary minds. Sigurd was a thrill seeker who dropped out of college, reportedly due to boredom, not unlike Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg, and Musk.

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In a profile on him in Business Insider, Thiel says that in Silicon Valley many of the successful entrepreneurs are on the spectrum, which “happens to be a plus for innovation and creating great companies.” In hiring, he says, he avoids MBAs, whom he describes as high-extrovert/low-conviction people, with a combination of traits that leads toward “extremely herd-like thinking and behavior.” Many people consider Mark Zuckerberg to be on the Asperger’s spectrum. He has been described as robotic, socially awkward, and intensely single-minded. According to McFarland, Zuckerberg “wears a gray T-shirt every day, saying he wants to focus his decision-making energy on Facebook not fashion.” Some consider him a genius for having invented the world’s largest social network.

What's Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy
by Tom Slee
Published 18 Nov 2015

It embraces values of rebellion, drawing from a loose set of attitudes sometimes called the hacker ethic. Facebook’s headquarters are at “One Hacker Way” and it has the word HACK laid out in 12-meter letters in the stone. The company’s mantra until last year was “move fast and break things,” and Mark Zuckerberg recently explained to potential investors: “Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it—often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo.” Internet culture also believes that the Internet itself is a key to building a better world.

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Brian Chesky writes that “At Airbnb, we are creating a door to an open world—where everyone’s at home and can belong, anywhere.” Openness is almost a synonym for sharing, for a kind of exchange that goes beyond straightforward market transactions; it is central both to the broader appeal of the Sharing Economy and to the story that Airbnb tells about itself. ­Chesky’s words echo those of Mark Zuckerberg, who started a letter to potential Facebook investors this way: “Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission—to make the world more open and connected . . . As people share more, they have access to more opinions from the people they trust about the products and services they use.

The Best Interface Is No Interface: The Simple Path to Brilliant Technology (Voices That Matter)
by Golden Krishna
Published 10 Feb 2015

This is the first sentence of a 2013 Facebook researcher’s Facebook post about her team’s news feed findings.11 The stream of thoughts, images, videos, and links your friends and advertisers share with you is at the core of the Facebook experience and can even alter your mood.12 According to her team’s research, the resounding feedback from people using their web service was that important and interesting content was buried in a cluttered feed of stories they were less interested in reading. They redesigned. They used tools to prioritize which things you’d be interested in reading, what people you communicate with most often, and what kinds of imagery you’ll likely enjoy. The redesigned news feed was what Mark Zuckerberg called a “personalized newspaper.”13 A new design filled with more valuable content from friends also calls out sites that are more pertinent to your interests. Then, Facebook reversed course. The new design disappeared. Dustin Curtis, a technology writer and entrepreneur, reported that sources inside Facebook told him that the reversal occurred because people visiting the website on their desktop computers were, well, too efficient.14 They were discovering what they wanted at Facebook, felt satisfied, and left the site faster than ever before.

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note_id=10151359587673920 12 Robinson Meyer, “Everything We Know About Facebook’s Secret Mood Manipulation Experiment,” The Atlantic, June 28, 2014. http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/everything-we-know-about-facebooks-secret-mood-manipulation-experiment/373648/ 13 “Facebook has announced a redesigned News Feed that separates streams of content into multiple categories and optimizes the user interface with a ‘mobile-inspired’ design. Describing the goal of News Feed as providing a ‘personalized newspaper,’ Mark Zuckerberg says it’s being changed to take advantage of more photo and other visual content sharing, as well as the difference between personal stories and posts from public figures.” Adi Robertson, “Facebook Redesigns News Feed with Multiple Feeds and ‘Mobile-Inspired’ Interface,” The Verge, March 7, 2013. http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/7/4075548/facebook-redesigns-news-feed-with-multiple-feeds 14 “After an investigation into the problem by Facebook’s data team, they discovered that the new News Feed was performing too well.

The Creative Curve: How to Develop the Right Idea, at the Right Time
by Allen Gannett
Published 11 Jun 2018

Ting once told a BBC interviewer, “What Facebook did that was incredibly smart was to hook them with the friending and the poking, and then they learned with their users, and added functionality slowly over time as users became more comfortable.” In essence, without necessarily being aware of what they were doing, Mark Zuckerberg and his Facebook team were following the creative curve. They were balancing the familiar with the novel. Something too novel risked scaring people off—whereas something too familiar wouldn’t drive any interest. In David Kirkpatrick’s book The Facebook Effect, Zuckerberg is quoted as telling the author that “the trick isn’t adding stuff, it’s taking away.”

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That is why many luxury brands focus on exclusivity, maximizing price to grow revenues rather than distribution. The only other way to avoid the curve is to make your product addictive (think of the staying power of coffee or certain videogames). Yet, how did the Beatles know how much sitar to use in their music? Alternately, how did Mark Zuckerberg know which features to take away from the earliest versions of Facebook? Here is where my interviews became critical. I sat down with dozens of successful creatives from numerous fields. My goal was to understand how they managed to generate one idea after another at the sweet spot of the creative curve.

Just Giving: Why Philanthropy Is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better
by Rob Reich
Published 20 Nov 2018

Some attack donor discretion and argue that philanthropy is better conceived as reparative justice.¹⁹ Others argue that certain kinds of public good production should not be outsourced to private parties and must be produced and funded collectively, by citizens, if the goods are to possess the stamp of democratic legitimacy they are said to need.²⁰ Still others see in the evolution of philanthropy the emergence of a particular kind of high-profile philanthropist, such as Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Michael Bloomberg, whose activity supplants the state, subverts public policy processes, and in so doing diminishes democracy.²¹ I find many points of agreement, especially when considering the actual grant-making practices of foundations today. Yet despite all this, I think a role for foundations in democracy can be defended.

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In 2017, six of the top ten recipients of charitable contributions were DAFs.³ In light of these facts, how should public policy treat DAFs? Second is the increasing number of especially wealthy philanthropists who are rejecting the standard philanthropic form—the private philanthropic foundation—and creating instead a for-profit entity, a limited liability company (LLC), as their preferred vehicle for social change. Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan announced in 2015 that they would commit 99 percent of their wealth to advance human potential. Their announcement came not with the establishment of a tax-advantaged private foundation but with a for-profit LLC. In adopting the LLC form, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative avoids the already modest regulatory requirements concerning annual reporting of grant making and prohibitions on political giving that attach to private foundations.

Misfits: A Personal Manifesto
by Michaela Coel
Published 6 Sep 2021

I’ve decided to embrace as many perspectives as I can, and be brave enough to update my beliefs, and discover I’m not always right. What a brilliant thing, to discover we’ve been wrong about some things, what a brilliant thing it is to grow. We’re all gonna die. Instead of standing here, wishing for the good ol’ glory days, about the way life used to be before Mark Zuckerberg graduated, I’m going to try to be my best; to be transparent; and to play whatever part I can to help fix this house. What part will you play? “There are as many perspectives as there are people.” Colin Wright EPILOGUE The Aftermoth JUNE 2021 I write this three years on from the lecture, and I’m still often asked about its aftermath.

Self-Reliance and Other Essays
by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Published 12 Oct 1993

Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood. ● ● ● Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood. Mark Zuckerberg was misunderstood when he introduced the newsfeed and turned down a billion dollars. Steve Jobs was misunderstood, and Cory Booker, and Richard Branson, and David Simon, and Kanye West. If you’re not being misunderstood, then you’re not shattering the status quo. Michael Karnjanaprakorn ● ● ● I suppose no man can violate his nature.

Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change From the Cult of Technology
by Kentaro Toyama
Published 25 May 2015

Empowering Humanity.”4 A couple years later, Smith’s colleagues at Google began working to deliver WiFi through solar-powered balloons. CEO Larry Page says, “Two out of three people in the world don’t have good Internet access now. We actually think [balloon-delivered Internet] can really help people.”5 Not to be outdone, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced Internet.org in 2013. “We’ve been working on ways to beam internet to people from the sky,” he posted.6 He wants to reach remote places with infrared lasers and high-altitude drones. That tech giants are messianic about their creations is no surprise. But their outlook has possessed powerful people outside of Silicon Valley, too.

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It cited the 85,000 people who had pledged on Facebook that they would march.36 Days after the first protest in Tahrir Square, Roger Cohen wrote in the New York Times, “The Facebook-armed youth of Tunisia and Egypt rise to demonstrate the liberating power of social media.”37 One Egyptian newspaper reported that a man named his firstborn daughter Facebook.38 On February 11, 2011 – the day the regime folded – Ghonim told a CNN interviewer, “I want to meet Mark Zuckerberg one day and thank him. . . . This revolution started on Facebook . . . in June 2010 when hundreds of thousands of Egyptians started collaborating content. We would post a video on Facebook that would be shared by 60,000 people on their walls within a few hours. I’ve always said that if you want to liberate a society, just give them the Internet.”39 If you want to liberate a society, just give them the Internet.

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Asocial Enterprises Prahalad has had some influence in corporate circles, but it’s a variation of his idea called “social enterprise” that has really taken off. In business schools, engineering departments, and venture capital firms, social enterprises – start-up businesses that try to serve a social good through a viable business – are all the rage. Social entrepreneurs model themselves on the Steve Jobses and Mark Zuckerbergs of the world, not realizing that successful businesses are successful because they have carefully chosen their customers, not because they have a foolproof Midas touch. Apple is a profitable company not just because it designs superior products but also because it chooses the world’s wealthiest people as its market.

The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information
by Frank Pasquale
Published 17 Nov 2014

A psychologist has conducted experiments suggesting that a “dominant search engine could alter perceptions of candidates in close elections.”92 Jonathan Zittrain spells out how known technology at a dominant social network could have an even more insidious effect: Consider a hypothetical, hotly contested future election. Suppose that Mark Zuckerberg personally favors whichever candidate you don’t like. He arranges for a voting prompt to appear within the newsfeeds of tens of millions of active Facebook users. . . . Zuckerberg makes use of the fact that Facebook “likes” can predict political views and party affiliation, even beyond the many users who proudly advertise those affiliations directly.

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Google Annual Form 10-K Report for 2009 (fi led with United States Securities and Exchange Commission on February 12, 2010). Available at http:// google.client.shareholder.com /secfiling.cfm?filingid=1193125-10 -30774. 52. The same dynamic may be happening in dominant social networks as well. For example, one young developer wrote a heartfelt “Letter to Mark Zuckerberg,” complaining that he felt trapped by a meeting with the site’s acquisition team: he could either sell his app to the company, or risk being cut off from customers after Facebook developed its own version. Pay-for-prominence arrangements are also worrisome because of the overbearing power of the dominant platform.

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Cathy O’Neil, “When Accurate Modeling Is Not Good,” Mathbabe (blog), December 12, 2012, http://mathbabe.org/2012/12/12/when-accurate -modeling-is-not-good/ (analyzing the work of a casino CEO concerned with predictive analytics). 125. Evgeny Morozov, The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom (New York: PublicAffairs, 2011); Senator Dick Durbin, Letter to Mark Zuckerberg, February 2011. Available at http://www.durbin.senate.gov/public/index .cfm /files/serve?File _id=ec32a7a8-4671-4ab9-b5f4-9c0b9736deae. (“Facebook does not allow democracy and human rights activists in repressive regimes to use Facebook anonymously.”) 126. On a cost-per-impression or cost-per-click basis.

Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention--And How to Think Deeply Again
by Johann Hari
Published 25 Jan 2022

“We’ve been accelerating for a very long time, and for sure, we’re getting closer and closer to whatever limits we have,” he said. This acceleration, he said, “can’t continue indefinitely. There’s some physical limit to how fast things can move. It must stop at some point. But I don’t see any slowing down right now.” Shortly before I met with him, Sune had seen a photograph of Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, standing in front of a room of people who were all wearing virtual reality headsets. He was the only person standing in actual reality, looking at them, smiling, pacing proudly around. When he saw it, Sune said, “I was like—holy shit, this is a metaphor for the future.”

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For example, Sean Parker, one of the earliest investors in Facebook, told a public audience that the creators of the site had asked themselves from the start: “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?” The techniques they used were “exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology…. The inventors, creators—it’s me, it’s Mark [Zuckerberg], it’s Kevin Systrom on Instagram, it’s all of these people—understood this consciously. And we did it anyway.” He added: “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.” Chamath Palihapitiya, who had been Facebook’s vice president of growth, explained in a speech that the effects are so negative that his own kids “aren’t allowed to use that shit.”

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That’s why they began to offer tools they argued would help you to strengthen your willpower. All new iPhones have an option where you can be told how much Screen Time you have spent that day and that week, and a Do Not Disturb function where you can block out incoming messages. Facebook and Instagram introduced their own modest equivalents. Mark Zuckerberg even started using Tristan’s slogan, promising that time on Facebook would be “time well spent”—except for him, it was all about Nir-style tools where you reflect on what’s gone wrong with your own motives. I am writing this chapter about Nir not because he is unusual, but because he is the most candid of the people putting forward the dominant view in Silicon Valley about what you and I should do now.

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race
by Nicole Perlroth
Published 9 Feb 2021

Once they saw the web’s market potential, Microsoft hacked together its own web browser—Internet Explorer—cobbled together a quick and dirty web server, and aggressively pushed web providers to choose Microsoft over Netscape. This was before Gates became a philanthropic saint. He was firing off emails to AOL executives, demanding to know: “How much do we have to pay you to screw Netscape?” In the rush to best Netscape, speed, not security, was the name of the game. More than a decade later, Mark Zuckerberg would coin a name for this approach at Facebook with his motto “Move fast and break things.” Just as soon as these products hit the market, hackers began unspooling them with glee. They wanted to see how far the bugs in their new internet toys could take them—which, as it turned out, was quite far.

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She printed the email, sprinted over to Facebook’s head of product security, and told him to deal with it. Alex Rice, a freckled engineer in his early thirties, took one look at the email and was impressed, both by the bug and by Sandberg’s hustle. Facebook’s competitor at the time, MySpace, had a history of aggressively prosecuting hackers who pointed out bugs in its site. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg took the opposite approach. Zuckerberg considered himself a hacker. He sponsored all-night hackathons and made a point of engaging with—and in many cases hiring—anyone who came forward with a serious bug. Facebook’s 2012 IPO prospectus was part SEC regulatory filing, part dreamy love note to hackers the world over.

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Part of the problem is the economy still rewards the first to market. Whoever gets their widget to market with the most features before the competition wins. But speed has always been the natural enemy of good security design. Our current model penalizes products with the most secure, fully vetted software. And yet, the “move fast and break things” mantra Mark Zuckerberg pushed in Facebook’s earliest days has failed us time and time again. The annual cost from cyber losses now eclipses those from terrorism. In 2018, terrorist attacks cost the global economy $33 billion, a decrease of thirty-eight percent from the previous year. That same year, a study by RAND Corporation from more than 550 sources—the most comprehensive data analysis of its kind—concluded global losses from cyberattacks were likely on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars.

The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning With the Myth of the Good Billionaire
by Tim Schwab
Published 13 Nov 2023

Twenty years into Gates’s grand experiment in philanthropy, we are long overdue for a reappraisal of the world’s most powerful humanitarian, especially as a new generation of tech billionaires begins to follow in his footsteps. Jeff Bezos and his ex-spouse, MacKenzie Scott, have both pledged to give away most of their fortunes, more than $150 billion combined. Mark Zuckerberg has made similar claims, as have hundreds of other super-wealthy signatories to the “Giving Pledge” the Gates Foundation created to expand billionaire philanthropy. Counterintuitive as it sounds, the prospect of hundreds of billions—or even trillions—of dollars in philanthropic spending coming down the pike is cause not for celebration but, rather, for concern.

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If we take the Gates model of philanthropy to its logical conclusion, we can imagine not only Bill Gates’s private foundation growing in size, wealth, and power in the decades ahead but also the expanding role of other billionaires in world affairs. It presents us with a future in which a small group of super-rich global elites—Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Bloomberg, Charles Koch, Carlos Slim, MacKenzie Scott, Mukesh Ambani, Jack Ma—play an ever-larger role in global governance, organizing trillions of dollars to remake the world according to their own narrow interests, calling it philanthropy. * * * IN THE YEARS after the Great Recession, the political debate around the world’s economic woes included endless references to “belt tightening” and “hair cutting.”

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Against this political opposition, can we work through current political channels to challenge Bill Gates? More to the point, if we did build the necessary political power to create new regulations over the Gates Foundation, wouldn’t Gates simply shut down his foundation and start giving away his wealth as a private citizen? This is the innovative spirit that Meta (Facebook) founder Mark Zuckerberg and his spouse, Priscilla Chan, brought to their philanthropic giving, legally organizing their philanthropy as a limited liability company instead of a nonprofit private foundation. This means they forgo some tax benefits but gain a significant measure of opacity, shielding the details of their philanthropy from public scrutiny.

The Brussels Effect: How the European Union Rules the World
by Anu Bradford
Published 14 Sep 2020

(May 7, 2018), https://www.wsj.com/articles/techs-pickup-of-new-data-privacy-rules-reflects-eus-growing-influence-1525685400 (on file with author). 130.Mark Scott & Laurens Cerulus, Europe’s New Data Protection rules Export Privacy Standards Worldwide, Politico (Jan. 31, 2018), https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-data-protection-privacy-standards-gdpr-general-protection-data-regulation/ [https://perma.cc/WRW7-G6LN]; see also Angelica Mari, Brazilian President Signs Data Protection Bill, ZDNet (Aug. 16, 2018), https://www.zdnet.com/article/brazilian-president-signs-data-protection-bill/ [https://perma.cc/BB2D-JREC]; Asina Pornwasin, Thai Data Protection Laws Must Quickly be Updated to EU Standards: Experts, The Nation (May 25, 2018), http://www.nationmultimedia.com/detail/national/30346209 [https://perma.cc/T729-LKBV]. 131.Graham Greenleaf, The Influence of European Data Privacy Standards Outside Europe: Implications for Globalization of Convention 108, 2 Int’l Data Privacy L. 68, 75 (2012); see, e.g., María Paz Canales, Protección de datos en América Latina, urgente y necesaria [Data Protection in Latin America, Urgent and Necessary], Derechodigitales (July 7, 2017), https://www.derechosdigitales.org/11282/proteccion-de-datos-en-america-latina-urgente-y-necesaria/ [https://perma.cc/5EBL-L7B4] (translation supplied). 132.Tim Cook Calls for US Federal Privacy Law to Tackle “Weaponized” Personal Data, Guardian (Oct. 24, 2018), https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/oct/24/tim-cook-us-federal-privacy-law-weaponized-personal-data [https://perma.cc/TG55-FTMB]. 133.Mehreen Khan & Tim Bradshaw, Apple and Facebook Call for EU-style Privacy Laws in US, Fin. Times (Oct. 24, 2018), https://www.ft.com/content/0ca8466c-d768-11e8-ab8e-6be0dcf18713 (on file with author). 134.Mark Zuckerberg, The Internetneeds new rules. Let’s start in these four areas, Wash. Post (Mar. 30, 2019), https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/mark-zuckerberg-the-internet-needs-new-rules-lets-start-in-these-four-areas/2019/03/29/9e6f0504-521a-11e9-a3f7-78b7525a8d5f_story.html?fbclid=IwAR2dyE8yvRAI2SIUUsAJEj6nwcZatkpOWaS0k_cxHWsRkrpJI_qUZDpiDLw&utm_term=.bdb2c94b7c87 (on file with author). 135.Meghashyam Mali, Tech Mobilizes Against California Privacy Law, TheHill (July 1, 2018), https://thehill.com/policy/technology/394928-tech-mobilizes-against-california-privacy-law [https://perma.cc/GWU6-ZGQB]; see also Daisuke Wakabayashi, Silicon Valley Faces Regulatory Fight on Its Home Turf, N.Y.

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Cook described the amount of data that companies collect of individuals “unsettling,” referring to it as “surveillance” that can lead to an abuse of the data collected.132 Even more strikingly, Facebook’s privacy chief, Erin Egan, joined Cook in announcing Facebook’s support for a GDPR-equivalent federal privacy law in the United States.133 Six months later, Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s founder and chief executive, called for the adoption of GDPR-style laws worldwide in an op-ed published in the Washington Post in the following terms:134 [E]ffective privacy and data protection needs a globally harmonized framework. People around the world have called for comprehensive privacy regulation in line with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, and I agree.

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hl=en&gl=ZZ [https://perma.cc/PHQ9-RBDJ]; Privacy Statement, Netflix (Apr. 24, 2019), https://help.netflix.com/legal/privacy [https://perma.cc/TF7G-H774]; Mitchener, supra note 86. 90.See Apple Customer Privacy Policy, Apple, https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/ [https://perma.cc/TG8J-YD7N]. 91.Privacy Policy, Apple, https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/en-ww/governance/ [https://perma.cc/42BC-X6MJ]. 92.Alex Hern, Apple Launches iOS 11.3 with Raft of Privacy Features, Guardian (Mar. 29, 2018), https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/29/apple-launches-ios-113-privacy-features-gdpr-data-protection [https://perma.cc/5G9X-D9KX]. 93.Natasha Lomas, Facebook to Roll Out Global Privacy Settings Hub—Thanks to GDPR, TechCrunch (Jan. 24, 2018), http://social.techcrunch.com/2018/01/24/facebook-to-roll-out-global-privacy-settings-hub-thanks-to-gdpr/ [https://perma.cc/BK5K-A8AD]; Jim Brunsden, Tim Bradshaw & Hannah Kuchler, Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg to Hold Talks with Top EU Data Official, Fin. Times (Apr. 6, 2018), https://www.ft.com/content/88a8682a-3996-11e8-8b98-2f31af407cc8 (on file with author). 94.Hard Questions Q&A with Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook Newsroom (Apr. 4, 2018), https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/04/hard-questions-protecting-peoples-information/ [https://perma.cc/NEP5-9748]. 95.Updates to Terms, Airbnb, https://www.airbnb.com/home/terms-of-service-event?euid=76ed6f04-5530-5d81-7aaa-ce7e07e16be9 [https://perma.cc/X9BJ-WRYN]. 96.Privacy Policy, Uber (May 25, 2018), https://privacy.uber.com/policy [https://perma.cc/43JZ-MP4N]. 97.PricewaterhouseCoopers, GDPR Preparedness Pulse Survey (2016), https://www.pwc.com/us/en/increasing-it-effectiveness/publications/assets/pwc-gdpr-series-pulse-survey.pdf [https://perma.cc/2BZB-FGWK]. 98.See Preparing for a New Era in Privacy Regulation, Microsoft (Apr. 16, 2018), https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2018/04/16/preparing-for-a-new-era-in-privacy-regulation-with-the-microsoft-cloud/ [https://perma.cc/7XMV-G3U6]; Brendon Lynch, Get GDPR Compliant with the Microsoft Cloud, Microsoft on the Issues (2017), https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2017/02/15/get-gdpr-compliant-with-the-microsoft-cloud/ [https://perma.cc/Y2Z5-F6WS]; Rich Sauer, Earning Your Trust with Contractual Commitments to the General Data Protection Regulation, Microsoft on the Issues (2017), https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2017/04/17/earning-trust-contractual-commitments-general-data-protection-regulation/ [https://perma.cc/UEQ8-SBCS]. 99.Ugo Pagallo, The Impact of Domestic Robots on Privacy and Data Protection, and the Troubles with Legal Regulation by Design, Data Protection on the Move 403 (2016). 100.Opinion 2/2017 on Data Processing at Work WP 249, Article 29 Working Party (June 8, 2017), https://iapp.org/resources/article/wp29-opinion-on-data-processing-at-work/ [https://perma.cc/A5CT-MQ9X]. 101.Number of Employers Using Social Media to Screen Candidates at All-Time High, Finds Latest CareerBuilder Study, CareerBuilder (June 15, 2017), http://press.careerbuilder.com/2017-06-15-Number-of-Employers-Using-Social-Media-to-Screen-Candidates-at-All-Time-High-Finds-Latest-CareerBuilder-Study [https://perma.cc/7BRH-R4DB]. 102.Daniel Michaels, Hot U.S.

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World
by Cal Newport
Published 5 Jan 2016

Unless you have strong evidence that distraction is important for your specific profession, you’re best served, for the reasons argued earlier in this chapter, by giving serious consideration to depth. Chapter Two Deep Work Is Rare In 2012, Facebook unveiled the plans for a new headquarters designed by Frank Gehry. At the center of this new building is what CEO Mark Zuckerberg called “the largest open floor plan in the world”: More than three thousand employees will work on movable furniture spread over a ten-acre expanse. Facebook, of course, is not the only Silicon Valley heavyweight to embrace the open office concept. When Jack Dorsey, whom we met at the end of the last chapter, bought the old San Francisco Chronicle building to house Square, he configured the space so that his developers work in common spaces on long shared desks.

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Jack Dorsey justified the open layout of the Square headquarters by explaining: “We encourage people to stay out in the open because we believe in serendipity—and people walking by each other teaching new things.” For the sake of discussion, let’s call this principle—that when you allow people to bump into each other smart collaborations and new ideas emerge—the theory of serendipitous creativity. When Mark Zuckerberg decided to build the world’s largest office, we can reasonably conjecture, this theory helped drive his decision, just as it has driven many of the moves toward open workspaces elsewhere in Silicon Valley and beyond. (Other less-exalted factors, like saving money and increasing supervision, also play a role, but they’re not as sexy and are therefore less emphasized.)

The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving
by Leigh Gallagher
Published 26 Jun 2013

Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that walking has become en vogue with the biggest tech minds in Silicon Valley. The late Apple CEO Steve Jobs loved to go for walks with friends and business colleagues to discuss ideas, and getting asked to go on a walk in the woods of Palo Alto with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was at one point a rite of passage among Valley stars and potential employees. Twitter cofounder and Square founder Jack Dorsey is also an outspoken believer in the benefits of going for walks. “The best thinking time is just walking,” he has said. He’s not wrong. Studies have shown that the act of walking itself delivers physiological benefits of a higher order, or at least a different kind, than other kinds of physical activity.

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Twitter, Zynga, Airbnb, Dropbox: A notable exception to the tech moguls’ fascination with cities is Steve Jobs, who lived and worked his whole life in the suburbs (he lived in a Tudor house in Palo Alto, and Apple’s headquarters were in nearby Cupertino). But when Apple-owned Pixar moved to a new headquarters in Emeryville, California, Jobs pushed the designers to emphasize central locations where employees could mingle with one another with the hope of fostering creativity. Another exception is Mark Zuckerberg, who has built Facebook’s headquarters into a massive campus in Menlo Park, but one that attempts to approximate urbanism, with a walkable commercial strip that includes a dry cleaner, gym, doctor’s office, and various eateries. Zappos, the online shoe giant: Leigh Gallagher, “Tony Hsieh’s New $350 Million Startup,” Fortune.com, January 23, 2012.

The Introvert Entrepreneur: Amplify Your Strengths and Create Success on Your Own Terms
by Beth Buelow
Published 3 Nov 2015

What many people, including introverts themselves, may not know is that the strengths and traits of the typical introvert—curiosity, desire for depth over breadth, comfort with going solo, thoroughness and introspection, love of research—lend themselves well to entrepreneurship. Introvert entrepreneurs such as Bill Gates, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Tony Hsieh, Guy Kawasaki, and others have transformed our lives not by pretending to be extroverts but by applying their introvert strengths to their entrepreneurial endeavors. • • • An introvert trying to be a fake extrovert is just that: a fake extrovert. If you choose to approach your business with that mindset, you won’t solve your problem.

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Consider these household names: Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Charles Schwab. Steven Spielberg, Michael Jordan, and Julia Roberts. We don’t think of these people as shy underachievers, do we? Yet, they all identify themselves as introverts. There are also the introvert founders of some of the most successful social networking sites: Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Jack Dorsey (Twitter), and Larry Page (Google). And while I haven’t come across definitive proof, many signs point to President Barack Obama being a member of Team Introvert. What these people have in common is that they have channeled their introvert strengths into superpowers that enable them to succeed in a noisy world.

Dual Transformation: How to Reposition Today's Business While Creating the Future
by Scott D. Anthony and Mark W. Johnson
Published 27 Mar 2017

Google then expanded its inventory by taking over the advertising of other publishers through its AdSense program. A range of innovations led the company’s revenues and advertisements to soar. As of the writing of this book, Alphabet is worth almost a half-trillion dollars. Facebook. Similarly, when Mark Zuckerberg launched the first version of the social network in 2004, it looked as if he was a bit late to the party, with Myspace as the clearly established market leader. Zuckerberg started Facebook at Harvard and expanded it to the Ivy League schools and then to all schools before finally opening it to the public.

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In 2006 the popular press got wind of a rapidly growing trend among high school and college students: the use of what we now know as social networks. News Corp septuagenarian Rupert Murdoch shocked the industry by paying $580 million for social media pioneer Myspace. That move ended up being a boon to then twenty-four-year-old Mark Zuckerberg by giving him space to continue the relentless growth of Facebook. Turner could look to its cousins in the newspaper business to get a glimpse of the future. Although newspapers still appeared to be on stable financial ground, industry analysts increasingly—and correctly—worried that the industry was about to fall off a cliff.

I'm Judging You: The Do-Better Manual
by Luvvie Ajayi
Published 12 Sep 2016

Well, medically it is. Some people have trouble distinguishing between certain colors. Even scientifically, though, colorblindness does not mean you cannot tell black from white. Random fact for you, if you ever end up on Jeopardy and your Daily Double depends on it: the reason Facebook’s logo is blue is because Mark Zuckerberg is red-green colorblind, and shades of blue are the richest ones he can see. THE MORE YOU KNOW *shooting star*. But I bet even Zuck can tell the difference between my skin and his. So for people to sit on some delusional “more evolved” throne and proclaim themselves colorblind, and therefore unable to be prejudiced or racist, is absurd at best, cowardice at medium (yes, medium), and dangerous at worst.

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They have gotten rid of things like Facebook Gifts, but they choose to keep this poke thing, which is now the spider monkey that will not let go of our eAnkles. It is a boil on all our asses. The Facebook poke is the never-defined, always-creepy ability to virtually tap on someone’s shoulder or poke them in the who-knows-where-you-want-to-imagine. Mark Zuckerberg and his team of evil world dominators refuse to really answer as to what it’s for, but that doesn’t even matter, because it has taken on its own definition. To poke someone on Facebook is to randomly try to get their attention to flirt. It’s a virtual wink, and like winks, the person who sends one your way makes all the difference in the world.

How to Do Nothing
by Jenny Odell
Published 8 Apr 2019

The festival, which started as an illegal bonfire on Baker Beach in San Francisco in 1986 before moving to Black Rock Desert, has become an attraction for the libertarian tech elite, something Sophie Morris sums up nicely in the title of her piece on the festival: “Burning Man: From far-out freak-fest to corporate schmoozing event.” Mark Zuckerberg famously helicoptered into Burning Man in 2015 to serve grilled cheese sandwiches, while others from the upper echelon of Silicon Valley have enjoyed world-class chefs and air-conditioned yurts. Morris quotes the festival’s director of business and communications, who unflinchingly describes Burning Man as “a little bit like a corporate retreat.

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Having worked for an old and widely recognized clothing company, I know firsthand that the pillars of any brand are internal coherence and consistency over time. (That’s literally what we called them at work: “brand pillars.”) For a brand as for a public figure—which, as we now know, any Twitter user can accidentally become overnight—change, ambiguity, and contradiction are anathema. “You have one identity,” Mark Zuckerberg famously said. “The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly.” He added that “having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”8 Imagine what Audre Lorde, with all her different selves, would have to say to him

Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit From Global Chaos
by Sarah Lacy
Published 6 Jan 2011

Years ahead of the Beijing lost generation, Robinson wound up here at the end of a Trans-Siberian railroad whim, and he mostly stuck around because he fel in love and had two children “made in China.” It’s home now. Work-wise his latest company uses skil ed Chinese video game artists to build iPhone games. Robinson is wel connected in China’s Web scene, but wil he be the Mark Zuckerberg of China? No way, he says. None of these transplants wil . Most Americans—and the United States—can al just hope to get a piece of this wild ride. Part of that is because the ride is something no one can ful y understand, least of al an American. China’s growth isn’t just about people and factories.

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It was started by a young entrepreneur named Ma Huateng, nicknamed Pony Ma because “Ma” is Chinese for horse. Ma is written about daily in the Chinese press, but he almost never gives interviews. While most Internet companies team around Beijing and Shanghai, Tencent is down South with the factories in Shenzhen. It’s not about being the next Mark Zuckerberg; in China, the Web entrepreneur game is about being the next Pony Ma. Tencent’s company store is cal ed the Image Café, and it’s a coded message: “I” is the same sound as the Chinese word for “love,” “Ma” is Pony Ma’s last name, and “Ge” means brother. I love brother Pony. The company has that familiar cocky edge of an Internet darling at its do-no-wrong moment in time.

Longshot
by David Heath
Published 18 Jan 2022

They had already spent a decade trying to make vaccines from mRNA without success. The answer was right before them. Said Karikó, “If they, with a little money, would invest and pay for it, there would not be a Moderna. There would only be CureVac.” CHAPTER 5 Scientific Sabotage Twenty-six-year-old Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg graced Time’s cover as Person of the Year in 2010. Inside, the magazine featured 50-odd “People Who Mattered.” The list was full of obvious and instantly recognizable names, from Barack Obama and Pope Benedict to LeBron James and Lady Gaga. But there was at least one unknown: Derrick Rossi. The magazine identified him as a researcher whose discoveries “could help move stem cell–based treatments for diseases such as diabetes and Parkinson’s more quickly from the lab to the clinic.”1 Just four months later, in April, Time once again featured Rossi on a list of the world’s most influential people of 2011.

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The Soviet Union had just launched Sputnik in 1957, creating fears that the communist adversary had surpassed the United States in missile technology and may be able to drop a hydrogen bomb on the mainland.45 DARPA rests within the Department of Defense, and its mission includes being prepared for biological warfare. Within just six years, Moderna had raised $1.9 billion and had a market value of $5 billion, even though they were just a research company with no products. In 2017, a TEDx Talk interviewer said, “They are the Airbnb of biotech. You are looking at the Mark Zuckerberg of biotech.” At the time, Moderna had 12 drugs in development, but only 250 human beings had been injected with an mRNA drug in clinical trials.46 A key turning point came when Moderna would try to develop a vaccine for an epidemic that was under way, starting in Brazil and reaching the southeast United States.

The Great Wave: The Era of Radical Disruption and the Rise of the Outsider
by Michiko Kakutani
Published 20 Feb 2024

Bremmer, who is president of the research and consulting firm Eurasia Group, says that such leaders are surrounded by yes-men and “don’t get great information, especially about the second and third order effects of the decisions they take”—which can result in arbitrary policy-making and, potentially, momentous mistakes. Among the “rogue actors” Bremmer names are Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Kim Jong Un, as well as business leaders like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, who control “immensely powerful global platforms that operate with some level of sovereignty outside of the power purview even of governments.” Technology and globalization have amplified the volatility of today’s interregnum, but many of the primary drivers of instability have long been hallmarks of times of transition.

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GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “two sides of complete silence”: “Silent Meditation,” Kickstarter, kickstarter.com/​projects/​silentmeditation/​silent-meditation-on-vinyl. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Oculus Rift: Max Chafkin, “Why Facebook’s $2 Billion Bet on Oculus Rift Might One Day Connect Everyone on Earth,” Vanity Fair, Sept. 8, 2015, vanityfair.com/​news/​2015/​09/​oculus-rift-mark-zuckerberg-cover-story-palmer-luckey; Jenna Wortham, “Creator of a Virtual Reality Sensation,” The New York Times, Mar. 26, 2014, nytimes.com/​2014/​03/​27/​technology/​creator-of-a-virtual-reality-sensation.html; Taylor Clark, “How Palmer Luckey Created Oculus Rift,” Smithsonian Magazine, Nov. 2014, smithsonianmag.com/​innovation/​how-palmer-luckey-created-oculus-rift-180953049/.

Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet
by David Moon , Patrick Ruffini , David Segal , Aaron Swartz , Lawrence Lessig , Cory Doctorow , Zoe Lofgren , Jamie Laurie , Ron Paul , Mike Masnick , Kim Dotcom , Tiffiniy Cheng , Alexis Ohanian , Nicole Powers and Josh Levy
Published 30 Apr 2013

CONCLUSION We’ve been deservedly hard on Facebook, in this book and in much of our work, but that company’s famed CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently wrote something that speaks to the spirit of the SOPA/PIPA fight, which we’ve in turn tried to capture in this book. Just as the world was abuzz with news that he was launching an initial public offering of stock in the company Zuckerberg drafted an explanation of the values that supposedly undergird Facebook’s management culture. His statement included a description of something he calls “The Hacker Way.” A few highlighted sentences: MARK ZUCKERBERG: The word “hacker” has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers.

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Those seeking to understand what kind of governance Internet users are willing to accept would do well to start by studying the engineering that establishes the network and how it is governed. The key protocols and standards that make the Internet work—that make the Internet the Internet—are developed and modified by voluntary committees of engineers, who meet virtually to debate the merits of new features, design changes, and other basic enhancements. Mark Zuckerberg (cofounder of Facebook) The word “hacker” has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers. In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. Like most things, it can be used for good or bad, but the vast majority of hackers I’ve met tend to be idealistic people who want to have a positive impact on the world.

Virtual Competition
by Ariel Ezrachi and Maurice E. Stucke
Published 30 Nov 2016

IBM, Mobile App from Octo Telematics Uses IBM and the Weather Company Data to Help Drivers Score Savings with Pay-As-You-Drive Insurance (October 26, 2015), http://www- 03.ibm.com /press/us/en /pressrelease /47949.wss. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Josh Constine, “Facebook launches Messenger platform with chatbots,” April 12, 2016, http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/12/agents-on-messenger/; Ben Popper, “Mark Zuckerberg Thinks AI Will Start Outperforming Humans in the Next Decade,” April 28, 2016, http://www.theverge.com/2016/4/28 /11526436/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-earnings-artificial-intelligence -future. Madhumita Murgia, “Facebook Messenger’s New Bots Are a Powerful Way to Target Adverts,” The Telegraph, April 13, 2016, http://www.telegraph.co.uk /technology/2016/04/12/facebook-messenger-launches-chat-bot-economy-to -take-on-apps/.

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Another example concerns the combination of smart algorithms with Facebook’s vast user base, to improve targeting of ads and promotions. In its annual developer conference in 2016, the company discussed the way artificial intelligence (AI) could interact with the rich flow of data from its users. Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, noted how “with AI and natural language processing combined with human help, people will be able to talk to Messenger bots just like they talk to friends.”55 David Marcus, VP messaging products, reported how the company is “testing if business bots can re-engage people on threads with sponsored messages.”56 Not surprisingly, Apple, Amazon, Google and Microsoft are also investing in voice-activated digital assistants that “learn” to make decisions rather than simply follow instructions.57 The future of instant and online communications will heavily rely on the mutually reinforcing relationship between Big Data and Big Analytics.

The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America
by Victor Davis Hanson
Published 15 Nov 2021

Liberal worries over mail-in ballots: “Signature Verification and Mail Ballots: Guaranteeing Access While Preserving Integrity: A Case Study of California’s Every Vote Counts Act,” Policy Practicum: Every Vote Counts (Law 806Z), Stanford Law School Law and Policy Lab, May 15, 2020, www-cdn.law.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/SLS_Signature_Verification_Report-5-15-20-FINAL.pdf. Silicon Valley money and voting: C. Aguayo, “AMISTAT PROJECT Details FB CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s $500 Million Influence on Election, in Recent Report,” NewsNet, December 17, 2020, https://yournewsnet.com/amistat-project-details-fb-ceo-mark-zuckerbergs-500-million-influence-on-election-in-recent-report. 14. A. Viswanatha and S. Gurman, “Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick Died of Stroke, D.C. Medical Examiner Says,” Wall Street Journal, April 19, 2021, www.wsj.com/articles/capitol-police-officer-brian-sicknick-died-of-stroke-d-c-medical-examiner-says-11618864840.

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They too instead had a claim on oppression, by their very unalterable identity, and thus could put their formerly caricatured ill-gotten gains to work for the new woke cause—while squaring the circle of their very real economic and social privilege. Few have noted the deleterious new role of identity politics, wealth, and the eclipse of class in the fragmentation of citizenship into tribes. White male billionaires like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and the heads of Goldman Sachs need only concede the unfairness of the system they had mastered for their own benefit—and then put a percentage of their billions in the service of race and sex equality—to be part of the revolution, while being granted easy exemptions for the continuance of their own fortunes, influence, privilege, and power.14 If old Marxism had once sought to transcend race and unite the global oppressed, in a much wealthier twenty-first-century world, new cultural and racial Marxism sought to return to ancient tribal criteria of oppression.

Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex
by Yasha Levine
Published 6 Feb 2018

Instead of blanketing airwaves with a single political ad, they could use detailed behavioral profiles to micro-target their messaging, showing ads that appealed specifically to individuals and the issues they held dear. Facebook even allowed campaigns to upload lists of potential voters and supporters directly into the company’s data system, and then use those people’s social networks to extrapolate other people who might be supportive of a candidate.85 It was a powerful and profitable tool. A decade after Mark Zuckerberg transfigured the company from a Harvard project, 1.28 billion people worldwide used the platform daily, and Facebook minted $62 in revenue for every one of its users in America.86 Uber, the Internet taxi company, deployed data to evade government regulation and oversight in support of its aggressive expansion into cities where it operated illegally.

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“Facebook is not and has never been part of any program to give the US or any other government direct access to our servers. We have never received a blanket request or court order from any government agency asking for information or metadata in bulk, like the one Verizon reportedly received. And if we did, we would fight it aggressively. We hadn’t even heard of PRISM before yesterday,” Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post. He blamed the government and positioned Facebook as a victim. “I’ve called President Obama to express my frustration over the damage the government is creating for all of our future. Unfortunately, it seems like it will take a very long time for true full reform.” Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo!

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So instead of pushing for political and democratic solutions to surveillance, we outsource our privacy politics to crypto apps—software made by the very same powerful entities that these apps are supposed to protect us from. In that sense, Edward Snowden is like the branded face of an Internet consumerism-as-rebellion lifestyle campaign, like the old Apple ad about shattering Big Brother or the Nike spot set to the Beatles’ “Revolution.” While Internet billionaires like Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Mark Zuckerberg slam government surveillance, talk up freedom, and embrace Snowden and crypto privacy culture, their companies still cut deals with the Pentagon, work with the NSA and CIA, and continue to track and profile people for profit. It is the same old split-screen marketing trick: the public branding and the behind-the-scenes reality.

Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination
by Mark Bergen
Published 5 Sep 2022

In an interview back in 2002 he explained that effective web search, really giving people what they want, required understanding “everything in the world” and that this required an AI. A decade later he rightly predicted that machine learning would become all the rage. Amazon would release a speech-recognition gizmo called Echo. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who publicized his annual life-betterment goals, would spend one year inventing an AI butler. Tech companies threw around the slogan “mobile-first,” signposting their fitness for the smartphone world; Google would declare itself “AI-first.” Once the arcade boxing clip concluded on the TED stage, Page caught his breath.

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“They better be careful,” the president huffed in August, “because they can’t do that to people.” Trump allies attacked Silicon Valley platforms for abusing their protected status under Section 230, the law that shielded user-generated websites from liability. Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, berated Mark Zuckerberg in a hearing for failing to operate Facebook as a “neutral public forum,” as Section 230 dictated. In fact, the law did not dictate this, but this blustering threat still worked. Within Google, members of its policy team were instructed to be extra cautious about anything Section 230 related and anything that might make Google appear as if it were taking on the role of a publisher.

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Outrage in the press and halls of power usually focused on the social networks, not the video site. In 2021 President Joe Biden chastised tech platforms for promoting vaccine hesitancy, specifically accusing Facebook of “killing” people with lies. Ire on the right was largely aimed at Twitter, which had booted Trump off the service after the January 6 insurrection. Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey, the chiefs of Facebook and Twitter, testified multiple times before Congress; Susan Wojcicki never did. YouTube was the sleeping giant of social media. There were many reasons for this. YouTube was better situated to avoid information warfare. You might see your cranky uncle rant about vaccines on Facebook or Twitter, but probably not YouTube.

Four Battlegrounds
by Paul Scharre
Published 18 Jan 2023

The first regional regulatory regime for data privacy, the GDPR has become the de facto global standard that companies must comply with and other nations must at least consider when crafting their own standards. While the U.S. government has taken a much more laissez-faire attitude to tech regulation, with members of Congress dragging tech leaders like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg before Congress for a public browbeating but passing little in the way of substantive regulation, Europe has leaned into regulating technology. American business executives have decried Europe’s model, arguing too much regulation could “strangle business,” and it is certainly true that overly burdensome regulations could harm innovation.

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Camargo, “We Don’t Understand How YouTube’s Algorithm Works—and That’s a Problem,” Fast Company, January 24, 2020, https://www.fastcompany.com/90454610/we-dont-understand-how-youtubes-algorithm-works-and-thats-a-problem. 145reduce recommendations of “borderline” content: “Continuing Our Work to Improve Recommendations on YouTube,” YouTube Official Blog, January 25, 2019, https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/continuing-our-work-to-improve; “The Four Rs of Responsibility, Part 2: Raising Authoritative Content and Reducing Borderline Content and Harmful Misinformation,” YouTube Official Blog, December 3, 2019, https://youtube.googleblog.com/2019/12/the-four-rs-of-responsibility-raise-and-reduce.html. 14570 percent drop in watch time for borderline content: “The Four Rs of Responsibility, Part 2.” 145flat earth videos: Thompson, “YouTube’s Plot to Silence Conspiracy Theories.” 145promoting “meaningful interactions”: Mark Zuckerberg, “One of our big focus areas for 2018 is making sure the time we all spend on Facebook is time well spent . . .” Facebook, January 11, 2018, https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10104413015393571?pnref=story. 145posts that “spark conversations”: Adam Mosseri, “Bringing People Closer Together,” about.fb.com, January 11, 2018, https://about.fb.com/news/2018/01/news-feed-fyi-bringing-people-closer-together/. 145new algorithm “pushed up articles on divisive topics”: Laura Hazard Owen, “One Year In, Facebook’s Big Algorithm Change Has Spurred an Angry, Fox News-Dominated—and Very Engaged!

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McKinnon and Alex Leary, “Trump Considers Forming Panel to Review Complaints of Online Bias,” Wall Street Journal, May 23, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-considers-forming-panel-to-review-complaints-of-online-bias-11590238800. 150soft-pedal right-wing disinformation: Jeff Horwitz and Deepa Seetharaman, “Facebook Executives Shut Down Efforts to Make the Site Less Divisive,” Wall Street Journal, May 26, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-it-encourages-division-top-executives-nixed-solutions-11590507499. 150Facebook altered its algorithm to boost the rankings: Kevin Roose, “Facebook Reverses Postelection Algorithm Changes That Boosted News from Authoritative Sources,” New York Times, December 16, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/16/technology/facebook-reverses-postelection-algorithm-changes-that-boosted-news-from-authoritative-sources.html. 150incited a riot to storm the Capitol: Twitter Inc., “Permanent Suspension of @realDonaldTrump,” Twitter Blog, January 8, 2021, https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspension.html; Mark Zuckerberg, “The shocking events of the last 24 hours clearly demonstrate . . .” Facebook, January 7, 2021, https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10112681480907401. 150account suspensions were clearly necessary: Sheera Frenkel, “The Storming of Capitol Hill Was Organized on Social Media,” New York Times, January 6, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/06/us/politics/protesters-storm-capitol-hill-building.html. 150Republican members of Congress objected to certifying: Karen Yourish, Larry Buchanan, and Denise Lu, “The 147 Republicans Who Voted to Overturn Election Results,” New York Times, January 7, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/01/07/us/elections/electoral-college-biden-objectors.html. 150debunked allegations of fraud: Ann Gerhart, “Election Results Under Attack: Here Are the Facts,” Washington Post, updated March 11, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/interactive/2020/election-integrity/. 19.

The Great Stagnation
by Tyler Cowen
Published 24 Jan 2011

It’s hard to measure the productivity of the internet, but twenty years ago—or less—we did not have Google, browsers, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, or Craigslist, among other major innovations, all now used by many millions. It is no accident that our most revolutionary sector is still one where “amateurs”—that’s what Mark Zuckerberg was—can make a major impact. In this regard, the internet is very much like the early years of the British industrial revolution. Unlike electricity, the internet hasn’t changed everyone’s life, but it has changed a lot of lives, and its influence will be even stronger for the next generation.

The Middleman Economy: How Brokers, Agents, Dealers, and Everyday Matchmakers Create Value and Profit
by Marina Krakovsky
Published 14 Sep 2015

To see what I mean, think of people as points on a piece of paper and think of the relationships between them as lines that connect those dots. Nozad might balk at this abstract, overly mathematical depiction of the ties between people, but it’s a common way to look at human connections, especially in our Web 2.0 era. When Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Weiner talk about the “social graph,” this is what they mean, except they’re referring to users of Facebook or LinkedIn. The points, or nodes, represent individual people, while the lines or links represent the social ties between the individuals.12 Our social graphs from the online world are often a crude replica of our actual social networks.

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But judging by how ordinary people evaluate the decisions middlemen make, it seems that many of us don’t quite get it. Consider the following cases: •A single mother struggling to keep up with mortgage payments on her condo tries to refinance, but the lender rejects her application because she had recently lost her job, which is the very reason she is struggling.20 On the other hand, Mark Zuckerberg refinances the loan on his $5.95 million mansion and gets an interest rate of 1.05 percent, less than half the national average.21 •A 50-year-old man gets advanced-stage prostate cancer, begins aggressive treatment, and applies for life insurance to protect his family if the worst case should happen.

What's Mine Is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption Is Changing the Way We Live
by Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers
Published 2 Jan 2010

Our immersion in innovative information, communication, and technology (ICT) platforms, specifically online social networks and handheld mobile devices, is the second phenomenon driving us toward a “we” mind-set. The “We” Generation Chris Hughes cocreated one of the defining businesses of the past decade, Facebook. Unlike his partners and Harvard roommates, Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz, Hughes was not interested in the software itself. Instead, he wanted to figure out the ways that people would want to connect and share stuff with one another and how an online community could enrich the lives of its users—a passion that led to his nickname “the Empath” among Facebook insiders.

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A commune with a focus, such as improving food quality, may get an e-mail from Whole Foods offering special discounts.26 Some skeptics have derided the idea as nice but “too Californian” to take hold in other parts of the United States. Yet within just eight weeks of the launch, Smith estimates that more than three hundred communes have been created, from Toronto to Texas. When we asked Smith what her ambition was within the next two to three years, she answered, “I want to be on Oprah sitting on the sofa with Mark Zuckerberg (one of the founders of Facebook) talking about the sharing revolution.” Her goal is driven not by arrogance but by a down-to-earth vision of wanting people to embrace communal behaviors to become resource efficient and connected. In a recent article in the New York Times, “Saving the Suburbs,” Allison Arieff commented about the growth of Smith’s cul-de-sac projects.

The Dark Net
by Jamie Bartlett
Published 20 Aug 2014

‘The real genius of blockchain is that it is going to help us create a decentralised net that no one can censor. This is much bigger than just Bitcoin. We’re going to transform the entire internet.’ ‘What do you mean?’ I ask. ‘Well, at the moment your Facebook data isn’t really controlled by you: it’s hosted on Mark Zuckerberg’s servers. Facebook administrators can do anything they like with it, because they own the servers, and so they own your data. It’s not really free, because it’s centralised. A social media platform built using blockchain would be different. Your posts would become part of the public blockchain record, and every user of the platform would have their own copy.

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p.170 ‘Sharing images of ourselves . . .’ http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/05/opinion-naked-sexting/. p.170 ‘Viewers respond – sometimes positively . . .’ Like most online communities, there are rules: ‘no random porn dumps’, ‘post pictures of yourself!’ and of course, ‘be respectful to each other’. p.172 ‘In 2011, a Facebook group . . .’ Facebook was originally called Facemash. Mark Zuckerberg and his university friends wanted to rate the pictures of female students they’d managed to grab – without permission, of course – from the Harvard University files. Facemash placed a photo of female students next to each other and asked users to vote on who they thought was the best looking, with an algorithm slowly pushing certain girls up or down the list.

Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet
by Andrew Blum
Published 28 May 2012

On the morning of Google’s public offering, in August 2004, the crowd at the café on our corner was electrified—not, presumably, because they themselves were getting richer by the moment (although maybe), but because it suddenly made everything seem possible again. Indeed, it was that same summer when Mark Zuckerberg moved his fledgling company, then known as The Facebook, from his dorm room at Harvard to a sublet house in Palo Alto. It wasn’t big news at the time—the only person I knew on Facebook then was my sister-in-law, still in college—but it was clear that it made perfect sense. As E. B. White said of New York, this was the place you came if you were willing to be lucky.

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Or Eddie Diaz, who, after spending all night underneath the Manhattan streets, headed home for a quick shower before going back out again for his wife’s birthday. Or Ken Patchett setting down his giant mug of coffee to read the text message that arrived from his son—a sniper in the air force—who at that moment was sitting in a transport plane on the tarmac in Qatar. These guys aren’t Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg. They didn’t invent anything, reshape any industries, or make a whole lot of money. They worked inside the global network and made it work. But they lived locally, as most of us do. What I understood when I arrived home was that the Internet wasn’t a physical world or a virtual world, but a human world.

Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution
by Fred Vogelstein
Published 12 Nov 2013

Clients are now creating games, turning it into a book and then a movie. The agency now has a new media department. Apps are getting developed. It’s very dynamic.” Here’s an example. Lady Gaga’s next album, ArtPop, won’t be issued initially as a CD or digital download but as a mobile app. Her manager, Troy Carter, has a lot more in common with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg than with the traditional rock-star managers of old. He’s one of the first to use social media as the primary marketing vehicle for his client. In addition, he is fast becoming known as one of the savviest high-tech angel investors around, with early stakes in apps such as music service Spotify, taxi service Uber, and news service Summly (just bought by Yahoo!).

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* * * In mid-May 2013, at the end of a marathon keynote presentation to open its conference for software developers, Google served up a surprise to its exhausted listeners. At the three-hour mark, Larry Page, the company’s publicity-shy CEO, came out to deliver remarks and take questions from the audience. Page isn’t a rock star CEO as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates once were, or as Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook and Larry Ellison at Oracle continue to be. In fact, Page’s appearance was notable for the exact opposite reason: few could remember the last time they had seen him center stage. He has been Google’s CEO for two years and is one of its cofounders. But during that entire fifteen-year period—Google was founded in 1998—he has taken pains to avoid the limelight.

The Trouble With Billionaires
by Linda McQuaig
Published 1 May 2013

In taking this position, we are not denying the enormous contribution made by some of the mega-rich, including innovators such as Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. These men have truly changed the way people live today – a fact that perhaps puts them in a category quite different to, say, the stars of the handbag industry or the world of cable TV sports. Bill Gates may be the hardest case to contest, given that he is credited with nothing less than making the computer revolution accessible to hundreds of millions of people and donating billions of dollars to worthwhile causes. We will look at his case in more detail later. For now, though, let’s take a quick look at Mark Zuckerberg, who became a multi-billionaire in his twenties by inventing the social media network Facebook, which has an estimated five hundred million users worldwide.

Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It)
by Salim Ismail and Yuri van Geest
Published 17 Oct 2014

It allows a machine to discover new patterns without being exposed to any historical or training data. Leading startups in this space are DeepMind, bought by Google in early 2014 for $500 million, back when DeepMind had just thirteen employees, and Vicarious, funded with investment from Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg. Twitter, Baidu, Microsoft and Facebook are also heavily invested in this area. Deep Learning algorithms rely on discovery and self-indexing, and operate in much the same way that a baby learns first sounds, then words, then sentences and even languages. As an example: In June 2012, a team at Google X built a neural network of 16,000 computer processors with one billion connections.

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Furthermore, he said, all corporate planning efforts attempt to scale efficiency and predictability, meaning they work to create static—or at least controlled-growth—environments in the belief that they will reduce risk. But in today’s fast-changing world, Seely Brown continued, just the opposite is true. Mark Zuckerberg agrees, noting, “The biggest risk is not taking any risk.” Constant experimentation and process iteration are now the only ways to reduce risk. Large numbers of bottom-up ideas, properly filtered, always trump top-down thinking, no matter the industry or organization. Seely Brown and Hagel call this “scalable learning,” and given the growth rates of ExOs, it is their only possible strategy.

Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think
by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger and Kenneth Cukier
Published 5 Mar 2013

FlyOnTime.us highlights how an entity that does not collect or control information flows, like a search engine or big retailer, can still obtain and use data to create value. Valuing the priceless Whether open to the public or locked away in corporate vaults, data’s value is hard to measure. Consider the events of Friday, May 18, 2012. On that day, Facebook’s 28-year-old founder Mark Zuckerberg symbolically rang NASDAQ’s opening bell from the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California. The world’s biggest social network—which boasted around one out of every ten people on the planet as a member—began its new life as a public company. The stock immediately jumped 11 percent, as many new technology stocks do on their first day of trading.

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Google’s obsession with such data for HR purposes is especially queer considering that the company’s founders are products of Montessori schools, which emphasize learning, not grades. And it repeats the mistakes of past technology powerhouses that vaunted people’s résumés above their actual abilities. Would Larry and Sergey, as PhD dropouts, have stood a chance of becoming managers at the legendary Bell Labs? By Google’s standards, not Bill Gates, nor Mark Zuckerberg, nor Steve Jobs would have been hired, since they lack college degrees. The firm’s reliance on data sometimes seems overblown. Marissa Mayer, when she was one of its top executives, once ordered staff to test 41 gradations of blue to see which ones people used more, to determine the color of a toolbar on the site.

Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists
by Julia Ebner
Published 20 Feb 2020

Their employees, executives, and their users are all afraid to express themselves for fear of being fired or shamed by a dishonest and disgusting establishment media oligarchy.7 They have picked a strong opponent. Facebook counts 2 billion monthly users, has purchased more than fifty companies and holds over 70 per cent of the market share. Sounds like a monopoly? ‘It certainly doesn’t feel like that,’ Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Senator Lindsey Graham during his 2018 US Senate hearing.8 His response raised much laughter, although it wasn’t entirely wrong: there is indeed a growing niche audience that is exploring alternative solutions. As the big tech firms come increasingly under fire – whether in the US Senate, the EU, the British Home Office or the German Ministry for Justice – non-state actors ranging from radical libertarians to extremist users spot a unique chance to woo away unhappy clients.

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Palo Alto, which hosts the prestigious Stanford University, is home to the founding fathers of today’s new media and modern communication technologies. The former house of Apple founder Steve Jobs is situated a few hundred metres from the homes of Google co-founder Larry Page and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Menlo Park, Facebook’s international headquarters, is just a five-minute drive away. I enter the closed-off campus, immediately paralysed by the sensory overload. Are you hungry? Choose between authentic Thai curries, American burgers and exotic ice creams. Bored? Drop by at the computer game arcade to play Crash Bandicoot.

The Clock Mirage: Our Myth of Measured Time
by Joseph Mazur
Published 20 Apr 2020

“Every day, I put money—millions of dollars—on futures and credit-default swaps. It’s a legal crapshoot, but you gotta know what you’re doing. I can lose a bundle in one second, and make lots of money in the next.” I thought about what that trader meant by that last sentence, and then imagined the amounts Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, George Soros, Michael Bloomberg, and Warren Buffett gained or lost in just fifteen seconds. The digital clock on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange is somewhat precise, yet not connected to the trading bell. The opening bell of the exchange is rung by a human at almost precisely 9:29:45 a.m.

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Such high-frequency trades placed from locations all around the world account for almost 70 percent of the trade volume in the United States. According to Forbes, the net worth of Jeff Bezos and his family in 2019 was about $131 billion, of Bill Gates about $96.5 billion, Warren Buffett about $82.5 billion, Mark Zuckerberg about $62.3 billion, and Michael Bloomberg about $55.5 billion.1 These are staggering amounts of money. Just to give you an impression of how large these numbers are, consider how much money is gained or lost in just fifteen seconds of a normal day when the stock market is open. If we assume that as little as 30 percent of Bezos’s money is tied up in securities and exchange investments, Bezos could either gain or lose about $4.4 million every fifteen seconds, on average.

Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?
by Thomas Frank
Published 15 Mar 2016

It is the reason Northeastern University has a “venture accelerator” it calls IDEA; that Harvard has the famous Innovation Center; that Boston University’s business school has a Department of Strategy and Innovation; that its College of Engineering has a Product Innovation Center; and that one of its colleges offers a certificate in Innovation and Entrepreneurship. At Harvard, where I met innovation guru Clayton Christensen ambling across a parking lot, the dream of being the next Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates is almost palpable. As well as the usual incubators and accelerators, the school boasts a $100 million venture capital fund that is focused on commercializing the ideas of former students.19 One of this fund’s press releases quotes a Harvard professor on how this heap of money advances the school’s “mission,” which today (apparently) includes “marshaling significant resources to help create thrilling companies.”

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An aura of youthful lightheartedness seems to envelop every interaction between the president and the techies. After all, one notable manifestation of Obama’s outreach to this powerful industry was his farcical 2015 interview with YouTube comedienne GloZell Green. Another was this famous exchange with Mark Zuckerberg, in the course of a “town hall” meeting at Facebook headquarters during which Obama proposed that the rich should pay higher taxes than they currently do: Zuckerberg: “I’m cool with that.” Obama: “I know you’re OK with that.”3 In the 1980s and ’90s, Silicon Valley was not a particularly Democratic industry.

Picnic Comma Lightning: In Search of a New Reality
by Laurence Scott
Published 11 Jul 2018

Speculative fictions of the near-future envision the eerie signs of an artificial life form’s emerging sentience: a lingering, knowing stare from their synthetic eyes, the merest smirk at the outer edge of their polymer lips. Programmes such as Humans, Black Mirror and Westworld, as well as the films Her and Ex Machina, explore artificial life grappling with the subtlest shades of feeling, broadcast in an era in which Mark Zuckerberg has yet to trust us with a ‘Dislike’ button. Hanson Robotics’s more recent invention is the robot Sophia, who in 2017 was awarded Saudi Arabian citizenship. In a scripted interview, Sophia announced in that stilted, metallic robot voice we’ve known for ever: ‘I want to14 live and work with humans.

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Rowell & Co., 1870); ‘all the things …’, Marcus Mustafa, quoted in Jamie Carter, ‘How mining human emotions could become the next big thing in tech’, www.techradar.com, 20th April 2015; ‘You can look …’, see Mitra Sorrells, ‘How Jaguar Is Using Technology to Visualise the Mood at Wimbledon’, www.bizbash.com, 7th July 2015. 12 ‘We are now …’, a version of these arguments first appeared in ‘A Sentimental Portrait’; ‘It’s a big …’, Rafael Nadal interview with TennisTV, August 2017. 13 ‘a comedy of …’, this section has been adapted from my ‘Openings’ column for the Financial Times, ‘As robots feel empathy, we get new emojis’, 23rd October 2015. Thanks to John Sunyer for commissioning and editing the piece. 14 ‘I want to …’, see ‘Interview with the Life-Like Hot Robot Named Sophia’, CNBC YouTube Channel, published 25th October 2017; ‘What they really …’, from Mark Zuckerberg’s live-streamed talk during a Facebook ‘Town Hall’ meeting, 15th September 2015. 15 ‘simple’, Pepper interview with Joanna Stern and Geoffrey A. Fowler, WSJDLive2015; ‘It was like …’, O. Henry, ‘The Gift of the Magi’ (1905), in 100 Selected Stories (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 1995). 16 ‘scanned the headlines …’, Patrick Hamilton, Hangover Square (Penguin Books: London, 2001 [1941]). 17 ‘It’s sometimes difficult ….’, Gérard Biard, quoted in Mukul Devichand, ‘How the world was changed by the slogan “Je Suis Charlie”’, www.bbc.co.uk, 3rd January 2016. 18 ‘“shattered” and “pierced”’, Andrew O’Hagan, ‘A City of Prose’, London Review of Books, 4th August 2005. 19 ‘a time which …’, Doris Lessing, A Small Personal Voice: Essays, Reviews, Interviews, ed.

Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World
by Meredith Broussard
Published 19 Apr 2018

This usually takes the form of wanting a robot butler to attend to your every need. (I will confess to having had many late-night undergraduate conversations about the practical and ethical considerations of having a robot butler.) A disproportionate number of the people who make tech fall into the camp of desperately wanting Hollywood robots to be real. When Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg built an AI-based home automation system, he named it Jarvis. One excellent illustration of the confusion between real and imaginary AI happened to me at the NYC Media Lab’s annual symposium, a kind of science fair for grownups. I was giving a demo of an AI system I built. I had a table with a monitor and a laptop hooked up to show my demo; three feet away was another table with another demo by an art school undergraduate who had created a data visualization.

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If somebody appeared who had the talent, the magic touch, they would fit in.” The TMRC and Minsky’s lab were later immortalized in Stewart Brand’s The Media Lab and Steven Levy’s Hackers: The Heroes of the Computer Revolution, in addition to many other publications.6 The hacker ethic is also what inspired Mark Zuckerberg’s first Facebook motto: “Move fast and break things.” Minsky was part of Zuckerberg’s curriculum at Harvard. Minsky and a collaborator, John McCarthy, organized the very first conference on artificial intelligence, at the Dartmouth Math Department in 1956. The two went on to found the Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT, which evolved into the MIT Media Lab, which remains a global epicenter for creative uses of technology and has generated ideas for everyone from George Lucas to Steve Jobs to Alan Alda to Penn and Teller.

Upscale: What It Takes to Scale a Startup. By the People Who've Done It.
by James Silver
Published 15 Nov 2018

While he concedes that ‘it’s a worry some founders have, although not every founder’, Chandratillake says that it has driven some very high-profile founders to opt for ‘slightly paranoid share structures’, which are popular in the US and afford them some protection against being ousted. Since Mark Zuckerberg, among others, insulated himself as Facebook’s leader, the two founders of Snap - Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy - have done the same thing. ‘They have this special class of shares which means they are in control, and if either of them passes away or leaves, the other gets control so they keep it between them,’ he says.

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And it should be the CEO or one of the founders who takes the lead. Lay out the facts. Be empathetic to those affected. And be very clear about what action you are urgently taking to fix things. Be visible and prepare for every negative question you might get asked. That’s the only way to regain the initiative - and your stakeholders’ trust. Mark Zuckerberg’s so-called apology tour, in the wake of Facebook’s 2018 data-harvesting scandal, followed this playbook to the letter. A whirlwind round of measured, mea culpa media interviews, combined with full-page newspaper advertisements apologising for a ‘breach of trust’, contained a storm, which had been fast-developing into a very serious threat.

Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization?
by Aaron Dignan
Published 1 Feb 2019

The pilot who goes through the OODA cycle in the shortest time prevails because his opponent is caught responding to situations that have already changed.” Back in the present, technological monopolies are putting this into practice, to lethal effect. Amazon now averages more than one software deployment every second. And on Reid Hoffman’s Masters of Scale podcast, Mark Zuckerberg shared how Facebook gets smarter every day. “At any given point in time, there isn’t just one version of Facebook running, there are probably 10,000. Any engineer at the company can basically decide that they want to test something. There are some rules on sensitive things, but [. . .] they can launch a version of Facebook not to the whole community, but maybe to 10,000 people or 50,000 people—whatever is necessary to get a good test of an experience.”

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“situations that have already changed”: Adrian Cho, The Jazz Process: Collaboration, Innovation, and Agility, Portable Documents (Boston: Pearson, 2010), 94. deployment every second: Wermer Vogels, “The Story of Apollo—Amazon’s Deployment Engine,” All Thing Distributed (blog), November 12, 2014, www.allthingsdistributed.com/2014/11/apollo-amazon-deployment-engine.html. “get a good test of an experience”: Andrea Huspeni, “Why Mark Zuckerberg Runs 10,000 Facebook Versions a Day,” Entrepreneur, accessed September 1, 2018, www.entrepreneur.com/article/294242. sure the trade-offs are real: Jordan Husney, “Strategic Prioritization Using ‘Even Over’ Statements,” Parabol (blog), Medium, October 22, 2017, https://focus.parabol.co/strategic-prioritization-using-even-over-statements-fb63e78e7b4d.

Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil
by Kenneth Cukier , Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Francis de Véricourt
Published 10 May 2021

We may believe the answer to our problems is to double down on human coordination in the future. All we need is to link together more and better. For the historian Yuval Noah Harari, human coordination marks not just the apex of our past but the elixir of our future. Speaking with Facebook’s boss Mark Zuckerberg in 2019, he argued, “We need global cooperation like never before because we are facing unprecedented global problems.” Yet this is only half the story. Inside every achievement is an idea; embedded in each monument is a mental model. Our economic, scientific, and social successes stem from our ability to comprehend and conceptualize, to see what is and what can be, and to connect our ideas with our actions.

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On Easy Solar: Easy Solar, “Easy Solar Raises $5M in Series A Equity and Debt Funding to Scale Operations in West Africa,” press release, September 30, 2020, https://www.pv-magazine.com/press-releases/easy-solar-raises-5m-in-series-a-equity-and-debt-funding-to-scale-operations-in-west-africa. Yuval Noah Harari on human cooperation: “A Conversation with Mark Zuckerberg and Yuval Noah Harari,” Facebook, April 26, 2019, transcript, https://about.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/transcript_-marks-personal-challenge-yuval-noah-harari.pdf. Looking into the mind: It is only recently (i.e., the late nineteenth century) that scholars have looked deeper into decision-making abilities.

Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for Our Wallets
by Brett Scott
Published 4 Jul 2022

Members of the US Congress sent a letter to Facebook asking it to officially halt development, and David Marcus was called in to testify. He quickly reverted to a geopolitical justification, arguing that Libra would be a US counterforce to Chinese digital payments platforms (a message that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg pushed too). Libra could be like a financial weapon, ensuring dollar hegemony extends beyond the realm of international trade, and into ordinary retail transactions between citizens within foreign countries. Nevertheless, the backlash towards its platform caused Facebook to back down and return to the drawing board.

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Morgan itself built its own DLT system called Quorum: Quorum has now been acquired by ConsenSys https://consensys.net/quorum/ NASDAQ has announced a partnership with R3: See R3 press release ‘Nasdaq to collaborate with R3 on institutional grade offerings for digital assets exchanges’, 29 April 2020, https://www.r3.com/press-media/nasdaq-to-collaborate-with-r3-on-institutional-grade-offerings-for-digital-assets-exchanges/ Tether tokens being partially ‘unbacked’: There is a large amount of reporting on the Tether controversy, but for an illustrative piece, see Nikhilesh De, ‘Tether Says Its Stablecoin Is “Fully Backed” Again’ Coindesk, 8 Nov. 2019, https://www.coindesk.com/tether-says-its-stablecoin-is-fully-backed-again to which Tether’s US dollar reserves could be moved: See Amy Castor, ‘The curious case of Tether: a complete timeline of events’, 17 Jan. 2019, https://amycastor.com/2019/01/17/the-curious-case-of-tether-a-complete-timeline-of-events/ crypto-dollar called USD Coin to you in return, via an Ethereum smart contract: See the FAQ on USD Coin here https://help.coinbase.com/en/coinbase/getting-started/crypto-education/usd-coin-usdc-faq headlines claiming that Libra would ‘destroy commercial and central banks’: Robert Johnson, ‘BitMEX CEO: “Libra Will Destroy Commercial & Central Banks”’, 2 July 2019, https://cryptodaily.co.uk/2019/07/bitmex-ceo-libra-will-destroy-commercial-central-banks arguing that Libra would be a US counterforce to Chinese digital payments platforms: read the testimony here https://financialservices.house.gov/uploadedfiles/hhrg-116-ba00-wstate-marcusd-20190717.pdf a message that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg pushed too: Josh Constine, ‘Facebook’s regulation dodge: Let us, or China will’, TechCrunch, 17 July 2019, https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/17/facebook-or-china/ One major central bank think-tank surveyed twenty-three central banks: OMFIF, Retail CBDCs: The next payments frontier, https://www.omfif.org/ibm19/ Conclusion In the UK this has worked, with cash usage plummeting by over 50 per cent in 2020: This figure is based on Enryo research.

The Capitalist Manifesto
by Johan Norberg
Published 14 Jun 2023

and AOL were later bought by the telecom company Verizon, which, after large losses, recently sold them for $5 billion. Back then, Amazon was a loss-making new online bookstore. Just one year earlier, the venerable investment bank Lehman Brothers had warned that Amazon was incompetent, bleeding money and would probably go bankrupt within a year (eight years later, Lehman Brothers was bankrupt). In 2001, Mark Zuckerberg had not left Harvard to start Facebook – because he had not even started at Harvard. The social networks that ruled were Sixdegrees, AIM, Friendster and most importantly MySpace, which was so hot that Google saw it as a breakthrough to get a three-year advertising agreement with the network in 2006, which was signed at a glamorous party on Pebble Beach with such guests as Bono and Tony Blair.

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Research on the US economy shows that market concentration grew the most in sectors where regulations increased the fastest.31 It is in this context that we should see Facebook’s new-found interest in abolishing section 230 of the Federal Communications Decency Act, which means that American platforms are allowed to moderate content without making themselves open to legal action for what others publish on their site. Without this, platforms would be stopped from taking any action against even hateful speech and harassment if they didn’t have the resources to engage in very strict moderation to make sure that nothing ever slips through. Mark Zuckerberg’s openness to abolishing it was greeted by some as a sign that he had become enlightened and realized that Facebook needs to be monitored more closely. In fact, it’s just the latest round in the old game of increasing your competitors’ costs. Reading, examining and moderating everything posted by the public almost in real time would be very expensive even for those who have Facebook’s entire infrastructure and 60,000 employees, but what is more important to Zuckerberg is that it would be completely impossible for smaller rivals.

Rule of the Robots: How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Everything
by Martin Ford
Published 13 Sep 2021

Vicarious’s robots have a remarkable ability to improve at their assigned tasks—getting measurably better within hours of their initial operation.25 The objective is to create robots capable of not just picking items from inventory shelves or bins, but to go beyond that and design machines with genuinely versatile manipulative ability, including functions such as sorting and packing items, replacing the workers who tend factory machines by feeding parts in and out and performing detailed assembly work. Vicarious has raised at least $150 million in venture funding and is backed by some of most prominent names in Silicon Valley, including Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel and—as you might have expected—Jeff Bezos. In parallel with its progress in artificial intelligence, Vicarious is also pursuing an innovative “robots as a service” business model, which may eventually prove to be disruptive across a range of industries. Rather than building or selling its own robots, Vicarious instead acquires industrial robots from companies like ABB, integrates them with its proprietary artificial intelligence software and then rents the robots out to companies in a way that’s roughly comparable to the way a temporary employment agency might place human workers.

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However, the potential for malicious use of the technology is inescapable and, evidence already suggests for many tech savvy individuals, irresistible. Widely available deepfake videos created with humorous or educational intent demonstrate what is possible. You can find numerous fake videos featuring high-profile individuals like Mark Zuckerberg saying things they would presumably never say—at least in public. One of the most famous examples was created by the actor and comedian Jordan Peele, who is known for his impersonation of Barak Obama’s voice, in collaboration with BuzzFeed. In Peele’s public service video intended to make the public aware of the looming threat from deepfakes, Obama says things like “President Trump is a total and complete dipshit.”3 In this instance, the voice is Peele’s imitation of Obama, and the technique used alters an existing video by manipulating President Obama’s lips so they synchronize with Peele’s speech.

Vassal State
by Angus Hanton
Published 25 Mar 2024

He, too, claims to have started the ‘everything store’ in a garage, which feels a bit of a stretch as he spent the previous ten years as a well-paid executive on Wall Street and received $300,000 of start-up funding from his parents. Bezos’s origin story includes the claim that to save money in the early days, rather than buying desks, he used cheap wooden doors supported on legs made from four-by-four timber.36 These founders’ stories add to the celebrity status given to the men who still lead their companies, such as Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Benioff and Elon Musk. But the star-struck reporting on business celebrities can easily overlook the essential part of the story, as happened with Musk’s purchase of Twitter/X late in 2022. The BBC reported extensively on whether Musk paid too much, on the will-he-won’t-he takeover process and on whether he was employing enough content moderators.37 The real story, at least in the UK, should be why the ‘town square’, which sits at the heart of British political life, is owned and controlled – and reportedly manipulated – from California.

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Work is made to be efficient and, crucially, customers are entranced and then entrapped as far as possible in long-standing and profitable relationships. All this has been seeded and then grown in the British economy, where each US company has similar objectives: to find engines of profit and then pull them apart, merge them or supercharge them to create further growth. That is why Britain’s new boss is not Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg. It is not an individual or partnership, but the US corporation itself – an entity perfectly positioned to dominate any market in which it competes. Backed by the largest economy in the history of the world, staffed by managers who train and compete for supremacy over decades, US corporations approach efficiency with scientific ruthlessness and patiently invest time and resources to dominate their competition.

If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities
by Benjamin R. Barber
Published 5 Nov 2013

It proffered a horizontal rather than a vertical technology, connecting people directly with one another. It disintermediated authority and gave birth to a crowdsourcing wiki-logic in which knowledge would be subjected to democratic (critics would say anarchic) processes. Yet in application, the technological dreams were diminished. Social media as imagined by a college sophomore named Mark Zuckerberg (obsessed with rating girls and sharing gossip rather than generating a new mode of uplifting civic and social interaction of value to educators, deliberative democrats, or creative artists) instead produced the popular blockbuster Facebook—a product in which, though it defined social media, neither civic culture nor the culture of cities was visible.

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These companies are abetted by the enormous publicity campaigns they run to market their brands, advertising the consumer virtues of pads, pods, and play-stations and boasting about the democratic architecture of their wizardry. Billionaires like Bill Gates (Microsoft), the late Steve Jobs (Apple), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), and Jeff Bezos (Amazon) are pop celebrities and media heroes. As such, though they regularly swallow up their rivals (critics talk about “Facebookistan”), they are rarely subjected to the harsh spotlight once shone on earlier tycoons such as John D. Rockefeller or Andrew Carnegie.25 The term plutocrat is widely used today to disparage Wall Street and big finance, and is occasionally employed to batter traditional media bosses like Rupert Murdoch or Silvio Berlusconi.

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But more pointedly, in the civic realm, the interactivity that could enable us to control new media and communicate with one another actually ends up (for the same reason) allowing the new media to watch and control us; allowing us to influence each other, sometimes in ways we don’t even notice. While the web hosts a plethora of independent sites and critical blogs of real value to public debate, they are often overshadowed or simply buried by a cacophony of digital noise and the din of big companies.30 Sharing is a great virtue of new media and has become Mark Zuckerberg’s defining ideal: he wishes to help us do together just about anything that can be done. Except, unfortunately, politics and civics, which are activities that must be done together. Yet in a world of polarized ideology and divisive rhetoric, they rarely are. Jeff Jarvis has celebrated at book length how the “publicness” of sharing compensates any loss of privacy.31 Lori Anderson writes about the flip side of Internet sharing, that it is not always voluntary.32 Collecting and sharing information on consumers and citizens alike is a multibillion-dollar business whose primary object is the commercial exploitation of consumers.

Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War
by Paul Scharre
Published 23 Apr 2018

.’”: Ibid. 241 AI risk “doesn’t concern me”: Sharon Gaudin, “Ballmer Says Machine Learning Will Be the next Era of Computer Science,” Computerworld, November 13, 2014, http://www.computerworld.com/article/2847453/ballmer-says-machine-learning-will-be-the-next-era-of-computer-science.html. 241 “There won’t be an intelligence explosion”: Jeff Hawkins, “The Terminator Is Not Coming. The Future Will Thank Us,” Recode, March 2, 2015, https://www.recode.net/2015/3/2/11559576/the-terminator-is-not-coming-the-future-will-thank-us. 241 Mark Zuckerberg: Alanna Petroff, “Elon Musk Says Mark Zuckerberg’s Understanding of AI Is ‘Limited,’ “ CNN.com, July 25, 2017. 241 “not concerned about self-awareness”: David Brumley, interview, November 24, 2016. 242 “has been completely contradictory”: Stuart Armstrong, interview, November 18, 2016. 242 poker became the latest game to fall: Olivia Solon, “Oh the Humanity!

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It’s hard to dismiss people like Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk out of hand, but that doesn’t mean they’re right. Other tech moguls have pushed back against AI fears. Steve Ballmer, former CEO of Microsoft, has said AI risk “doesn’t concern me.” Jeff Hawkins, inventor of the Palm Pilot, has argued, “There won’t be an intelligence explosion. There is no existential threat.” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that those who “drum up these doomsday scenarios” are being “irresponsible.” David Brumley of Carnegie Mellon, who is on the cutting edge of autonomy in cybersecurity, similarly told me he was “not concerned about self-awareness.” Brumley compared the idea to the fear that a car, if driven enough miles on highways, would spontaneously start driving itself.

We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet's Culture Laboratory
by Christine Lagorio-Chafkin
Published 1 Oct 2018

Wong had become a power contributor on the Q&A site Quora, developing a reputation as a Silicon Valley insider who frequently and unceremoniously pulled back the curtain. In response to queries from strangers, he discussed Facebook and other tech companies with a remarkable earnestness. He was blunt, and that read as honest. For instance, when a Quora user asked who ran Mark Zuckerberg’s personal Facebook page, Wong, who’d been Facebook’s engineering director, wrote simply, “He does.” On the day of his AMA, Wong logged in as u/yishan and saw the questions rolling in. How would he fix Reddit’s remarkably slow and ineffective search function? (He wrote he’d work to make it faster and more accurate.)

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Certain conservative subreddits (such as r/The_Donald and r/Conservative, the two major hubs, and r/HillaryForPrison, an extreme anti-Clinton forum) were home to 80 percent of all fake news on Reddit, during and after the 2016 election cycle, they determined. From the outset of Trump’s presidency, instances remained high. Reddit wouldn’t admit anything of this sort publicly until six months later. Huffman would post in April 2018, as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg testified before Congress, that Reddit had identified 944 accounts that linked to and disseminated Russian propaganda meant to sow discord among Americans. He wrote that the majority of the accounts had been banned in 2015 and 2016. Regardless, thousands of posts in the lead-up to the 2016 election had shared links to phony websites created by the notorious Russian troll hub the Internet Research Agency to spread divisive propaganda.

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In other words, what the Russian trolls had set out to do had worked to trick Americans. Huffman wrote that “the biggest risk we face as Americans is our own ability to discern reality from nonsense, and this is a burden we all bear.” Banning propaganda would not be enough. Huffman admitted in a comment in an April post on Reddit that he was glad he wasn’t in Mark Zuckerberg’s shoes testifying before Congress. (Reddit said it had turned over its findings to congressional investigators.) Such issues as requests from federal investigators would not be easily solved for Reddit. Back in October 2017, Reddit had filed a federal disclosure that in July it had hired a lobbying firm called the Franklin Square Group, which works with Alphabet, Apple, Dropbox, and Uber, among many other public and private tech companies.

If Then: How Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future
by Jill Lepore
Published 14 Sep 2020

By “human behavior,” they meant the behavior of men; by “artificial intelligence,” they meant their own intelligence—a fantasy of their own intelligence—which they intended to graft onto a machine. They did not consider the intelligence of women to be intelligence; they did not consider a female understanding of human behavior to be knowledge. They built a machine to control and predict what they could not. They are the long-dead, white-whiskered grandfathers of Mark Zuckerberg and Sergey Brin and Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen and Elon Musk. The Simulmatics Corporation is a missing link in the history of technology, a clasp that fastens the first half of the twentieth century to the beginning of the twenty-first, a future in which humanity’s every move is predicted by algorithms that attempt to direct and influence our each and every decision through the simulation of our very selves, this particular hell.

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University of Michigan law professor Arthur Miller sounded an alarm in the pages of the Atlantic, warning of a grave danger to privacy: “a central computer might become the heart of a government surveillance system that would lay bare our finances, our associations, or our mental and physical health to government inquisitors or even to casual observers.”16 In an essay in Playboy, another legal scholar warned of the rise of “data surveillance.”17 But it was an anonymous law review article that offered the most poignant and prescient warning: “The fabric of human social relationships, dependent upon each person’s having only limited knowledge about other people, could be rent by leaks from the data center.”18 Each of these commentators missed something important, something that had come up at the hearings before Cornelius Gallagher’s committee only to be dismissed, not least because members of Congress tended not to have the most sophisticated knowledge of the latest developments in computer technology, or even of the not-so-latest developments. This remained the case for decades. In 2018, at hearings about Facebook’s handling of users’ personal data, eighty-four-year-old Senator Orrin Hatch asked baby-faced, thirty-three-year-old Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, “How do you sustain a business model in which users don’t pay for your service?” Zuckerberg blinked three times, apparently shocked that Hatch could know so little about so basic a matter. “Senator,” he said, “we run ads.”19 During the hearings Gallagher held in the summer of 1966, Paul Baran, a very sharp computer scientist from RAND, said that it didn’t matter what Congress decided about whether or not to build a National Data Center, because data would be aggregated, would become big data, with or without the federal government.

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What obligation does the collector, or holder, or analyst of data hold over the subject of the data? Can data be shared? Can it be sold?20 Congress didn’t answer these questions, or even debate them. Gallagher’s committee doesn’t seem to have understood what Baran was saying about the coming network of networks, any more than Orrin Hatch in 2018 understood what Mark Zuckerberg said about how Facebook works. Instead of shifting the debate to the nature and ownership and privacy of data itself, Congress simply tabled the proposal for a National Data Center. By 1968, the idea had been shelved, another casualty of the disintegration of Johnson’s Great Society. No building was ever built, no agency ever established, no federal regulations on data devised.

Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks
by Scott J. Shapiro

,” Wired, February 23, 2005, https://www.wired.com/2005/02/paris-hilton-hacked-or-not/. Barack Obama admitted: Nick Statt, “Obama, Serious about Cybersecurity, Also Delivers Laughs,” CNET.com, February 13, 2015, https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/obama-serious-about-cybersecurity-also-delivers-laughs. Mark Zuckerberg’s Twitter: John Leyden, “Mark Zuckerberg’s Twitter and Pinterest Password Was ‘dadada,’” The Register, June 6, 2016, https://www.theregister.com/2016/06/06/facebook_zuckerberg_social_media_accnt_pwnage. Kanye West’s pass code: Jason Parker, “Kanye West Meets with Trump, Reveals iPhone Passcode Is 000000,” CNET.com, October 11, 2018, https://www.cnet.com/culture/internet/kanye-west-meets-with-trump-reveals-iphone-passcode-is-000000.

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Hackers could have infiltrated these servers through the very web that allowed legitimate users to access their data. The simplest way to infiltrate these web portals would be by guessing passwords. Famous people have been known to choose extremely weak passwords. Barack Obama admitted that his password used to be password; until he was hacked in 2012, Mark Zuckerberg’s Twitter and Pinterest password was dadada; Kanye West’s pass code for his iPhone was 000000, which cameras picked up when he opened his iPhone in the Oval Office chatting with Donald Trump. On his blog Good Morning Silicon Valley, the journalist John Paczkowski wrote, “$5 and a Swarovski-encrusted dunce cap says [Paris’s] password was Tinkerbell,” the name of her favorite pet Chihuahua, whom she constantly carried around with her.

A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas
by Warren Berger
Published 4 Mar 2014

As Ito puts it, “These days it’s easier and less expensive to just try out your ideas than to figure out if you should try them out.” What Ito is doing in his lab is also happening at companies such as Google and Facebook, and throughout much of the tech industry worldwide. At Facebook, founder Mark Zuckerberg has64 elevated the idea of quickly building and testing ideas to a sacred principle that Zuckerberg has described as the Hacker Way. In a letter to potential Facebook investors at the time of the company’s 2012 IPO, Zuckerberg explained that while the word hacking has some negative connotations, at Facebook it means “building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done.”

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Joe Sharkey, “Reinventing the Suitcase by Adding the Wheel,” New York Times, October 4, 2010. 63 As the writer Peter Sims noted in . . . Peter Sims, “The Number One Enemy of Creativity: Fear of Failure,” Harvard Business Review, October 5, 2012; see also, Peter Sims, “Daring to Stumble on the Road to Discovery,” New York Times, August 7, 2011. 64 At Facebook, founder Mark Zuckerberg has . . . Zuckerberg published his manifesto “The Hacker Way” as part of his letter to investors during Facebook’s IPO in early 2012. Wired reprinted the complete letter, http://www.wired.com/business/2012/02/zuck-letter/. 65 “the trick is to go from one failure . . .” This quote is worded differently depending on where you find it.

Most Likely to Succeed: Preparing Our Kids for the Innovation Era
by Tony Wagner and Ted Dintersmith
Published 17 Aug 2015

She petitioned her university multiple times to be able to design her own major that focused on leadership and organizations. The university denied her requests. Rebecca felt frustrated by the lack of support and the pattern that she saw emerging. She thought, “You did this to Bill Gates, then you did this to Mark Zuckerberg. You have done this to every creative entrepreneur here. All we do is drop out with a bitter taste in our mouth. I am a better bet than my peer that’s going to go to Wall Street. There are more and more entrepreneurs, and yes they’re risky, but when they win big, they win bigger than everyone else.”

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In the past couple of years, attendance rates have jumped dramatically. Kids now come to school on snow days. And during lunch, groups of kids take their lunch trays to sessions tutoring them on things like writing skills. The Newark school system has long been viewed as Ground Zero for education reformers. Several, including Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, the Waltons, and Eli Broad, set out to transform Newark schools and make them a national model. Zuckerberg announced a $100 million gift to Newark education on the Oprah Winfrey show, timed to coincide with the documentary Waiting for Superman. But, as the New Yorker reported, this heavily funded reform initiative accomplished nothing other than lining the pockets of consultants.

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies
by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee
Published 20 Jan 2014

Leena Rao, “Facebook Will Grow Headcount Quickly In 2013 To Develop Money-Making Products, Total Expenses Will Jump By 50 Percent,” TechCrunch, January 30, 2013, http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/30/zuck-facebook-will-grow-headcount-quickly-in-2013-to-develop-future-money-making-products/ (accessed August 10, 2013). 7. Brad Stone and Ashlee Vance, “Facebook’s ‘Next Billion’: A Q&A With Mark Zuckerberg,” Bloomberg Businessweek, October 4, 2012, http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-10-04/facebooks-next-billion-a-q-and-a-with-mark-zuckerberg (accessed September 11, 2013). 8. “Kodak’s Growth and Decline: A Timeline,” Rochester Business Journal, January 19, 2012, http://www.rbj.net/print_article.asp?aID=190078. 9. According to an analysis of 2006 tax returns in the United States by Emmanuel Saez of University of California, Berkeley. 10.

Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet
by Claire L. Evans
Published 6 Mar 2018

“were so polite and nice”: Rhine, interview with the author, February 8, 2017. “The original model had been”: Rhine, interview with the author, February 21, 2017. “Facebook is good because it creates community”: Max Read, “Does Even Mark Zuckerberg Know What Facebook Is?” New York, October 1, 2017, http://nymag.com/selectall/2017/10/does-even-mark-zuckerberg-know-what-facebook-is.html. the year the Web broke: Myra M. Hart and Sarah Thorp, “Women.com,” HBS 9-800-216 (Boston: Harvard Business School Publishing, 2000), 4. “I always wanted to make this”: Pack, interview with the author, March 3, 2017.

Experience on Demand: What Virtual Reality Is, How It Works, and What It Can Do
by Jeremy Bailenson
Published 30 Jan 2018

WALKING IN THE SHOES OF ANOTHER 4. WORLDVIEW 5. TIME MACHINES FOR TRAUMA 6. ABSENCE MAKES THE PAIN GROW FAINTER 7. BRINGING SOCIAL BACK TO THE NETWORK 8. STORIES IN THE ROUND 9. REVERSE FIELD TRIPS 10. HOW TO BUILD GOOD VR CONTENT Acknowledgments Notes Index EXPERIENCE ON DEMAND INTRODUCTION Mark Zuckerberg is about to walk the plank. It’s March 2014, and we’re standing in the multisensory room of the Virtual Human Interactive Lab (VHIL) at Stanford University. I’m making last-minute adjustments to his head mounted display (HMD), the bulky, expensive, helmet-like device that is about to take him into another world.

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However, the anonymity that was supposed to protect people’s speech and identity has also made possible a powerful subculture of Internet trolls who take delight in making other people miserable—sometimes because they disagree with what a person is saying and sometimes for sport. If innovators like Mark Zuckerberg and Philip Rosedale are right, and public debate shifts to virtual spaces, we can only guess as to what these encounters will be like. Avatar bodies cannot hurt you, but their perceived physicality and voice-carrying capabilities do make a greater impact than a comment on an article or a Tweet, and indeed there have already been allegations of sexual harassment and avatar trolling in some early virtual environments.

The Internet Trap: How the Digital Economy Builds Monopolies and Undermines Democracy
by Matthew Hindman
Published 24 Sep 2018

Started by Adam Goldberg, an engineering and computer science student, Campus Network (initially called CU Community) launched before Facebook. It began with a head start in features and functionality. Blogging and cross-profile discussion were built into Campus Network from the start, while these features came later to Facebook. In Goldberg’s telling, Sean Parker urged Mark Zuckerberg to purchase Campus Network and to hire Goldberg. So why was Facebook ultimately successful, while Campus Network ended up shutting down in 2006? Journalist Christopher Beam suggests several possible factors that may have outweighed Campus Network’s early lead.82 One is money. Facebook quickly pursued financial backing, while Campus Network turned down advertisers and declined to seek venture capital funding.

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Online sellers such as Amazon.com and eBay pioneered this technology,4 with other digital giants close behind. News sites such as Google News, cnn, and Yahoo! News now also rely heavily on learning algorithms. Facebook in particular has emphasized hyperpersonalization, with Facebook founder and ceo Mark Zuckerberg stating that “a squirrel dying in your front yard may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.”5 With the rise of the iPad and its imitators, Negroponte’s idea that all of this personalized content would be sent to a thin, lightweight, “magical” tablet device has been partially realized, too.

The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America—and How to Undo His Legacy
by David Gelles
Published 30 May 2022

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, flush with a $50 billion endowment made possible by Microsoft’s early monopolizing, tried to use technology to overhaul curriculums in Washington State. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has launched the Bezos Academy, a preschool designed to cultivate entrepreneurial thinking. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg donated $100 million to revamp the Newark public school system, an effort later deemed unsuccessful. And Adam Neumann, the WeWork cofounder, started a high-priced school for his children and their friends and let his wife design the curriculum. These expensive efforts were largely unsuccessful, making clear that improving how children learn and teachers teach takes more than money.

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In 1913, the top 0.00001 percent was represented by four of the wealthiest men ever to walk the planet; John D. Rockefeller, Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Carnegie, and George Fisher Baker accounted for some 0.85 percent of the total wealth in the United States. In 2020, the 0.00001 percent was represented by just three men: Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg, who together accounted for some 1.35 percent of total U.S. wealth. Three men who founded technology companies possessed as much wealth as the entire bottom half of the United States combined. The wealthiest 0.01 percent of American households, around 18,000 families, also possess proportionally more capital than they did in the Gilded Age, today owning about 10 percent of the country’s wealth, compared to 2 percent in 1913.

Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking
by Mehdi Hasan
Published 27 Feb 2023

“Your head is filled”: Jessica Hullinger, “The Science of Brainstorming,” Fast Company, June 30, 2014, https://www.fastcompany.com/3032418/the-science-of-brainstorming. legendary tennis player Arthur Ashe: “In the Zone,” Quote Investigator, September 16, 2016, accessed May 11, 2022, https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/09/16/zone/. when the magic happens: Lauren Ingeno, “In Fact, Mark Zuckerberg, ‘Eureka Moments’ Do Exist,” Drexel News Blog, June 5, 2017, accessed May 11, 2022, https://drexel.edu/coas/news-events/news/2017/June/In-Fact-Mark-Zuckerberg-Eureka-Moments-Do-Exist/. a 2015 survey: “Hansgrohe Study: The Brightest Ideas Begin in the Shower,” Plumbing & Mechanical, January 26, 2015, accessed May 11, 2022, https://www.pmmag.com/articles/96968-hansgrohe-study-the-brightest-ideas-begin-in-the-shower.

The End of Nice: How to Be Human in a World Run by Robots (Kindle Single)
by Richard Newton
Published 11 Apr 2015

To paraphrase John Wayne’s advice to an inferior gunslinger: “Mister, you’d better find another line of work, this one sure don’t fit your pistol.” Becoming occult “Hobbyists”. This was the dismissive name given to those who pursue their passion for piffling self-indulgences like personal computing. Bill Gates was a “hobbyist”. The hours that Gates and Mark Zuckerberg put into their passions while others were partying earned them the scornful epithet “geek”. Nowadays the chorus no longer laughs in unison at geeks; geeks and nerds are the new rock ’n’ roll stars after all. And it was that investment of time and passion which formed the foundation for their business.

Ethics of Big Data: Balancing Risk and Innovation
by Kord Davis and Doug Patterson
Published 30 Dec 2011

He emphasized that who we are—our identity—is multifaceted and is hardly ever summarized or aggregated in whole for consumption by a single person or organization. The implication is that if our identity is multifaceted, then it’s likely that our values and ethical relationship to identity are also multifaceted. Expressing a seemingly opposing view, Mark Zuckerberg recently made the assertion that having more than one identity demonstrates a “lack of integrity” (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/14/technology/14facebook.html). If our historical understanding of what identity means is being transformed by big-data technologies (by providing others an ability to summarize or aggregate various facets of our identity), then understanding our values around the concept itself enhances and expands our ability to determine appropriate and inappropriate action.

Troublemakers: Silicon Valley's Coming of Age
by Leslie Berlin
Published 7 Nov 2017

He added, “You can’t really understand what is going on now unless you understand what came before.”2 Jobs did not mention it in his Stanford speech, but after he returned to Apple, he passed the baton forward to a new generation of entrepreneurs. Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page went to Jobs for advice when they were starting their company. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg considered Jobs a mentor.3 I once saw Zuckerberg eating dinner in the same hidden corner of a low-key Palo Alto Mexican restaurant where, years before, I had seen Jobs. Zuckerberg was in the same seat, at the same table, sitting, as Jobs had, alone, his back to the window. The period covered in this book marks the first time that the generational handoff happened on a grand scale, as pioneers of the semiconductor industry passed the baton to younger up-and-comers developing innovations that would one day occupy the center of our lives.II The result was staggering.

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Sun, also facing competition from less expensive servers running Linux and Berkeley Unix operating systems, never recovered. In 2010, Oracle Corporation acquired Sun for $7.4 billion. Oracle’s cofounder and CEO was Larry Ellison, a former Ampex employee who had worked on the same Videofile system as Atari’s Al Alcorn, Nolan Bushnell, and Ted Dabney. When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg left the Sun sign angled so that employees pulling out of the main campus parking lot could see it, he was sending them a message: take none of Facebook’s success—the wealth, the accolades, the free lunches, the pride you feel in your company’s name—for granted. Even a once iconic company can disappear in the wake of relaxed vigilance, a few bad quarters, a series of poor decisions, or the rise of a new competitor.

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Spielberg, quoted in Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ’n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (Simon & Schuster, 1998): 20. 2. Steve Jobs, interview by author, May 24, 2003. 3. See Zuckerberg’s comments on Jobs on Charlie Rose, Nov. 7, 2011. Zuckerberg has also said that he visited a temple in India on Jobs’s recommendation. See, e.g., http://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-visited-india-thanks-to-steve-jobs-2015-9. 4. “OTL Financial Data, 1970–2016.” KK; Martin Campbell-Kelly, From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A History of the Software Industry (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003): 115. 5. Gabriel Metcalf, “Beyond Boom and Bust: Where Is Silicon Valley Taking Us?

The Joys of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning, Revised and Updated
by Gautam Baid
Published 1 Jun 2020

Personal freedom allows us sufficient time to think. Making good decisions requires quiet time alone in our heads to think through a problem from multiple points of view. Uninterrupted personal time is life’s most valuable limited resource. Several notable creators, including Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, regularly take “think weeks” to invigorate their thinking and to allow their minds to wander. They often advocate the value of taking time off specifically to relax and clear one’s head. Taking a whole week off to focus on our thinking process may sound like a farfetched scenario, but this is possible once we achieve financial independence.

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All of these businesses scaled up much more quickly than Carnegie’s steel plants or Rockefeller’s oil refineries. It took decades of toil and sweat, and significant sums of capital, to go around the country and cobble together a network of refineries in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It took Mark Zuckerberg just eight years to build Facebook from nothing to a business with $100 billion in valuation—and just four more years to reach $300 billion. The big picture is that software is eating the world—that is, many of the products and services developed over the past 150 years are transforming into, or being disrupted by software….

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Luck’s role is hidden because outstanding success is spotlighted; failure is all around but unpublicized and unseen. Jennifer Aniston and Sandra Bullock worked as waitresses before they became movie stars. The remaining thousands of waiters and waitresses in Los Angeles probably never got a casting call. For every Mark Zuckerberg, thousands of tech entrepreneurs and employees have little to show for decades of effort. In his book How to Get Lucky, Max Gunther writes a tour de force on luck, chance, serendipity, and randomness: It isn’t enough just to be good. You’ve got to be lucky, too…. …Good luck is the essential basic component of success, no matter what your personal definition of “success” may be….

The Virgin Way: Everything I Know About Leadership
by Richard Branson
Published 8 Sep 2014

The word innovation tends to set most people thinking about places like Silicon Valley – which has its own fair share of sharks – about huge technological advances and companies with even huger research and development budgets. But my favourite stories are always those about people who have come up with a simple idea and with little or no money made a big success of it. Obviously the likes of Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and others qualify for inclusion in such a category but there are also a lot of lesser known but every bit as impressive stories out there – like Sara Blakely’s, for instance – a lady whose career track has an amazing number of parallels to mine. SPANX A MILLION I first met Sara when she became a contestant on my 2004–05 one-season wonder of a US TV show The Rebel Billionaire.

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‘Technology should be about more than just newest, loudest, prettiest – it should make a real difference.’ Dave Morin who spent time at Facebook as well as Apple before creating the critically acclaimed social-networking app Path, commented that the impetus for great design has got to come from the top. And having worked with both Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg, he should certainly know! Dave believes that everyone at a company should care about how a product looks, feels and works — not just the people with the word ‘design’ in their job titles. He added that modern companies need CEOs with a taste for good design every bit as much as they need accountants who are great with numbers.

Utopias: A Brief History From Ancient Writings to Virtual Communities
by Howard P. Segal
Published 20 May 2012

In 2010 Facebook surpassed Google as the United States’ most visited website, with 8.9 percent of all American website visits versus Google’s 7.2 percent. Facebook had reached more than 500 million users.13 Not surprisingly, perhaps, Time magazine’s 2010/2011 Person of the Year was Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg. Now, the new question was “What’s happening?” Despite their respective drawbacks, social media continue to promote utopian expectations of instant and ever growing communities, including Wikipedia’s volunteer communities. Not just consumers but corporate executives themselves seek vastly expanded social interactions for their devices and enterprises.

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Kahn, “Facebook Film Not Making Friends with Some Harvard Grads,” Boston Globe, October 2, 2010, A1, A9; David Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company that Is Connecting the World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010); Miguel Helft, “Facebook Aims to Expand Its Reach,” Boston Globe, April 19, 2010, B8; Mark Zuckerberg and Donald E. Graham, “Answering Facebook Privacy Concerns,” Bangor Daily News, May 25, 2010, A7; Dan Fletcher, “Facebook: Friends Without Borders,” Time, 175 (May 31, 2010), 32–38; Alex Beam, “Everybody Hates Facebook: For Hundreds of Millions, You Can’t Live Without It or Without Complaining About It,” Boston Globe, August 27, 2010, G39; Kirkpatrick, “It’s Time to Clear Up Five Myths About Facebook,” Bangor Daily News, September 30, 2010, A7; Geller, Associated Press, “Facebook Founder’s Story Irretrievably Public,” Bangor Daily News, October 1, 2010, C9; Kahn, “What Does Friend Mean Now?”

The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity
by Amy Webb
Published 5 Mar 2019

The difference is that these particular companies are developing autonomous decision-making systems intended to represent all of our interests. Criticism is coming not just from women and people of color but from an unlikely group of people: conservatives and Republican Party stalwarts. In May 2018, the Republican National Committee sent a letter to Mark Zuckerberg accusing Facebook of bias against conservative Americans, which read in part: “Concerns have been raised in recent years about suppression of conservative speech on Facebook… including censorship of conservative news stories.… We are alarmed by numerous allegations that Facebook has blocked content from conservative journalists and groups.”9 The letter, signed by Ronna McDaniel, chairwoman of the RNC, and Brad Parscale, campaign manager for President Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign, went on to demand transparency in how Facebook’s algorithms determine which users see political ads in their feeds and a review into bias against conservative content and leaders.

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Google captured images of our homes and neighborhoods and made them searchable in Google Maps without asking us first. (People are avoided when possible, and their faces are blurred out.) Apple slowed down its older iPhones as its new models hit the shelves and apologized. Post–Cambridge Analytica, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg published a general apology on his Facebook wall, writing, “For those I hurt this year, I ask for forgiveness and I will try to be better. For the ways my work was used to divide people rather than bring us together, I ask forgiveness.” Therefore, the G-MAFIA tend to move swiftly in developmental spurts until something bad happens, and then the government gets involved.

Reset: How to Restart Your Life and Get F.U. Money: The Unconventional Early Retirement Plan for Midlife Careerists Who Want to Be Happy
by David Sawyer
Published 17 Aug 2018

As the Dalai Lama has said: “Simplicity is extremely important for happiness.” Decluttering your house is a great practical introduction to the joys of simplicity and minimalism. It not only clears your mind but also reduces the choices you have to make on what to wear and where to store items. For instance, much like Mark Zuckerberg and his grey t-shirts[217], I have a small range of clothing. I don’t have to waste time choosing what to wear every day – because I don’t have much choice. Also, I have a versatile holdall[218] that can double as a suitcase, briefcase, rucksack, running emporium. I don’t need to spend time deciding which bag will meet my needs the next morning – because I have one I love that covers every eventuality.

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[214] “without exception dramatically altered”: “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying: A simple, effective way to banish...” toreset.me/214, p. 206. [215] Minimalists: A Documentary About the Important Things: “Minimalism: A Documentary About the Important Things.” toreset.me/215. [216] “elements of a fulfilling existence”: “Your Money or Your Life – Amazon UK.” toreset.me/216, p. xxiii. [217] his grey t-shirts: “This photo of Mark Zuckerberg’s closet is literally the least surprising...” 26 Jan. 2016, toreset.me/217. [218] versatile holdall: “Osprey Porter 65 Travel Duffel – YouTube.” 23 Jul. 2015, toreset.me/218. [219] Tim Ferriss’s 5-Bullet Friday: “Welcome to 5-Bullet Friday | The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.” toreset.me/219. [220] Pakt One venture: “Pakt.” toreset.me/220. 17.

Rockonomics: A Backstage Tour of What the Music Industry Can Teach Us About Economics and Life
by Alan B. Krueger
Published 3 Jun 2019

By this measure, incomes in the U.S. economy today are almost as skewed as they were in the rock and roll industry when Bruce Springsteen cut “Born in the U.S.A.” One reason the entire economy has veered toward a superstar, winner-take-all affair is the rise of digital technology. Successful entrepreneurs can turn apps and digital technology into fortunes worth billions of dollars. Five of the six wealthiest Americans (Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, Michael Bloomberg, and Jeff Bezos)—whose combined wealth equals nearly that of half of the world’s population—made their fortunes because of digital technology.16 Digital technology is scalable. One day soon the top surgeons may be able to operate on a great many more patients due to improvements in digital technology.

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Commenting on the 1870s, Marshall wrote, “A business man of average ability and average good fortune gets now a lower rate of profits…than at any previous time, while the operations, in which a man exceptionally favoured by genius and good luck can take part, are so extensive as to enable him to amass a large fortune with a rapidity hitherto unknown.”3 Sound familiar? The same might be said of Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg today. Marshall’s explanation for the growing income gap between superstar businessmen and everyone else rested on new developments in communications technology—namely, the telegraph. The telegraph connected Great Britain with America, India, and even places as far away as Australia.

The Infinite Machine: How an Army of Crypto-Hackers Is Building the Next Internet With Ethereum
by Camila Russo
Published 13 Jul 2020

“Is it going to be like Fight Club where the buildings come crashing down? No. Is there an opportunity to mitigate against systemic risk? Absolutely, and I think that is almost guaranteed over the long term. It’s just a better way of doing things.” He also raved about Vitalik, who had recently been awarded the prestigious 2014 World Technology Awards, beating out Mark Zuckerberg, who was also nominated. “He’s like, the next Alan Turing!” Joe didn’t say much during Jeff’s pitch/rant. He just stood there, cross armed, with a bemused look on his face. He offered Jeff the job while in transit to an Ethereum meetup later that day. Jeff held out initially because he wanted to see the terms of his contract before officially accepting the position.

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Then in March Bitcoin reached above $1,200 and beat the price of an ounce of gold, prompting a new flurry of headlines saying things like “Bitcoin is more valuable than gold!” The rally was fueled in part on speculation that the long-awaited Bitcoin ETF would be approved. The Winklevoss twins, the same who were locked in a legal fight with Mark Zuckerberg over ownership of Facebook, were determined to become the first to launch a Bitcoin-backed exchange-traded fund. They were deep in the crypto game after backing Charlie Shrem’s BitInstant exchange and buying a big chunk of the bitcoins seized by the FBI when they shut down fraudulent Mt. Gox.

We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves
by John Cheney-Lippold
Published 1 May 2017

To elevate our specifics brings us to a key documentary condition of the Internet, something privacy theorist Daniel Solove details in his theorization of reputation in a dataveilled world: “In the past, people could even escape printed words because most publications would get buried away in the dusty corners of libraries. . . . The Internet, however, makes gossip a permanent reputational stain, one that never fades. It is available around the world, and with Google it can be readily found in less than a second.”40 A similar point is made in the 2010 film The Social Network, when Mark Zuckerberg’s ex-girlfriend berates him after a late-night round of boorish, sexist blogging: “The Internet’s not written in pencil, Mark; it’s written in ink.” While the practical permanency of the digital archive has long been called into question by digital scholars like Megan Sapnar Ankerson, this use of ink as metaphor bleeds beyond instances of mere blogging to also include the logging of our datafied associations into a database.41 Indeed, to return to gossip, people don’t just say they saw someone walking down the street.

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By the same token, the Internet’s comprehensive capacity to surveil has led some tech leaders, especially those who stand to make money from cultivating our datafied lives, to join the media chorus and rhetorically toss the concept of privacy out the window. As Sun Microsystems’ CEO, Scott McNealy, quipped way back in 1999, “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.”14 Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, believes that privacy “is no longer a social norm.”15 And Google’s former CEO Eric Schmidt described privacy as unnecessary and even dangerous, warning the surveilled masses that “if you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”16 For these rich white men, privacy is dead because it impinges on their business models.

Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire
by Rebecca Henderson
Published 27 Apr 2020

In the last fifteen years, many of the most successful Silicon Valley firms have gone public with dual class stock that has left founders in sole control of their firms. Facebook, for example, issued two classes of shares when it went public. The Class A shares went to everyday investors and came with one vote per share. But the founders—mostly Mark Zuckerberg—got Class B shares. Every Class B share came with ten votes. This means that it is effectively impossible to force Zuckerberg to step down, no matter how badly Facebook performs.93 In general, the founders in question claim that this structure is necessary to protect them from shareholder pressure.

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Ito Kunio, “Ito Review of Competitiveness and Incentives for Sustainable Growth: Building Favorable Relationships Between Companies and Investors,” Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), August 2014, accessed June 2018, www.meti.go.jp/english/press/2014/pdf/0806_04b.pdf, p. 52. 93. Jake Kanter, “Facebook Shareholder Revolt Gets Bloody: Powerless Investors Vote Overwhelmingly to Oust Zuckerberg as Chairman,” Business Insider, June 4, 2019, www.businessinsider.com/facebook-investors-vote-to-fire-mark-zuckerberg-as-chairman-2019-6. 94. Guest, CIO Central, “Sorry CalPERS, Dual Class Shares Are a Founder’s Best Friend,” Forbes, May 14, 2013, www.forbes.com/sites/ciocentral/2013/05/14/sorry-calpers-dual-class-shares-are-a-founders-best-friend/#aa06d5012d9b. 95. “Supplier Inclusion,” https://corporate.walmart.com/suppliers/supplier-inclusion. 96.

Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics
by Elle Reeve
Published 9 Jul 2024

He was convicted of murder. * * * Unlike many free speech absolutists, Fred was someone threatened by white supremacist propaganda, because he was disabled. When he defended having almost no moderation on his site, he took it further, and to a more personal place, than the other tech guys. Mark Zuckerberg might have allowed Holocaust denial, but he didn’t post antisemitic cartoons of himself. But a cartoonist got so angry at 8chan that he drew a cartoon of Fred as just a head on a wheelchair on fire, “burning in his own personal hell.” Fred posted it and said thanks. Fred let people call him “Hotwheels,” even though he privately didn’t like the nickname, and never used it himself.

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Jeb is out of the race and still getting BTFO STOP HE’S GOING TO COMMIT SUICIDE As I watched the Tay drama unfold, I took breaks from the screen to look out the window at the innocent skateboarders and discount fruit sellers in Union Square below. At the time, I was working at a hundred-year-old magazine that had been purchased by Mark Zuckerberg’s college roommate. He’d wanted to run the New Republic like a tech company, but a few months before Tay’s release, he’d decided to sell it, because, he told the staff, journalism turned out to be tougher than he’d anticipated. My last boss had been an eBay billionaire who’d funded a political satire site that imploded before it ever launched.

Platform Capitalism
by Nick Srnicek
Published 22 Dec 2016

Enclosure takes on an even stricter form with Facebook’s attempt to bring internet access to India and other countries through its Free Basics program. Facebook’s own services would be provided for free, but other services would have to partner with Facebook and go through its platform, effectively enclosing the entirety of the internet into Mark Zuckerberg’s silo.31 While rejected in India, the Free Basics service is now active in 37 countries and used by over 25 million people.32 Uber is also effectively building up a system that funnels passengers into its system. The decreased demand for non-Uber cabs means a decreased supply of non-Uber drivers, as more and more of the services move onto Uber.

Money Moments: Simple Steps to Financial Well-Being
by Jason Butler
Published 22 Nov 2017

Working with your hands (particularly connected with nature) and being self-employed, both which positively affect happiness, are optional extras! 22 THE STRAIGHTJACKET WHY BEING AN EMPLOYEE MIGHT NOT BE RIGHT FOR YOU ‘The biggest risk is not taking any risk. In a world that is changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.’ Mark Zuckerberg, American computer programmer and Internet entrepreneur My first full-time job, at seventeen, was working for a company in London which stored the master copies of geological survey maps for all the big oil companies. Most of the facility was in a basement and my job was to be locked in the windowless map vault and deal with the daily requests to retrieve and file the original maps.

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty
by Benjamin H. Bratton
Published 19 Feb 2016

See Conor Dougherty “Google Loses to Linkedin in Silicon Valley Headquarters Pitch,” New York Times, May 6, 2015, http://nyti.ms/1F68CMI. 59.  Adam Greenfield compares “Zee Town” to company towns of years past in “Is Facebook's ‘Zee Town’ More Than Just a Mark Zuckerberg Vanity Project?” Guardian, March 10, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/mar/10/facebook-zee-town-mark-zuckerberg. 60.  See Kirk Johnson and Nick Wingfield, “As Amazon Stretches, Seattle's Downtown Is Reshaped,” New York Times, August 25, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/26/us/as-amazon-stretches-seattles-downtown-is-reshaped.html. 61.  See for example, Colin Marshall, “Amazon's New Downtown Seattle HQ: Victory for the City over Suburbia?”

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Unsurprisingly then, Cloud network platforms have hired many of the best social network analysis away from academia. For example, during my time at Yahoo! I worked with small-worlds network pioneer Duncan Watts, formerly of Columbia's Department of Sociology and now at Microsoft Research. 51.  Company founder Mark Zuckerberg may have found a way around the problem of Facebook's closure from the open Internet, and that is to implement a proprietary aerial Facebook-centric version for the developing world. See Quentin Hardy and Vindu Goel, “Drones Beaming Web Access Art in the Stars for Facebook,” New York Times, March 26, 2015, http://nyti.ms/1GpPOXh. 52. 

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The project is still to be approved, if at all, by Mountain View city council, and so we shall have to wait and see what is actually built to compare the real environmental platform to that proposed.58 By contrast, looking at Frank Gehry's early proposals for a new Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park (nicknamed “Zee Town” after company founder, Mark Zuckerberg) we see a plan for a more traditional corporate campus, designed, it appears, to ensure the managed serendipitous contact between employees in motion. In this encapsulated “company town” winding pathways and strategic lines of sight connecting interior and exterior views are embedded in a multilevel landscape where sub- and superterranean greenery twists and turns onto and under the collection of buildings.59 At their desks, the aggregate social graph of the on-site employee/resident population is framed and displayed to itself as it moves and involves itself within itself in airplane hangar–scale open-plan work space.

Saudi America: The Truth About Fracking and How It's Changing the World
by Bethany McLean
Published 10 Sep 2018

“We could change the entire manufacturing base in the U.S. if we just embrace what’s happening in natural gas,” Nucor’s then CEO, Dan DiMicco, told the Wall Street Journal. Fortunes were made. While the media focused its gaze on the high priests of technology like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, unknown tycoons quietly raked in billions. A man named Terrence Pegula, who was born into a coal mining family in Pennsylvania and who majored in petroleum engineering on a scholarship, ran a struggling small time drilling operation called East Resources, which he’d started by borrowing $7,500 from family and friends.

European Founders at Work
by Pedro Gairifo Santos
Published 7 Nov 2011

Did it have a huge impact on the company in terms of visibility, or was it just, you felt, a recognition of a job well done? Haas: Yeah, definitely. We had some really great moments in our journey, one being the World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer 2010. I also once hosted Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook into the amiando office for a very nice evening in October 2008. So both things, of course, make the team incredibly proud and really help to form the unique culture of amiando, which is why we're really passionate about what we do. Of course, having Mark Zuckerberg in the office was fantastic also for the IT guys - they were motivated for months. Santos: Yeah, I can imagine. Haas: It's very interesting to see how Facebook is changing and growing.

How to Run a Government: So That Citizens Benefit and Taxpayers Don't Go Crazy
by Michael Barber
Published 12 Mar 2015

THE LAUNCH September 24 2010. Oprah Winfrey: ‘So, Mr Zuckerberg, what role are you playing in all of this?’ ‘I’ve committed to starting the Startup: Education Foundation, whose first project will be a one hundred million dollar challenge grant …’ Oprah again, interrupting, ‘One. Hundred. Million. Dollars.’2 Thus Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, announced his $100 million investment in Newark Public Schools. Why Newark, New Jersey? Because Zuckerberg ‘believed in’ the mayor of Newark, Cory Booker, and the governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, who were there with him on Oprah’s show. Now that was a launch that had the ‘wow’ factor!

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With a launch like that, expectations are raised sky high, but until someone starts work, the ground reality is unchanged. The gap between the two is vast. The result is a greatly increased risk. Rhetoric. Reality. Many a great idea has fallen through the gap between them. As Dale Russakoff put it in the New Yorker, Cory Booker, Chris Christie and Mark Zuckerberg had a plan to reform Newark’s schools. In fact, ‘They got an education.’3 In this case, it would be wrong four years later to say there has been no progress – Cami Anderson, who runs the School District, points to increases in achievements, enrolment and physical infrastructure.4 However, even the celebrities involved would admit the outcomes are far short of the aspirations set out that day on Oprah.

Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing
by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman
Published 19 Feb 2013

The most successful entrepreneurs had ring fingers 10% to 20% longer than their index fingers. As you hold up your hand to examine your own two fingers, this finding probably sounds downright absurd to you. For decades, people have speculated about what made Steve Jobs special, what set apart the Richard Bransons and Larry Ellisons and Mark Zuckerbergs from everybody else—what character traits facilitated their success, or what in their childhoods drove them to build their empires—and here comes two Italian economists to argue it’s all about the length of their fingers! Well, it’s not really about the length of their fingers. Finger length is actually just a marker, a sign of what was going on when these entrepreneurs were in their mothers’ wombs.

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Tremblay, “Prevalence of Father-Child Rough-and-Tumble Play and Physical Aggression of Preschool Children,” European Journal of Psychology of Education, vol. 18(2), pp. 171–189 (2003) Schore, Allan, & Jennifer McIntosh, “Family Law and the Neuroscience of Attachment,” Family Court Review, vol. 49(3), pp. 501–512 (2011) 5. Sandra Lerner; Women in Silicon Valley: Boyd, E. B., “Where is the Female Mark Zuckerberg?,” San Francisco, pp. 82–93, 106–114 (Dec. 2011) Brush, Candida, Nancy Carter, Elizabeth Gatewood, Patricia Greene, & Myra Hart, “The Diana Project: Women Business Owners and Equity Capital, the Myths Dispelled,” Kansas City, MO: Kauffman Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership, (2001) Coleman, Susan, & Alicia Robb, “A Comparison of New Firm Financing by Gender: Evidence from the Kauffman Firm Survey Data,” Small Business Economics, vol. 33(4), pp. 397–411 (2009) Crets, Douglas, “Recruiting Women to the Burgeoning (But Mostly Male) Host of Angel Investors,” Fast Company, http://bit.ly/odqVEn (8/1/2011) Flynn, F.

American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road
by Nick Bilton
Published 15 Mar 2017

At its core, though, the relationship was personal. VJ’s greatest value was as an executive coach of sorts—someone who could mentor the young founder through problems germane to any start-up, like Bill Campbell, who had helped the creators of Twitter and Google, or Marc Andreessen, who offered advice to Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook. “What are my strengths?” Ross asked VJ one afternoon, hoping that his new confidant could hold up a mirror for Ross to see himself, a view that Ross, in his secret solitude, was incapable of discerning on his own. “You play your cards close,” VJ replied. “You really do get that it’s gone from fun and games to a very serious life or death lifestyle you’ve created.”

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“But we’re pretty sure we’re going to have this site shut down in a couple of weeks.” Chapter 26 THE MUTINY Every founder goes through it. When Facebook introduced the “timeline,” its few-million-strong user base grew enraged at the privacy violations that came with involuntarily sharing everything you did with others. But Mark Zuckerberg had no choice; he needed to grow his revenue, and this was the path forward. Uber went through it when the company defiantly refused to eliminate its “surge pricing” model, which would make customers’ car rides double, triple, and in some instances even octuple without much warning. But Travis Kalanick had no choice; he needed to grow his revenue.

Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond
by Chris Burniske and Jack Tatar
Published 19 Oct 2017

Little did Grayscale know it would have competition from former Olympic rowers and near-founders of Facebook. Perhaps best known for their involvement with the latter, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss are two well-to-do investors. They claimed to be the originators of the idea for Facebook, which led to a $60-million settlement with Mark Zuckerberg. Since much of that settlement was in shares, its present-day equivalent is in the hundreds of millions. However, the twins were not about to disappear into oblivion with their millions; they had tasted greatness and were not the kind of figures who easily faded from the limelight. Eager for new ventures, Bitcoin provided just the opportunity.

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In the past, this world was open only to the wealthy, but with new trends such as crowdfunding, token launches, and innovative regulation via the JOBS Act, opportunities exist for innovative investors of all shapes and sizes to get involved. Chapter 16 The Wild World of ICOs During the early tech days, innovators such as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Michael Dell became iconic figures who had turned ideas into multibillion-dollar businesses. Over the last decade, we’ve seen visionaries such as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Mark Zuckerberg do the same. These innovators changed the world because people believed in their visions, and these early believers invested money to turn their ideas into reality. While these investments brought great benefit, they were not based on altruism; initial investors were looking to get a sizable return on their risky investments.

Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
by David Epstein
Published 1 Mar 2019

The push to focus early and narrowly extends well beyond sports. We are often taught that the more competitive and complicated the world gets, the more specialized we all must become (and the earlier we must start) to navigate it. Our best-known icons of success are elevated for their precocity and their head starts—Mozart at the keyboard, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the other kind of keyboard. The response, in every field, to a ballooning library of human knowledge and an interconnected world has been to exalt increasingly narrow focus. Oncologists no longer specialize in cancer, but rather in cancer related to a single organ, and the trend advances each year.

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And I was stunned when cognitive psychologists I spoke with led me to an enormous and too often ignored body of work demonstrating that learning itself is best done slowly to accumulate lasting knowledge, even when that means performing poorly on tests of immediate progress. That is, the most effective learning looks inefficient; it looks like falling behind. Starting something new in middle age might look that way too. Mark Zuckerberg famously noted that “young people are just smarter.” And yet a tech founder who is fifty years old is nearly twice as likely to start a blockbuster company as one who is thirty, and the thirty-year-old has a better shot than a twenty-year-old. Researchers at Northwestern, MIT, and the U.S. Census Bureau studied new tech companies and showed that among the fastest-growing start-ups, the average age of a founder was forty-five when the company was launched.

A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond
by Daniel Susskind
Published 14 Jan 2020

Just 16 percent of Americans think a four-year degree prepares students “very well” for a well-paying job.21 In part, this may have been prompted by the fact that many of today’s most successful entrepreneurs dropped out from these sorts of institutions. The list of nongraduates is striking: Sergey Brin and Larry Page left Stanford University; Elon Musk did likewise; Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg left Harvard University; Steve Jobs left Reed College; Michael Dell left the University of Texas; Travis Kalanick left the University of California; Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey left the University of Nebraska and New York University, respectively; Larry Ellison left both the University of Illinois and the University of Chicago; Arash Ferdowsi (cofounder of DropBox) left MIT; and Daniel Ek (cofounder of Spotify) left the Royal Institute of Technology.22 This list could go on.

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An early edition of the laws, from 1552, stated, rather dramatically, that “if any man or woman, able to work, should refuse to labor and live idly for three days, he or she should be branded with a red hot iron on the breast with the letter V and should be judged the slave for two years of any person who should inform against such idler.”13 The resentment runs both ways. While those in work rail against the unemployed, those without work also feel aggrieved toward those with it. This, in part, explains the curious reaction to Silicon Valley’s recent enthusiasm about the UBI. Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have made supportive noises about the idea of a UBI; Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, and Sam Altman, founder of Y Combinator, have funded trials of it in Kenya and the United States.14 But their interest has been met with widespread hostility. If work were simply a means to an income, that response might seem odd: these entrepreneurs were essentially proposing that people like them should do all the hard work and give everyone else money for free.

The AI Economy: Work, Wealth and Welfare in the Robot Age
by Roger Bootle
Published 4 Sep 2019

When you look at the rich lists, particularly in the USA, but also elsewhere, it is striking that so many of the superrich have acquired their wealth through work, leading to fantastic increases in the value of the companies that they founded and/or built up. This applies to Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and many more. And the key players are constantly changing. Consider the Forbes list. Of those listed as the wealthiest Americans in 1982, less than a tenth were still on the list in 2012. Moreover, the share of the Forbes 400 who came to their wealth through inheritance seems to be in sharp decline.

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Accordingly, it makes sense for us now to leave it to one side and to concentrate on the more mainstream idea of a UBI. It seems much more likely to fly. Indeed, in some senses it has already taken off. Illustrious support The essential principle of a UBI has recently received widespread support, including from Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Tesla’s Elon Musk. At the World Government Summit in Dubai in 2017, referring to the coming transformation of transportation, the latter said: “Twenty years is a short period of time to have something like 12 [to] 15 percent of the workforce be unemployed.” And on UBI he said: “I don’t think we’re going to have a choice.

Blood and Oil: Mohammed Bin Salman's Ruthless Quest for Global Power
by Bradley Hope and Justin Scheck
Published 14 Sep 2020

And the lemons are packaged up and rebranded for what derisive bankers call the “dumb money” in the Middle East. “They don’t care about us,” he says. “They only want our money.” Days later Mohammed headed to Silicon Valley. Executives were eager to greet the prince. In pressed jeans and a blazer, Mohammed posed for photos with Mark Zuckerberg and visited Google’s founders. The reception was less effusive among the venture capitalists (VCs) whose ranks Mohammed wanted to join. While entrepreneurs were hungry for Saudi money, the VCs were a different breed. Often pompous, driving Teslas to their low-slung offices on Sand Hill Road in the hills above Palo Alto, they specialized in making small deals in early-stage start-ups that could pay giant returns in the unlikely event of success.

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Pecker’s relationship to Trump, rather than the grand plans of the prince, became the focal point for many US pundits. Grine, who preferred to operate on the fringes, was now in the center of an embarrassing uproar that brought lots of publicity and no money. Mohammed continued his visit, meeting executives like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and Apple’s Tim Cook. He ate dinner with Jeff Bezos and was photographed with Google founder Sergey Brin wearing his Silicon Valley best: a blazer, dress shoes, and a button-down shirt tucked into dark jeans belted across his broad belly. He sat with Oprah Winfrey, venture capitalist Peter Thiel, and the CEOs of Disney, Uber, and Lockheed.

Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall
by Zeke Faux
Published 11 Sep 2023

The story was irresistible. He was twenty-nine years old, and venture capitalists had just invested in his two-and-a-half-year-old exchange FTX at a $25 billion valuation. Forbes estimated his personal net worth at $22.5 billion. People were calling him a financial version of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. I didn’t think FTX was an innovation on par with social media. It seemed like a casino for gambling on random coins, just like all the other crypto exchanges. To me, the most interesting part of Bankman-Fried’s story was his motivation. Bankman-Fried said he’d decided when he was young to dedicate his life to doing the most good he could for the world.

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Her songs, from “Pho King Badd Bhech” to “Gilfalicious,” were full of painfully forced rhymes, with a delivery so stilted she made Chet Hanks sound like Kendrick Lamar. Her lyrics were nonsensical. In “High in the Cemetery,” she describes a hallucination in which she’s given a magic lamp and meets a genie who offers to fulfill her wishes in exchange for “a handie.” Only later does she learn the genie’s true identity: “This was no ordinary perv / It was Mark Zuckerberg.” In her Forbes columns and self-help YouTube videos, Morgan explained that she created her rap persona as a way to embrace the weirdness that used to make her a target of ridicule. She’d grown up in a small town of about four hundred people outside Chico, California, where she was “bullied mercilessly” about her lisp and braces.

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century
by Rodrigo Aguilera
Published 10 Mar 2020

Yarvin calls this system of government “neocameralist” and he certainly has one man in line for the job: “It’s easy to say ‘put Elon [Musk] in charge, he’ll figure it out,’ and he might well”.35 Some tech tycoons certainly appear to be eying the possibility of running for office. Before Facebook was riddled with public scandals over its role in the 2016 election, Mark Zuckerberg went on a country-wide road trip that led to suspicions that he may have been harboring presidential ambitions.36 The trip was immaculately staged and photographed, and the people he interviewed carefully chosen so as to not be too controversial nor disruptive, which goes to show how loosely he correlates transparency with democracy.

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Quote taken from around the 36 minute mark. 29 Ribeiro, M.H. et al., “Auditing Radicalization Pathways on YouTube”, arXiv, 3 Sep. 2019, https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.08313 30 Fukuyama, F., “Transhumanism”, Foreign Policy, 23 Oct. 2009, https://foreignpolicy.com/2009/10/23/transhumanism/ 31 Gray, R., “Behind the Internet’s Anti-Democracy Movement”, Atlantic, 2 Feb. 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/02/behind-the-internets-dark-anti-democracy-movement/516243/ 32 “The Price of Muscle-Flexing”, 2Blowhards, 30 Jan. 2007, http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/2007/01/costs.html, The quote is in the comments under Mencius. 33 Laliberte, B., “A Comprehensive Guide to Cathedralism, Part I”, Anarcho Papist, 1 Jan. 2014, http://archive.is/pRZ2d 34 Quoted in Finley, K., “Geeks for Monarchy: The Rise of the Neoreactonaries, TechCrunch, 11 Nov. 2013, http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/22/geeks-for-monarchy/ 35 Matthews, D., “The Alt-Right is More than Warmed-Over White Supremacy. It’s That, but Way Way Weirder”, Vox, 18 Apr. 2016, https://www.vox.com/2016/4/18/11434098/alt-right-explained 36 Issac, M., “Mark Zuckerberg’s Great American Road Trip”, New York Times, 25 May 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/25/technology/zuckerberg-harvard-commencement-road-trip.html 37 “Steven Pinker on Genetically Re-engineering Human Nature”, The Nexus Institute, 2016, http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/steven-pinker-genetically-reengineering-human-nature/ 38 Norberg, J., Progress, pg. 124 39 Ridley, M., The Rational Optimist, pg. 346 40 Pinker, S., Enlightenment Now, Ch 22 41 Plous, S., “The Nuclear Arms Race: Prisoner’s Dilemma or Perceptual Dilemma?”

The 4-Hour Chef: The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life
by Timothy Ferriss
Published 1 Jan 2012

—Tim 32 See the deer version. 33 This is another name for the loin of the deer, which runs over and along the spine, above the tenderloin. 34 If the crunch doesn’t cut through the ribs, drag back with a few hard slices afterward. ‡ David Foster Wallace, “Consider the Lobster,” Gourmet, August 2004, http://www.gourmet.com/magazine/2000s/2004/08/consider_the_lobster (accessed September 16, 2012). ‡ Patricia Sellers, “Mark Zuckerberg’s New Challenge: Eating Only What He Kills (and Yes, We Do Mean Literally...),” CNNMoney, May 26, 2011, http://postcards.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2011/05/26/mark-zuckerbergs-new-challenge-eating-only-what-he-kills (accessed September 16, 2012). 35 One thigh, from an earlier butchered chicken, was twitching on a platter when we arrived, and was still twitching 10 minutes later. 36 You could also use a garden incinerator, which is like a metal garbage can with the holes already drilled in it. 37 This is a good time to toast marshmallows. 38 I don’t need to remind you about the dangers of consuming undercooked seafood, but I will.

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Serve w lemon, tarragon, S+P. TOTAL TIME Depends on the size of your lobster (see chart in Pickup Step 02) GEAR 2 lobsters Stockpot Salt Tongs Aluminum foil Chef’s knife OPTIONAL MUSIC PAIRING “Eyes on Fire (Zed’s Dead Remix)” by Blue Foundation OPTION 1: BOILING Boiling lobsters is what Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, started with in 2011. He then worked his way up the food chain, all the way to shooting bison. Mark has a thing for what he calls “personal challenges.” In 2009, it was wearing a tie every day. In 2010, it was learning Chinese. He explained his 2011 challenge in an e-mail to Fortune magazine.

Geek Wisdom
by Stephen H. Segal
Published 2 Aug 2011

But that’s the inherent problem with anything that impacts society enough to bring about lasting change: Its success carries within it the seeds of its eventual dissolution. If history teaches us anything, it’s that the rebels of today are inevitably the establishmentarians of tomorrow—whether Fidel Castro, Kurt Cobain, or Mark Zuckerberg. And so, can you really blame Tyler Durden for wanting to keep a lid on his new favorite thing for just a little while longer? The novel Fight Club (1996) established Chuck Palahniuk as a major author of disturbing fiction. His short story “Guts,” about unfortunate masturbation accidents, established him as an author who could cause people to faint while listening to him read out loud.

With Liberty and Dividends for All: How to Save Our Middle Class When Jobs Don't Pay Enough
by Peter Barnes
Published 31 Jul 2014

Equity leverage works by incorporating anticipated future earnings into present asset prices, thereby enabling stock sellers to get a lump sum now for a potential stream of future profits that may or may not materialize. If a company is expected to grow, this leverage can be huge—and it’s on top of the liquidity premium that accrues simply from enlarging the universe of potential stock buyers. It’s what enables people like Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, to become billionaires before they’re thirty. And that’s not all. Large chunks of many fortunes come from sources less visible than these. Consider the nest egg of another youthful billionaire, Bill Gates. According to Forbes magazine, Gates in 2013 was the richest man in America and second-richest man in the world, with a net worth of $72 billion.2 Virtually all of that comes from stock he received or bought cheaply as Microsoft’s cofounder.

Dead People Suck: A Guide for Survivors of the Newly Departed
by Laurie Kilmartin
Published 13 Feb 2018

Now that your loved one is dead, honor their memory by not paying full price. “Mom died in her sleep” gets me nothing. But “Mom died in her sleep, and she slept on a Casper” gets me a promo code for 15 percent off a Casper mattress. STOP COMMENTING ON DEATH POSTS: The more you type, “I’m sorry for your loss,” the more Mark Zuckerberg is going to give you, “We lost Dad today.” Be cruel. Stop leaving comments. Ignore your friends and their grief. Or rejoice in it. “Good riddance to her! Your pain makes my heart sing!” Facebook will learn that you are a sociopath who can’t be trusted with other people’s despair. MAKE YOUNG FRIENDS: If most of your Facebook friends are middle age, then most of their parents are preparing to die.

Mbs: The Rise to Power of Mohammed Bin Salman
by Ben Hubbard
Published 10 Mar 2020

MBS has never publicly discussed when he began plotting his political career, but he has talked about his desire to be a new kind of ruler, one who disrupted the old order like the giants of Silicon Valley, instead of one who followed the traditional ways. “There’s a big difference,” he said. “The first, he can create Apple. The second can become a successful employee. I had elements that were much more than what Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates had. If I work according to their methods, what will I create? All of this was in my head when I was young.” King Abdullah, however, saw MBS as an upstart whose experience fell far short of his ambitions. He named Salman minister of defense, but barred MBS from joining his father in the ministry.

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Cisco Systems signed a preliminary agreement to upgrade the kingdom’s digital infrastructure. Microsoft signed on to a program to train young Saudis. Dow Chemical received a license, billed as the first ever, allowing it to operate in the kingdom without a Saudi partner. MBS got sit-downs with Tim Cook of Apple and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. Photos of the young prince in jeans and a sport coat trying out a virtual reality headset at Facebook headquarters zinged around the kingdom, convincing many young Saudis that this prince was indeed different from the others. In his meetings, MBS pitched a bright future for Saudi Arabia and argued that authoritarianism would help bring it about.

Cities Are Good for You: The Genius of the Metropolis
by Leo Hollis
Published 31 Mar 2013

As he announced in 2006, Newark was to lead the way in urban transformation, and when President Obama requested that Booker join his own team in 2008, Booker refused, preferring to run for a second mayoral term. Newark is now the fastest-growing city in north-east US, and violent crime has been drastically reduced. In 2010 Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, donated $100 million to the city’s schools and many others have started to see Newark as a place worth investing in. This re-emerging Lockeville is on the way to recovery and while it might never achieve the economic might of Singapore, it is anything but a ‘machine without a soul’.

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The day after the first protest, the authorities were so taken aback by the size of the march that the internet was switched off; on 27 February Ghonim was arrested and was not seen for the next twelve days until the Mubarak government was eventually closed down. In later interviews, Wael Ghonim personally thanked Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, for his role in bringing down the government. On the morning of Friday, 11 February, the atmosphere in Tahrir Square was tense; during the night the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces issued a second communiqué, but no one really understood what they had said. After morning prayers, the crowds began to swell.

Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream
by Nicholas Lemann
Published 9 Sep 2019

The potential of the Internet as a communications medium was hard to miss, but many people who wanted to exploit it commercially, especially people from outside the Valley, understood it as a version of broadcasting—a way for producers to make almost infinitely large quantities of information available to consumers anywhere in the world where there was an online connection, instantaneously and at no cost. People like Hoffman, Thiel, and Pincus—and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, whom all three met and invested in soon after his arrival in Silicon Valley as a teenage Harvard undergraduate—saw that the Internet would become a bidirectional medium that was more about creating connections among individual users than between a single purveyor and a mass of users.

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* * * Things had been moving in this direction for some time, but LinkedIn’s initial public offering firmly established Hoffman as Silicon Valley’s unofficial mayor, or Godfather, or chief theoretician: “His Reidness,” as some of his old friends began calling him. He was below the very top level of wealth and public renown that such people as Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google or Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook occupied, but for the role he wanted to play, that was an advantage. Hoffman could still drive his own car and meet people in restaurants and coffee shops (though he’d begun making reservations under an assumed name), so he was able to circulate constantly in the community. He was not an engineer interested only in technical issues, and he was far more diplomatic than, say, Peter Thiel, and so was unusually likely to be sought out by people from the outside world who wanted entrée to Silicon Valley.

The Millionaire Fastlane: Crack the Code to Wealth and Live Rich for a Lifetime
by Mj Demarco
Published 8 Nov 2010

Interest works on your business an hour a day Monday through Friday; commitment works on your business seven days a week whenever time permits. Interest leases an expensive car; commitment rides a bike and puts the money into your system. Interest is looking rich; commitment is planning to be rich. Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, didn't build the most-used social networking site by being interested. He was committed. Thomas Edison didn't invent the light bulb by interest; he was committed. Interest is quitting after the third failure; commitment is continuing after the hundredth. While I was building my company, my system, my surrogate, I was committed.

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A blanket with arms? It's been around for years, but that didn't stop Snuggie from selling 40 million blankets via infomercial marketing. An old idea better marketed and better executed. It was an open road when the road seemed closed. MySpace was thriving well before Facebook, but that didn't stop Mark Zuckerberg. He saw a niche need and solved it. It was an open road when the road seemed closed. Poorly met needs are open roads when they often appear closed. Successful businesses take existing ideas, services, and products and simply make them better, or spin them in new directions. How to Spot Open Roads Not a day goes by when I don't spot a need that can be exploited for Fastlane opportunity.

The Messy Middle: Finding Your Way Through the Hardest and Most Crucial Part of Any Bold Venture
by Scott Belsky
Published 1 Oct 2018

“They took pride in their employer as a really human place to work. And they were more committed as a result.” Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook COO and whose personal experience of her husband Dave Goldberg dying suddenly was the inspiration for Option B, recalls, “I never would have gotten through this without Mark [Zuckerberg]. Mark was at my house the day I came home from Mexico and told my children. Mark literally planned Dave’s funeral. And Mark was with me every step of the way. When I came back to work and felt like I was a ghost and no one would talk to me, I took refuge in his conference room. . . . We think about providing that kind of emotional support to our friends. . . .

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Perhaps your business model and all the assumptions leading up to it were fundamentally flawed. The truth will hurt, and it may set you back temporarily, but it will ultimately set you free. Entrepreneur and investor Paul Graham, founder of the start-up incubator Y Combinator, once remarked in an interview about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg: “It’s easier to tell Zuck that he’s wrong than to tell the average noob [new] founder. He’s not threatened by it. If he’s wrong, he wants to know.” Paul goes on to say, “What distinguishes great founders is not their adherence to some vision, but their humility in the face of the truth.” The greatest thinkers I admire anchor their ideas around a central truth—often one they believe is unique and unrealized by others.

Seasteading: How Floating Nations Will Restore the Environment, Enrich the Poor, Cure the Sick, and Liberate Humanity From Politicians
by Joe Quirk and Patri Friedman
Published 21 Mar 2017

You’ve been to this city, you’ve been in that city, and you know in ten more minutes, you’re going to depart again.” Tufts proved to be a transformative experience. “We were very close to MIT and Harvard, which are exposed to many very innovative ideas and people. I probably spent half of my evenings at lectures at MIT or Harvard listening to people like Mark Zuckerberg—very enlightened people. By day, I did my homework, but at night, instead of staying in my dorm and partying with people, I went to these lectures. I probably learned more from these lectures than from my course work. “Peter Thiel visited MIT one month after I arrived for college to give a speech in which he talked about seasteading.

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As of 2014, 75 percent of the world’s adult population owned a mobile phone. As we write, three global connectivity projects are in the works. The company where Patri works, Google, is testing Project Loon, a global network of stratospheric balloons it hopes will wirelessly connect a billion remote rural people to the Internet. Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook has partnered with Samsung, Nokia, and four other companies to launch a project called Internet.org, to provide World Wide Web access to the billions of people still not connected to the Internet. The Media Development Investment Fund has financed the Outernet, a plan to launch private satellites into space to provide free worldwide Wi-Fi access for billions of people locked in oppressive governments.

Startup Weekend: How to Take a Company From Concept to Creation in 54 Hours
by Marc Nager , Clint Nelsen and Franck Nouyrigat
Published 8 Nov 2011

While the average guy on the street may think that an entrepreneur without an idea is like a cyclist without a bike, we at Startup Weekend know the truth, which we&apos;ve repeated again and again: Ideas are important, but the team is essential. The news is full of stories of the lone entrepreneur who clings tightly to his dream and works tirelessly, for years and against all odds, to prove all the naysayers wrong. We hear the Mark Zuckerbergs praised as tenacious geniuses (and they are); but that&apos;s only half of the story. Even visionaries need a team of doers to bring their paradigm-shifting, brand-new idea to life. From mentors to investors to lawyers to employees to fellow cofounders, there&apos;s a whole stream of people involved in even the most humble startup.

Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy
by Robert W. McChesney
Published 5 Mar 2013

As Rebecca MacKinnon puts it, “Open-source software is not inherently anti-business,” and many of the giants like Google use it where it helps them.53 “Many businesses built on top of open source,” notes James Losey of the New America Foundation, “such as Apple building its OSX on top of Unix.”54 Google and Wikipedia, as Siva Vaidhyanathan writes, have such a strong synergy—Wikipedia ranks near the top of most Google searches—that “it’s unlikely any reference source would unseat Wikipedia.”55 This cooperative sector is important for the corporate players too, because it brings legitimacy to the commercial Internet as something more than a digital ATM for billionaires. When Mark Zuckerberg prepared the initial public offering for Facebook in 2012, he wrote to potential investors that Facebook “was not originally created to be a company.” Instead, “it was built to accomplish a social mission—to make the world more open and connected.”56 Internet Service Providers: From Monopoly to Cartel?

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Given their extraordinary size and wealth and the corruption of the political system, they should have commensurate political power in Washington in short order. Some sense of the rapidly growing power of the digital giants comes when one looks at international politics, where the giants play a foundational role. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg was invited to the 2011 G8 meetings, where he sat at the table and discussed world politics.92 MacKinnon characterizes “Facebookistan” and “Googledom” as virtual nation-states obsessed with limiting the ability of governments anywhere to interfere with their profitability and growth, which is their driving concern.

Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future
by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson
Published 26 Jun 2017

Tmall’s “Singles Day” effort started out with just twenty-seven participating merchants, but it quickly became the most important shopping event in the country, with participants buying presents not only for their single selves, but also for people they’re interested in. On November 11, 2016, Alibaba’s marketplaces enabled sales of $17.8 billion, three times the combined total of Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the United States.# Of the four companies mentioned by Goodwin, though, Facebook might have the most extraordinary story. From its start in Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard dorm room eleven years earlier, it had grown from a social networking site at a few elite US universities into a global utility of communication, connection, and content, visited daily by 936 million people. As Goodwin pointed out, Facebook drew all these people in and kept them engaged for an average of fifty minutes per day without generating any of the information that appeared on the site.

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And Facebook, already a huge and profitable company when Goodwin wrote about it in March of 2015, continued to grow in size and influence, to greatly affect mainstream content producers, and to make sizable investments in innovation. In August of 2015 the web traffic analysis company Parse.ly released a report showing that across the major news and media sites it tracked, more viewers came via Facebook than from Google and other search engines. In March of 2016, Mark Zuckerberg unveiled the company’s ten-year road map, which included major initiatives in artificial intelligence, virtual reality and augmented reality, and even solar-powered airplanes to bring Internet access to millions of people who live far from any telecommunications infrastructure. How could companies that consisted of only an “indescribably thin layer” be having such an impact, and such success?

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life
by Adam Greenfield
Published 29 May 2017

Here’s What He Said,” Recode, April 13, 2016. f 3.Brad Stone and Jack Clark, “Google Puts Boston Dynamics Up for Sale in Robotics Retreat,” Bloomberg Technology, March 17, 2016. 4.John Markoff, “Latest to Quit Google’s Self-Driving Car Unit: Top Roboticist,” New York Times, August 5, 2016. 5.Mark Harris, “Secretive Alphabet Division Funded by Google Aims to Fix Public Transit in US,” Guardian, June 27, 2016. 6.Siimon Reynolds, “Why Google Glass Failed: A Marketing Lesson,” Forbes, February 5, 2015. 7.Rajat Agrawal, “Why India Rejected Facebook’s ‘Free’ Version of the Internet,” Mashable, February 9, 2016. 8.Mark Zuckerberg, “The technology behind Aquila,” Facebook, July 21, 2016, facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/the-technology-behind-aquila/10153916136506634/. 9.Mari Saito, “Exclusive: Amazon Expanding Deliveries by Its ‘On-Demand’ Drivers,” Reuters, February 8, 2016. 10.Alan Boyle, “First Amazon Prime Airplane Debuts in Seattle After Secret Night Flight,” GeekWire, August 4, 2016. 11.Farhad Manjoo, “Think Amazon’s Drone Delivery Idea Is a Gimmick?

Bank 3.0: Why Banking Is No Longer Somewhere You Go but Something You Do
by Brett King
Published 26 Dec 2012

It was in 2004 that Tim O’Reilly first coined the phrase “Web 2.0” when attempting to define the intersection of the web and applications that facilitate participatory information sharing, interoperability, user-centred design, and collaboration.2 Facebook launched in 2003, but MySpace was the dominant social media platform in the US at this time. iTV bought the Friends Reunited network in 2003 as it climbed past the 15-million user mark. It was also in 2003 that YouTube first started its video storing/retrieval service. In 2005 News Corp purchased MySpace for $580 million3 and Viacom offered Mark Zuckerberg $75 million for the rapidly growing Facebook service.4 In 2006 they returned with an offer of $1.5 billion. When that deal fell through, Yahoo tried a counter-offer of $1 billion—unsurprisingly it was declined. By 2007, when Apple released the iPhone, Facebook was already outperforming MySpace in terms of monthly visitors.

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Well, Twitter wasn’t launched at SXSW, but its “buzz” and rapid growth are often attributed to its appearance at SXSW in 2007. Foursquare launched at SXSW, along with a bunch of other start-ups and apps. In 2006, Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia and Craig Newmark from Craigslist were the primary speakers. In 2008, Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook took the stage, and in 2010, Evan Williams, the CEO of Twitter, was the primary personality on the interactive stage. Figure 8.11: PanelPicker at SXSW is a great example of structured crowdsourcing (Credit: SXSW) However, SXSW uses crowdsourcing to select most of the topics for its interactive week.

Who Owns the Future?
by Jaron Lanier
Published 6 May 2013

There are legendary professors and we scramble to recruit their graduating students. But it’s also considered the height of hipness to eschew a traditional degree and unequivocally prove yourself through other means. The list of top company runners who dropped out of college is commanding: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Mark Zuckerberg, for a start. Peter Thiel, of Facebook and PayPal fame, started a fund to pay top students to drop out of school, since the task of building high-tech startups should not be delayed. Mea culpa. I never earned a real degree (though I have received honorary ones). In my case poverty played a role, as it did for many others.

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FIFTH INTERLUDE The Wise Old Man in the Clouds THE LIMITS OF EMERGENCE AS AN EXPLANATION In 2012, the University of San Francisco, a Jesuit institution, themed its recruitment campaign on the idea that Christianity is like Facebook. One of the slogans was “Our CEO mastered social networking 2,000 years before Mark Zuckerberg was born.”1 There’s something to the comparison, and I find that worrisome. Each institution became powerful in an unconventional way. Each network created a center of power that bypassed territorial and political boundaries, and existed on its own plane. Each became what might be called a “social monopoly,” engaging in social engineering on a grand scale.

The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard
by Fredrik Erixon and Bjorn Weigel
Published 3 Oct 2016

It also boosted the number of M&As, because companies needed to become bigger than before to capture the specialization gains from a growing world economy. There was little demand for innovators and entrepreneurs fanning that “perennial gale of creative destruction,” and that demand naturally declined as companies turned into logistics hubs. Executive recruiters were not scouting for entrepreneurial people like Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg to take up key positions in multinationals. They wanted executives with specialisms in optimization, management, logistics, capital markets, and other key operative functions of a firm. They wanted trusted partners from the “technostructure” of managerial capitalism, to quote John Kenneth Galbraith.6 And these partners were planners, not entrepreneurs.

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A successful company-builder like Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, for example, differentiates between Class A and Class B common stocks.27 When first introduced, Class B shares traded for 1/30th of Class A’s stock price and carried lower voting rights. Both Google and Facebook have dual share structures, something that has arguably helped to maintain a culture of innovation in those firms. A few days after Facebook’s initial public offering, founder Mark Zuckerberg owned 18 percent of Facebook, but controlled 57 percent of the share-votes.28 The reason is obvious: maintaining entrepreneurial grit. Ownership differentiation is a red rag for many in corporate finance. Regulators do not like it either and tend to root for ownership democracy. In Europe, authorities have made efforts to remove ownership discrimination, and less than a decade ago there was a political campaign to rule out dual class stocks entirely.

Samsung Rising: The Inside Story of the South Korean Giant That Set Out to Beat Apple and Conquer Tech
by Geoffrey Cain
Published 15 Mar 2020

And many see it as an urgent concern. * * * — IN FACT, SAMSUNG HAS no equivalent among its Silicon Valley peers. Nor does the company have Silicon Valley’s rebellious, counterculture origins. There is no marijuana-smoking college-dropout equivalent of Steve Jobs; there is no mischievous Mark Zuckerberg, ranking co-eds on his dorm room website. There is no flamboyant engineer like Sony’s Akio Morita, who survived World War II, co-founded the company in a bombed-out department store, and drove its success. Sitting down for interviews in Seoul, I was often met with looks of suspicion and distrust—even terror.

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In the scheme of things, it was an inexpensive way to build word of mouth. “To some extent it was pay to play. Or we would ‘host’ the events with already-friendly partners,” said a marketer on the team. Samsung hosted a celebrity dinner party at the estate of Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss—the twins who sued Mark Zuckerberg claiming he took their ideas to create Facebook. On a swanky terrace overlooking an infinity pool and the Hollywood Hills, a Samsung representative was waiting for Dana Brunetti, Galaxy S III ready to go, customized with a background picture of the producer’s name. Yeah, I’m going back to the iPhone as soon as dinner’s over, Brunetti thought.

Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone
by Sarah Jaffe
Published 26 Jan 2021

Employees frequently cried at their desks, trapped in something bearing an uncanny resemblance to the ups and downs of an abusive relationship. 28 At Facebook, things were a little bit different—at least according to Kate Losse, who detailed her experience as one of the company’s early nontechnical employees in her memoir, The Boy Kings . But the sense of awe at the power in her hands was the same, at least before Losse’s eventual disillusionment and break with Facebook and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg. The work that Losse did—customer service work—was devalued from the very start by Zuckerberg, who fetishized hackers and Ivy Leaguers who he imagined were crafted in his own image. “Move fast and break things,” was his motto, and moving fast and breaking things were things that boys did. Losse nevertheless worked her way in, figuring, “You can’t run a successful company with boys alone.” 29 Losse befriended the “hacker boys,” including one particular teenager who was hired after he hacked Facebook itself.

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Programming might be destined not to be a prestige field for wizards and boy kings, but rather, as Clive Thompson of Wired wrote, “the next big blue-collar job.” Some of the boot camps are out-and-out scams, like one that promises to pay you to learn—and then takes a cut of your salary for the next two years. But all of them will have the effect of making coders more common, and thus making the work less rarefied—and less well remunerated. 37 Mark Zuckerberg also has a plan to bring in lots of short-term workers from overseas. His immigration nonprofit, FWD.us, was created to lobby for immigration reform. That sounded nice in the age of Trump, but Zuckerberg’s main concern was increasing the number of H1-B guestworker visas for skilled workers. H1-B workers are tethered to a particular job; if they quit or get fired, they have to leave the country, which makes them spectacularly compliant as well as cheaper to hire. 38 All of this means that tech workers might have more in common with the industrial workers of midcentury than they might think.

The Job: The Future of Work in the Modern Era
by Ellen Ruppel Shell
Published 22 Oct 2018

He said: ‘This is a very good place for a small person to be.’ ” Most of us, Pohjakallio said, are small people, not in the sense that we are lesser than others, but in the sense that we find satisfaction and purpose in small, steady accomplishments in our work rather than being saddled with vague and grandiose expectations. “In the US, Mark Zuckerberg seems to work all the time and demands the same from his workforce,” Pohjakallio said. “But he is not the role model of future business leaders. The CEO of Snellman, well, yes, maybe he’s the one we should be looking up to. Work cannot be measured in hours spent, it must be measured in things accomplished, and accomplishing those things and making meaning of them takes thought.

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“there may have been a time and a place for unions” Kevin Rose, “Silicon Valley’s Anti-Unionism, Now with a Side of Class Warfare,” New York Magazine, July 2013. Still, it’s worth pointing out that not a few of these new economy employers recognize the value of collective action in pursuit of their own goals. Consider, for example, the sudden involvement of industrial leadership in immigration reform. In April 2013, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg collaborated on the launch of Fwd.us, a proimmigration collective whose members included Bill Gates, Google’s Eric Schmidt, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, and Silicon Valley venture capitalist and billionaire John Doerr. narrows the gap between the highest and lowest earners Derek C. Jones, “The Ombudsman: Employee Ownership as a Mechanism to Enhance Corporate Governance and Moderate Executive Pay Levels,” Interfaces 43, no. 6 (December 1, 2013): 599–601, https://doi.org/​10.1287/​inte.2013.0709.

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World)
by Robert J. Gordon
Published 12 Jan 2016

Among the many foreigners who deserve credit for key elements of the Great Inventions are transplanted Scotsman Alexander Graham Bell for the telephone, Frenchmen Louis Pasteur for the germ theory of disease and Louis Lumière for the motion picture, Englishmen Joseph Lister for antiseptic surgery and David Hughes for early wireless experiments, and Germans Karl Benz for the internal combustion engine and Heinrich Hertz for key inventions that made possible the 1896 wireless patents of the recent Italian immigrant Guglielmo Marconi. The role of foreign inventors in the late nineteenth century was distinctly more important than it was one hundred years later, when the personal computer and Internet revolution was led almost uniformly by Americans, including Paul Allen, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, and Mark Zuckerberg. Among the pioneering giants of the Internet age, Sergei Brin (co-founder of Google) is one of the few to have been born abroad. Organization. The book proper begins with chapter 2, on living conditions in 1870. Part I includes eight chapters (chapters 2–9) on the revolutionary advances in the standard of living through 1940, a dividing year chosen both because it is halfway between 1870 and 2010 and because 1940 marks the year of the first Census of Housing, with its detailed quantitative measures of housing and its equipment.

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If 90 percent of the people with whom you interact speak English and only 10 percent speak French, then it is quite likely that you will work harder to perfect your English than your French. Thus the power of social media is determined by the popularity of the platform. In 2005, only 8 percent of adults said they used social media. A service called Myspace was then the leading social media network, and Facebook, created by Mark Zuckerberg in his Harvard dorm room, was still only a year old. Eight years later, in 2013, social media use in adults had reached 72 percent. Teenagers and young adults had an adoption rate of close to 90 percent. Many business interactions still remain focused on e-mail, but social networks dominate personal interactions.

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The chapter begins with a historical overview of the source of inventions since 1870 and emphasizes a U-shaped history in which the role of the individual inventor dominated the late nineteenth century, followed by most of the twentieth century, when major inventions occurred within the research laboratories of giant corporations. After 1975, the individual entrepreneur returned as the modern electronic age was created by individuals such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg. Equipped with this historical background, we then examine the quantitative record of progress. The post-1970 years have not witnessed a uniformly slow advance of TFP. Instead the impact on TFP of the inventions of IR #3 were centered on the decade 1994–2004. We describe changes in business practices in the office, in the retail sector, and in the banking and financial sector and find in all cases that current methods of production had been largely achieved by 2004.

Don't Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
by Steve Krug
Published 1 Jan 2000

What they know is you type something in a box and stuff appears.2 But it doesn’t matter to them: They’re muddling through and using the thing successfully. 2 Usually a box with the word “Google” next to it. A lot of people think Google is the Internet. And muddling through is not limited to beginners. Even technically savvy users often have surprising gaps in their understanding of how things work. (I wouldn’t be surprised if even Mark Zuckerberg and Sergey Brin have some bits of technology in their lives that they use by muddling through.) Why does this happen? It’s not important to us. For most of us, it doesn’t matter to us whether we understand how things work, as long as we can use them. It’s not for lack of intelligence, but for lack of caring.

Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
by Nir Eyal
Published 26 Dec 2013

Products with higher user engagement also have the potential to grow faster than their rivals. Case in point: Facebook leapfrogged its competitors, including MySpace and Friendster, even though it was relatively late to the social networking party. Although its competitors both had healthy growth rates and millions of users by the time Mark Zuckerberg’s fledgling site launched beyond the closed doors of academia, his company came to dominate the industry. Facebook’s success was, in part, a result of what I call the more is more principle—more frequent usage drives more viral growth. As David Skok, tech entrepreneur turned venture capitalist, points out, “The most important factor to increasing growth is . . .

Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming
by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby
Published 22 Nov 2013

The design collective Metahaven has developed a sustained critique of neoliberalism through a series of uncorporate identities for imaginary corporategovernment states by subverting branding and corporate identity strategies from a graphic design perspective.18 Their Facestate (2011) installation for Graphic Design: Now in Production at the Walker Art Center explored parallels between social software and the state: "It is about politicians hailing the entrepreneurship of Mark Zuckerberg, about the neoliberal dream of minimal government interference, about the governance of social networks, about face recognition, about debt, about the future of money and currency in social networks, and about the dream of total participation. "19 Metahaven combines extensive research with the setting out of fictional corporate government hybrids through design.

Automation and the Future of Work
by Aaron Benanav
Published 3 Nov 2020

Again, “the most frightening long-term scenario of all might be if the global economic system eventually manages to adapt to the new reality,” leading to the creation of an “automated feudalism” in which the “peasants would be largely superfluous” and the elite impervious to economic demands.6 For these authors, education and retraining will not be enough to stabilize labor demand in an automated economy; some form of guaranteed nonwage income, such as a negative income tax, must be put in place.7 This automation discourse has been enthusiastically adopted by the jeans-wearing elite of Silicon Valley. Bill Gates advocated for a robots tax. Mark Zuckerberg told Harvard undergraduate inductees to “explore ideas like universal basic income,” a policy Elon Musk also thinks will become increasingly “necessary” over time, as robots outcompete humans across a growing range of jobs.8 Musk gave his SpaceX drone vessels names like “Of Course I Still Love You” and “Just Read the Instructions,” which he lifted from the names of spaceships in Iain M.

That Used to Be Us
by Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum
Published 1 Sep 2011

SEVEN Average Is Over We have a bone to pick with the writers of the movie The Social Network. We take exception to the way they depicted Lawrence Summers, who was the president of Harvard at the time in which the movie is set. At one point, two Harvard students, the twin brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, go to Summers complaining that a fellow student, Mark Zuckerberg, has stolen their idea for something called “the Facebook.” Summers hears the twins’ tale of woe without a shred of sympathy, then tosses them out with this piece of advice: “Yes, everyone at Harvard is inventing something. Harvard undergraduates believe that inventing a job is better than finding one, so I’ll suggest again that the two of you come up with a new, new project.”

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“Show me an obstacle and I will show you an opportunity” is still the motto of many, many Americans, be they business entrepreneurs or civic and charitable entrepreneurs. So Rosa Parks just got on that bus and took her seat; so new immigrants just went out and started 25 percent of the new companies in Silicon Valley in the last decade; so college dropouts named Steve Jobs, Michael Dell, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg just got up and created four of the biggest companies in the world. So, when all seemed lost in the Iraq war, the U.S. military carried out a surge, not a retreat, because, as one of the officers involved told Tom, “We were just too dumb to quit.” It was never in the plan, but none of them got the word.

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World
by Don Tapscott and Alex Tapscott
Published 9 May 2016

CHANGING THE BOUNDARIES OF THE FIRM Throughout the first era of the Internet, management thinkers (Don included) talked up the networked enterprise, the flat corporation, open innovation, and business ecosystems as successors to the hierarchies of industrial power. However, the architecture of the early-twentieth-century corporation remains pretty much intact. Even the big dot-coms adopted a top-down structure with such decision makers as Jeff Bezos, Marissa Mayer, and Mark Zuckerberg. So why would any established firm—particularly ones that make their money off other people’s data, operate largely behind closed doors, and suffer surprisingly little in data breach after data breach—want to leverage blockchain technologies to distribute power, increase transparency, respect user privacy and anonymity, and include far more people who can afford far less than those already served?

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Twister leverages the free software implementations of bitcoin and BitTorrent protocols and deploys cryptography end to end so that no government can spy on users’ communications.41 GETTING THE WORD OUT: THE CRITICAL ROLE OF EDUCATION Joichi Ito is among an elite group of widely successful entrepreneurs—from Bill Gates and Steve Jobs to Biz Stone and Mark Zuckerberg—who dropped out of college to invent something new in the digital economy.42 It is a hallmark of our entrepreneurial culture that one’s pursuit of an idea, to go deep and understand its nuances as Ito likes to say, drives a visionary out of the classroom and into business. Henry Ford and Walt Disney pursued their passions without college degrees.

Advertisers at Work
by Tracy Tuten
Published 28 May 2012

And we have a little line that everyone here has to learn and learn what it means. It’s simply, “Make friends, not ads.” That’s what we try to get the organization to do: think not about this thing you’re about to create, but think, how do you help a brand and its publics become friends. We’ve been actually doing that long before Mark Zuckerberg took the word “friends” and did something with it—before he could probably shave. Anyway, that’s our philosophy, and we actually have an interesting organizational structure. We have no profit centers between any of our disciplines. We don’t have any sort of wholly owned subsidiaries. We have T-shaped subject matter people3 who can flow all around the organization and work on anything they want as long as what they’re providing is relevant, without worrying about where the budget is going.

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I personally am a big believer, even though some people don’t agree with me, that the future creative person is going to come as much from other areas as they do from the traditional writer, art director, and the crafts. In fact, if you look at the biggest cultural influencers of the last three or four years, who are they? They’re the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world, right? Programmers and nerds—not necessarily who we consider traditional communicators. Tuten: Right. Boches: They’re Ev Williams, they’re Steve Chen, they’re the guys who are inventing things like YouTube and Facebook and Twitter. They aren’t writers and art directors. They’re programmers.

Masters of Management: How the Business Gurus and Their Ideas Have Changed the World—for Better and for Worse
by Adrian Wooldridge
Published 29 Nov 2011

Business books sell in the millions. “When I was in college, guys usually pretended they were in a band,” one observer has commented. “Now they pretend they are in a startup.” Americans are unusually comfortable with the risk-taking that is at the heart of entrepreneurialism. The rewards for success can be huge—Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg was a billionaire before he was thirty—while the punishments for failure are often trivial. In some countries bankruptcy spells social death. In the United States, particularly in Silicon Valley, it is a badge of honor. Monitor, a consultancy, discovered that 96 percent of Americans who responded to its survey said that it was common for people who had failed in business to try again, compared with just 16 percent in Austria.4 The United States also has several structural advantages when it comes to entrepreneurship.

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CHAPTER 6: RETHINKING THE COMPANY 1. Auletta, Googled, pp. 17–18. 2. Martin Thomas, Loose: The Future of Business Is Letting Go (London: Headline, 2011), pp. 181–82. 3. Auletta, Googled, p. 21. 4. Steven Levy, “Larry Page wants to return Google to its startup roots,” Wired, March 18, 2011. 5. Auletta, Googled, p. 15. 6. Mark Zuckerberg, speech at Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival, June 23, 2010. 7. Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams, Macrowikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World (New York: Portfolio, 2010), p. 253. 8. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (New York: Random House, 2007). 9.

Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century
by Tim Higgins
Published 2 Aug 2021

Venture capitalists (VCs), meanwhile, ran funds that raised millions of dollars with the goal of investing in such startups, then cashing out—either through acquisition of the startup by a bigger company or else through an initial public offering at some point during the fund’s lifetime (typically eight to twelve years). In those early days, a software-based startup, such as Facebook, was judged on its expanding user base rather than its profit. Mark Zuckerberg’s social network didn’t turn a profit until five years after he founded it in his Harvard University dorm room, still years before its IPO. Amazon went nearly a decade before turning an annual profit; meanwhile it spent its cash to grow its user base and build unparalleled logistics and digital infrastructure systems.

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It was a position that would prove notoriously, almost comically difficult for Musk to keep filled; he didn’t seem to have much interest in the advice of his lawyers. One thing Tesla elected not to do when preparing for public ownership, which would have ramifications years later, was introduce a dual-class stock system. This was what allowed Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Google (or Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook two years later) to keep control of their company, even as they held a small fraction of its total stock. It’s unclear why Tesla’s IPO paperwork, which it filed in January 2010, contained no such provision to ensure Musk’s continued oversight of the company. Those who worked on it said the idea was omitted, in part, because selling Tesla as an investment was already going to be hard enough.

The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire
by Jeff Berwick and Charlie Robinson
Published 14 Apr 2020

The corporatist controllers with the money and political aspirations that are running the United States are families and people like Rockefeller, Carnegie, Koch, Bezos, Gates, Buffet, Du Pont, Vanderbilt, Mellon, Ford, Walton, Soros, Kissinger, Adelson, Sergey Brin & Larry Page, Eric Schmidt, Mark Zuckerberg, Pierre Omidyar, Elon Musk, and others. Families such as these have either been running the country for decades or are a new breed of wealthy technocrats that are stepping up to replace the older ruling families. Their money funds programs pushing to relax restrictions on things like oil drilling, the deregulation of industries they seek to expand into, the regulation of industries that they wish to lock others out of, and the ability to keep their operations as secret as possible.

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The people in charge will not be leaving witnesses to their crimes. Members of the Permanent State would be people like Henry Kissinger, Bill Gates, Sheldon Adelson, George Soros, The Bush & Clinton families, John Brennan, James Comey, Rupert Murdoch, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Barack Obama, Richard Perle, Bill Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, Eric Schmidt, Mark Zuckerberg, and many more names that most people would never recognize. A new generation of Permanent State swamp monsters is stealing the headlines these days as they work to take control of industries, like Jeff Bezos, who owns the bulk of Amazon. His ownership stake in Amazon is worth well over $100 billion, part of which he used to purchase the Washington Post.

Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World
by Naomi Klein
Published 11 Sep 2023

And then they expressed outrage—and utter incredulity—when they got carted away. The fantasy and the reality had become one and the same.” Notably, Bannon appears to have no desire to make Dave’s life better, to help him lead a life from which he would not need to escape. Rather, his goal seems to be to turn reality into a game played with live ammunition. If Mark Zuckerberg’s plans for the “Metaverse” proceed as he hopes, with all of us represented by personalized animated avatars to our banks and our friends, this is only going to get more confusing. It already is. In March 2022, South Korea elected Yoon Suk-yeol as its new president. The conservative politician campaigned, in part, by seeding the internet with a deepfake version of himself, known as AI Yoon.

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Billionaires, heads of state, A-list celebrities, journalists, and members of various royal families gather every year at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, just as they do in Aspen, Colorado, and just as they did in Manhattan at the Clinton Global Initiative—Google even runs an invitation-only annual “summer camp” in Sicily where you are as likely to bump into Mark Zuckerberg as Katy Perry. In every case, they take up the mantle of solving the world’s problems—climate breakdown, infectious diseases, hunger—with no mandate and no public involvement and, most notably, no shame about their own central roles in creating and sustaining these crises. Knowing that this kind of unmasked plutocracy can take root in democratic societies without so much as an effort to hide it is like being forced to watch your spouse cheat on you when that is not your kink.

Steve Jobs
by Walter Isaacson
Published 23 Oct 2011

Instead of living in the isolated and rather spooky unfurnished Woodside mansion, the couple moved into a charming and unpretentious house on a corner in a family-friendly neighborhood in old Palo Alto. It was a privileged realm—neighbors would eventually include the visionary venture capitalist John Doerr, Google’s founder Larry Page, and Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg, along with Andy Hertzfeld and Joanna Hoffman—but the homes were not ostentatious, and there were no high hedges or long drives shielding them from view. Instead, houses were nestled on lots next to each other along flat, quiet streets flanked by wide sidewalks. “We wanted to live in a neighborhood where kids could walk to see friends,” Jobs later said.

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In February 2011, Doerr began making plans to host a small dinner for President Obama in Silicon Valley. He and Jobs, along with their wives, went to dinner at Evvia, a Greek restaurant in Palo Alto, to draw up a tight guest list. The dozen chosen tech titans included Google’s Eric Schmidt, Yahoo’s Carol Bartz, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Cisco’s John Chambers, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, Genentech’s Art Levinson, and Netflix’s Reed Hastings. Jobs’s attention to the details of the dinner extended to the food. Doerr sent him the proposed menu, and he responded that some of the dishes proposed by the caterer—shrimp, cod, lentil salad—were far too fancy “and not who you are, John.”

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What are the five products you want to focus on? Get rid of the rest, because they’re dragging you down. They’re turning you into Microsoft. They’re causing you to turn out products that are adequate but not great. I tried to be as helpful as I could. I will continue to do that with people like Mark Zuckerberg too. That’s how I’m going to spend part of the time I have left. I can help the next generation remember the lineage of great companies here and how to continue the tradition. The Valley has been very supportive of me. I should do my best to repay. The announcement of Jobs’s 2011 medical leave prompted others to make a pilgrimage to the house in Palo Alto.

Britannia Unchained: Global Lessons for Growth and Prosperity
by Kwasi Kwarteng , Priti Patel , Dominic Raab , Chris Skidmore and Elizabeth Truss
Published 12 Sep 2012

But blaming the superficiality of the celebrity culture should not become a substitute for tackling a far deeper problem. People will always be attracted to shortcuts that offer a rapid ascent to fortune and fame. In interviews, Lord Sugar often makes the point that young entrepreneurs too often expect the one in a million success of Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook, rather than the hard grind of most business.54 He is equally quick to lambast what he calls the ‘cushy’ benefits system for generating an ‘expectancy culture’.55 Sugar is an example of a dwindling breed of self-made UK entrepreneurs who started out from modest beginnings, with few qualifications, and built up businesses to be internationally competitive.

The Scandal of Money
by George Gilder
Published 23 Feb 2016

Which means that the “greater fools” chiefly targeted by venture capitalists to buy their unicorns are not you and I and millions of others in a possibly hallucinogenic NASDAQ public market but rather a tiny elite of cagey bidders counseled by game theory quants. The oligopsonists include Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, Google’s alphabetic Larry Page, Disney’s Robert Iger, Verizon’s Lowell McAdam, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Netflix’s Reed Hastings, and Apple’s Tim Cook. None seems a good bet for a gaggle of gulls. What is really going on is the displacement of the open and rabble-run IPO market by an exclusive game of horse trading among the most exalted elite of “qualified investors,” the owners of the leviathans of the last generation of IPOs.

Science...For Her!
by Megan Amram
Published 4 Nov 2014

Penview was the “son of Dr. Ryan Penview, a third-generation ophthalmologist, and Mrs. Claire Penview, a Zuckerberg-ass beaver-bitch.” Mrs. Penview practiced law in New York State until 2004, and is considered by many to be a friendly and beautiful member of her community, bearing no resemblance whatsoever to Mark Zuckerberg or his rear end. “Beaver-bitch” is not a profession. We mischaracterized the bride as having worn “a peace [sic] of shit mayonnaise tent. Also, you know how sometimes people see the Virgin Mary in stuff? It was like that, except you could see Hitler in the wedding dress, but specifically because she had hand-embroidered a picture of Hitler in her dress.”

Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age
by Steven Johnson
Published 14 Jul 2012

The state plays a key role, but that role is limited to establishing rewards and incentives that encourage better—and more collaborative—teaching. — In February 2012, Facebook filed its S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission, justifying and describing its plans for an initial public offering. The document included a revealing letter from Facebook cofounder Mark Zuckerberg, outlining the company’s core mission and warning potential shareholders that the company would prioritize that long-term mission over short-term opportunities to increase the share price. The Facebook mission can be boiled down to the old E. M. Forster slogan: “Only connect.” The company wants to strengthen the social ties that allow humans around the planet to connect, organize, converse, and share.

Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal
by George Packer
Published 14 Jun 2021

The demand could produce a flowering of new outlets that will attract talented newcomers as well as refugees from established media as it increasingly loses its way. We need journalists who are rewarded when they refrain from scratching their Twitter itch and discover their fellow Americans. We need journalism that is independent and imaginative enough to go to places that Mark Zuckerberg never sees. We need citizens who can listen to one another while thinking for themselves. And we need to affirm the value of free expression for any of this to matter. * * * Our idea of activism has come down to the act of protest. It’s an indispensable civic tool for dramatizing a cause, heightening social tensions, and claiming the attention of those in power.

Team Human
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 22 Jan 2019

The Soviets’ launch of the Sputnik satellite in the 1960s led America to begin offering advanced math in high school Alvin Powell, “How Sputnik Changed U.S. Education,” Harvard Gazette, October 11, 2007. 27. For these reasons, many of the most ambitious engineers, developers, and entrepreneurs end up dropping out of college altogether Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Evan Williams, Travis Kalanick, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, John Mackey, Jan Koum, to name only a few. 28. Consider Thomas Jefferson’s famous invention, the dumbwaiter Silvio A. Bedini, Thomas Jefferson: Statesman of Science (Basing­stoke: Palgrave–MacMillan, 1990). Even today, Chinese laborers “finish” smartphones by wiping off any fingerprints Victoria Turk, “China’s Workers Need Help to Fight Factories’ Toxic Practices,” New Scientist, March 22, 2017. 29.

The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness
by Morgan Housel
Published 7 Sep 2020

But the majority of Benjamin Graham’s investing success was due to owning an enormous chunk of GEICO stock which, by his own admission, broke nearly every diversification rule that Graham himself laid out in his famous texts. Where does the thin line between bold and reckless fall here? I don’t know. Graham wrote about his GEICO bonanza: “One lucky break, or one supremely shrewd decision—can we tell them apart?” Not easily. We similarly think Mark Zuckerberg is a genius for turning down Yahoo!’s 2006 $1 billion offer to buy his company. He saw the future and stuck to his guns. But people criticize Yahoo! with as much passion for turning down its own big buyout offer from Microsoft—those fools should have cashed out while they could! What is the lesson for entrepreneurs here?

Computer: A History of the Information Machine
by Martin Campbell-Kelly and Nathan Ensmenger
Published 29 Jul 2013

As the personal-computer industry progressed, the garage gave way to the college dorm room as the symbolic locus for IT entrepreneurial activity. Freshman Bill Gates left Harvard University to co-found Microsoft, freshman Shawn Fanning left Northeastern University to co-found Napster, and freshman Mark Zuckerberg left Harvard University to found Facebook. (Facebook is discussed in Chapter 12.) Another freshman, Michael Dell, stands out from these other teenagers—for his University of Texas dorm room was not merely the location of early-planning and prototype design but also the initial site of product assembly.

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These firms, both of which were founded in California and initially focused on the United States, allowed users to create individual public- or semipublic-profile web pages and to connect with others. Friendster and MySpace grew rapidly in their first half-decade and gained millions of users, but in recent years they have been greatly overshadowed by industry-leading Facebook. Harvard University freshman Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook—then called Thefacebook—in his shared Kirkland House dorm suite. Frequently occupied with designing and programming computer applications during his first semester, Zuckerberg created two hit programs. The first, Course Match, enabled students to match up classes with others; the second, Facemash, allowed students to compare and choose (based on attractiveness) between two Harvard freshmen portrait photos.

The Content Trap: A Strategist's Guide to Digital Change
by Bharat Anand
Published 17 Oct 2016

despite Facebook’s superior user data Jim Edwards, “DATA: Google Totally Blows Away Facebook on Ad Performance,” Business Insider, last modified May 15, 2012, accessed March 9, 2016, http://www.businessinsider.com/​data-google-totally-blows-away-facebook-on-ad-performance-2012-5 . A 2013 survey of 395 large-company marketers by Forrester Research revealed that Facebook created “less business value than any other digital marketing opportunity.” See Nate Elliott, “An Open Letter to Mark Zuckerberg,” October 28, 2013, accessed June 6, 2016, http://blogs.forrester.com/​nate_elliott/​13-10-28-an_open_letter_to_mark_zuckerberg . The Affluent Society John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society , 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976). of desirable information One of the first papers to offer a formal theory for the informative (matching) effect of advertising is Gene Grossman and Carl Shapiro, “Informative Advertising with Differentiated Products,” The Review of Economic Studies 51, no. 1 (1984): 63–81.

The Finance Curse: How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer
by Nicholas Shaxson
Published 10 Oct 2018

In 1919, as Panama was taking its first steps setting up its ask-no-questions ship registry, Veblen summarised how the game worked: ‘In this international competition the machinery and policy of the state are in a peculiar degree drawn into the service of the larger business interests; so that, both in commerce and industrial enterprise, the business men of one nation are pitted against those of another and swing the forces of the state, legislative, diplomatic, and military, against one another in the strategic game of pecuniary advantage.’ These are ‘channels of sabotage’, he said, wrapped up in the flag. To help the national champions ‘compete’ on a global stage, the common man must shoulder the burden. The idea of national champions is a recurring theme in economic history. When Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook was grilled by the US Senate in April 2018 over privacy violations, photos of his crib notes revealed this: ‘US tech companies key asset for America; break up strengthens Chinese companies.’ This kind of nonsense – an apparent call to leave his monopoly alone to profitably harvest and sell valuable and sensitive data about American users in the interests of national security – was summarised by Veblen in his usual style.

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At the top of the 2018 list sits Jeff Bezos, the head of Amazon, the everything-monopoly. Next comes Bill Gates, who created the Windows quasi-monopoly, followed by Warren Buffett, the portfolio monopolist who openly admits that he only tends to invest in businesses that have little competition. There’s Mark Zuckerberg, the social network monopolist of Facebook, in fifth position, and Mexico’s uber-monopolist Carlos Slim, now pushed down to seventh place by the new giants of technology. All these people have made their fortunes as a result of the evisceration or lack of anti-monopoly laws or enforcement, the rise of offshore finance, the financialisation of Western and other economies and the general retreat of government.

After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul
by Tripp Mickle
Published 2 May 2022

Jobs had sparked the architectural bonanza in 2010 when he had Foster + Partners begin work on the closed loop that seemed like a physical manifestation of Apple’s culture of secrecy and control. Facebook had followed, with the architect Frank Gehry designing a campus of community coffee shops and offices lined with plywood, an informal homage to its hoodie-wearing CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. Not to be outdone, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, had tapped the Danish architect Bjarke Ingels to imagine a soaring glass canopy over a public walkway, a nod to the accessibility of information its search engine made possible. The glitzy headquarters followed a long line of monuments to wealth and power that dated all the way back to Egypt’s pharaohs.

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The 175 acres Apple had bought had been abandoned by Hewlett-Packard after the PC market stagnated. Facebook had taken over the fossilized remains of Sun Microsystems’ headquarters, which had been completed in 2000, just as the dot-com implosion had devastated Sun’s business. After taking over the campus in 2011, Mark Zuckerberg had left Sun’s sign visible to remind employees about the risks of becoming comfortable with success. Apple’s high-priced headquarters raised fears that the same thing might happen to it. The park the iPhone built was completed ten years after the company’s best-selling product had debuted. The device still accounted for two-thirds of the company’s sales, and the Apple Watch, AirPods, and other new products had yet to achieve comparable unit sales.

The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze
by Laura Shin
Published 22 Feb 2022

Gustav Simonsson, a programmer who’d been watching Ethereum but had thought that its token sale might be a scam, attended and realized that many of the people involved had PhDs, such as Gavin, Christian Reitwießner, and Jutta Steiner, who had a PhD in math and years at McKinsey & Company; she was managing security and audits. Plus, Vitalik had just won the 2014 World Technology Award for IT software, beating out Mark Zuckerberg, among others. Gustav cast aside his doubts to work with Jutta on security. The developers entered a heavy work period. Every day, Jeff would wake up in his small Amsterdam West apartment, walk his bull terrier Bruce, drink coffee, and then code until bedtime, with a break for dinner. In Germany, Christoph, who mostly worked remotely from his small town, Mittweida (population fifteen thousand), but occasionally went into the Berlin office, initially found a lot of exploits that could break the protocol—usually in Jeffrey’s Go client, since Gavin had written the yellow paper.12 As time went on, there were fewer and fewer bugs.

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She eventually became managing director of Kraken in Japan. By the end of 2017, Ethereum had a roughly $70 billion market cap, and Vitalik himself was a centimillionaire; he’d been named to the Fortune 40 Under 40 list alongside the likes of Emmanuel Macron, Marie Kondo, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and Tim Ferriss, and he’d even beaten Mark Zuckerberg (among others) for the World Technology Award.33 He could have done a proper executive search and attracted someone with experience stewarding an open-source technology. In fact, in these last months of 2017, Bob Summerwill was giving Vitalik recommendations around the transition from Ming, advocating that the EF have things like an elected community board, full transparency, defined governance, and the like—typical professional structural features appropriate for an organization shepherding the development of a decentralized technology.

The Network Imperative: How to Survive and Grow in the Age of Digital Business Models
by Barry Libert and Megan Beck
Published 6 Jun 2016

Technology evolves at a lightning pace and, with it, its applications. Even more of our everyday lives is converting to a digital or digitally supported experience. In March 2014, Facebook purchased virtual reality technology company Oculus VR for $2 billion. According to reports, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg instigated the deal. Zuckerberg described his first time using the VR headset as revelatory: “When you put on the goggles, it’s different from anything I have ever experienced in my life.”3 But more than that, Zuckerberg was on the lookout for the next major ecosystem that would support human interaction.

The Retreat of Western Liberalism
by Edward Luce
Published 20 Apr 2017

The most important example of this is how we think about economic growth in the West. We still measure our health in aggregate numbers. But averages are useless. As Robert H. Frank, the Cornell economist, points out, on average we have about 1.9 legs each, because some people have only one leg.14 Likewise, if Mark Zuckerberg joins your neighbourhood football team, every member is on average a billionaire. Under the old model, where most production was clustered behind national barriers, what was good for General Motors was good for America. The annual gross domestic product figure meant as much to GM’s American customers as it did to the company.

Be Obsessed or Be Average
by Grant Cardone
Published 20 Sep 2016

But you’re not going to stop. Because history shows that only the obsessed make it—people like Alexander the Great, Joan of Arc, Albert Einstein, Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Elon Musk, Howard Schultz, Oprah, Vincent van Gogh, Steve Jobs, Christopher Columbus, Charlie Chaplin, Mozart, Michelangelo, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Leonardo DiCaprio, Martin Scorsese, Jay Z, Beyoncé, Serena Williams, and on and on. There is no shortage of these people, and like them or hate them, admire them or detest them, we all know them! Whether or not you agree with their missions or how they got there, you can’t deny that they were obsessed—and that’s why you know their names.

Riding for Deliveroo: Resistance in the New Economy
by Callum Cant
Published 11 Nov 2019

He wants to ‘play the game of business as if people matter’.4 To work out how to do that, O’Reilly variously cites Jonathan Hall (an economist at Uber), Professor Andrei Haigu (in the Harvard Business Review), Simon Rothmans (venture capitalist), Tom Perez (secretary of labor under Obama), Steven Hill (of the Google-backed New America think tank), and Jose Alvarez (ex-CEO). His positive examples of social change are those luminaries of human emancipation, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk.5 His argument represents, in short, the ideas of the bleeding-heart ruling class. His analysis of working conditions at a global platform like Uber begins with a very specific element of US employment law: that when employees work for over 30 hours a week, employers have a responsibility to pay a full-time benefits package.

Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley's Bill Campbell
by Eric Schmidt , Jonathan Rosenberg and Alan Eagle
Published 15 Apr 2019

Bill had been a transcendent figure in the technology business since moving west in 1983, playing a critical role in the success of Apple, Google, Intuit, and numerous other companies. To say he was tremendously respected would be a gross understatement—loved is more like it. Among the audience that day were dozens of technology leaders—Larry Page. Sergey Brin. Mark Zuckerberg. Sheryl Sandberg. Tim Cook. Jeff Bezos. Mary Meeker. John Doerr. Ruth Porat. Scott Cook. Brad Smith. Ben Horowitz. Marc Andreessen. Such a concentration of industry pioneers and power is rarely seen, at least not in Silicon Valley. We—Jonathan Rosenberg and Eric Schmidt—sat among the audience, making subdued small talk, soft sunshine contrasting with the somber mood.

The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success
by William Thorndike
Published 14 Sep 2012

They rarely appeared on the covers of business publications and did not write books of management advice. They were not cheerleaders or marketers or backslappers, and they did not exude charisma. They were very different from high-profile CEOs such as Steve Jobs or Sam Walton or Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airlines or Mark Zuckerberg. These geniuses are the Isaac Newtons of business, struck apple-like by enormously powerful ideas that they proceed to execute with maniacal focus and determination. Their situations and circumstances, however, are not remotely similar (nor are the lessons from their careers remotely transferable) to those of the vast majority of business executives.

City Squares: Eighteen Writers on the Spirit and Significance of Squares Around the World
by Catie Marron
Published 11 Apr 2016

Facebook is a company that hates silos—so much so that the footbridges have supermarket-style doors that automatically open to let people pass. On the street level, there is an open-plan glass-windowed office exposed to the square, with a sign declaring “Do Not Feed the Animals”; this is where Facebook cofounder Mark Zuckerberg himself works. In the center of the space, in the spot where a fountain or statue might be found in an Italian plaza, there is a small yellow crane. Zuckerberg and the other engineers first stumbled on this piece of metal in the early days of Facebook, in an earlier warehouse office, and started using it as an impromptu stage for their so-called hackathons, or all-night coding rituals.

Big Bucks: The Explosion of the Art Market in the 21st Century
by Georgina Adam
Published 14 Jun 2014

On hand to promote the project were three very glamorous investors in the venture: Chinese-born Wendi Deng, at the time still married to press mogul Rupert Murdoch; former New Yorker editor Tina Brown, and Dasha Zhukova, partner of the Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich. Deng introduced Cleveland as: ‘A genius – our Mark Zuckerberg,’ referring to the Facebook founder. Then Cleveland – tall, casually dressed in a white shirt with the sleeves turned back – explained to the guests that Artsy would allow art to find a much wider audience through the internet. He drew a parallel with music: ‘Hundreds of years ago, music was something very few people had access to,’ he said.

Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth
by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares
Published 5 Oct 2015

It’s relatively easy to get started in this channel. Start by giving free talks to small groups of potential customers or partners. Speaking at small events can improve your speaking ability, give you some early traction, and spread your story or message. It’s also good for personal growth if you’ve never done it before: Mark Zuckerberg has talked about how improving at public speaking has vastly improved his management ability. We recommend trying to give at least one talk even if you choose not to pursue this traction channel. Dan Martell is the founder of Clarity, an advice platform that connects founders with successful entrepreneurs.

Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside
by Xiaowei Wang
Published 12 Oct 2020

We talk about the Silicon Valley hubris that keeps people from digging too deeply into Chinese technology with an honest look: Silicon Valley is the peak of innovation, so how could another place surpass it? On the other side of hubris is a rhetorical trap: China as a constructed enemy for the American government, in order for it to catalyze domestic support for a range of policies by inciting old-fashioned, U.S.A.-brand nationalism. It’s not surprising that tech CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg use China as a straw man, arguing that stringent government regulation will prevent American companies from moving fast. Even in narratives of Chinese economic might, China is not innovative; rather, it steals, it cheats, it oppresses. After the People’s Republic of China was founded, science and technology research did take a slow start.

Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History
by Kurt Andersen
Published 4 Sep 2017

Individual anybodies with good ideas and grit and luck could imagine and then create new businesses and industries. The entrepreneurial instinct has served America well. But as with the three hundred thousand California gold-seekers in 1849–50 who followed the fortunate ten thousand in 1848, as with the American habit of wishfulness in general, a confirmation bias kicks in: from Ben Franklin to Mark Zuckerberg, the stories of the supremely successful entrepreneurs obscure the forgotten millions of losers and nincompoops. The fabulous successes seem like proof of the power of passionate belief in oneself, our American faith in faith. Entrepreneurs exist on a smoke-and-mirrors spectrum, from small-time fabulists to legitimately world-changing visionaries.

…

The first generation of digital entrepreneurs to get amazingly rich, in the 1980s and ’90s—Gates, Jobs, Bezos—became billionaires in early middle age. In this century, before and after burst bubbles and meltdowns, it happened to younger, digital billionaires at thirty (Larry Page of Google) or twenty-five (Evan Spiegel of Snapchat) or twenty-three (Mark Zuckerberg). Which serves only to make the dream all the dreamier. What’s the new term of art for the most financially successful tech start-ups? Unicorns, after the magical creatures in which only children believe. It’s correct to say that the financial meltdown of 2008 resulted from too much deregulation, too many arcane Wall Street innovations, and some fraud.

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America
by George Packer
Published 4 Mar 2014

It didn’t succeed for various reasons—people turned out not to want to interact through avatars, they wanted to be themselves—but Hoffman continued to refine the idea, and after the sale of PayPal to eBay in 2002, he took his proceeds and launched a social network for businesspeople called LinkedIn. It was through LinkedIn that Hoffman met Sean Parker, and it was through Hoffman and Parker that Thiel met Mark Zuckerberg. In the spring of 2004, Thiel and Hoffman were trying to talk their hyperkinetic twenty-four-year-old friend Parker out of suing Sequoia Capital, the investors in his online address book company, Plaxo. Owing to his libertine ways, Parker had been driven out of his own company, just as he’d been driven out of Napster, the music sharing site, a few years earlier.

…

Three months later, Parker came back to Thiel with the news that he’d just become president of Thefacebook, a college social network with four employees, and that the Harvard sophomore who had founded it needed money because the number of students clamoring to get on was increasing and would soon overwhelm the computers. Hoffman, who had been tracking Thefacebook and Mark Zuckerberg all year, recused himself from becoming the lead investor because it might be seen as a conflict of interest with LinkedIn. The natural choice was Thiel. Thiel liked to say that, on principle, a hard-core libertarian shouldn’t put his money in social networking. If there was no such thing as society, only individuals, how could there be any return on the investment?

A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America
by Bruce Cannon Gibney
Published 7 Mar 2017

I mention them less to establish my credibility as a prognosticator than to show the value of socially funded innovation (every company I mentioned was built on technologies pioneered by government grants or research) and, most important, to show the overwhelming importance of luck in a stagnating economy. Sharing a dorm with the next Mark Zuckerberg is a boon not to be denied, but in the luck department, it really should be enough to be born American. And so it was, before the Boomers took over. Most Americans with moderate talent and ambition could find a good job, buy a home, and invest their savings in the Standard & Poor’s 500, and in doing so, accumulate enough for a comfortable retirement.

…

On the private side, Facebook, at least in America, is an economically acceptable natural monopoly—it’s a product that gets better as more people use it (a “network effect”), it’s difficult for competitors to re-create and doubtful consumers want a substitute, and there have been no real charges that Mark Zuckerberg has abused his position to dispatch competitors. Still, not all monopolies are natural, and there has been an alarming rise in the market power of megafirms. That is not to say that size automatically guarantees abuse, only that it creates its potential and, given the occupancy of corner offices by Boomers, should alarm.

The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World
by Adrian Wooldridge
Published 2 Jun 2021

During his first run for the presidency back in 1987, Joe Biden ticked off a voter who asked him about his educational qualifications by retorting, ‘I think I probably have a much higher IQ than you do … I’d be delighted to sit down and compare my IQ to yours.’8 Boris Johnson has been known to rag David Cameron because he was a King’s Scholar at Eton, a sure sign of mental ability, while Cameron was an Oppidan, or regular fee payer. This is not just froth. The meritocratic idea is shaping society from top to bottom. A growing proportion of great fortunes are in the hands of people with outstanding brain power: computer geeks such as Bill Gates (Microsoft) and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) or financial wizards such as George Soros (who pioneered hedge funds) and Jim Simons (who helped to found computer-driven ‘quant investing’).9 The world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton and makes a point of surrounding himself with academic super-achievers.

…

They are the Economist rich rather than the Tatler rich. Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist who founded PayPal and was one of the first investors in Facebook, likes to fly provocative intellectuals to have dinner with him in San Francisco to discuss their latest books (he has also written a rather good book of his own, Zero to One).3 Mark Zuckerberg hosts an online book club. Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, toyed, as a young man, with becoming a public intellectual and still likes to reminisce about his time studying philosophy at Oxford. Eric Schmidt, a former chairman of Google, is the author of a lengthening list of books and a fixture on the ideas-conference circuit.

Editing Humanity: The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing
by Kevin Davies
Published 5 Oct 2020

Pilkington observed: “Not everybody is able to fail twenty experiments and then get up and then come up with something brilliant.”3 At nineteen, Zhang placed third in the prestigious Intel Science Talent Search competition, winning a $50,000 scholarship. His mother accompanied him through to the finals, exhorting her son, “Zhan zhi!” (“Stand up straight!”). He excelled at Harvard, matriculating the year before Mark Zuckerberg, earning a degree in chemistry (“the central science”) and physics. Zhang wanted a grounding in the fundamentals that he could apply as he saw fit. Eager to experience Silicon Valley, Zhang moved to Stanford for his PhD. His first choice supervisor, Nobel laureate Steven Chu, had moved on; camped out in Chu’s former office was a new faculty member, Karl Deisseroth.

…

Those appear to be a sure thing, but to whom and for what is a topic of much speculation. The two women have shared the “Nobel Prizes” of Japan, Spain, Israel, and Canada (with Zhang), to name a few. The most lucrative award was the Breakthrough Prize, created by Silicon Valley billionaires including Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Sergey Brin (Google) and his ex-wife Anne Wojcicki (23andMe), and Dick Costolo (Twitter). At a black-tie awards ceremony in November 2014, Doudna and Charpentier received their awards from Hollywood actress Cameron Diaz. Charpentier flashed her Gallic humor on stage. “It’s kind of surreal to receive the prize from Cameron,” she said, then turned to Costolo: “Three powerful women… I was just wondering if you’re Charlie?”

Fantasyland
by Kurt Andersen
Published 5 Sep 2017

Individual anybodies with good ideas and grit and luck could imagine and then create new businesses and industries. The entrepreneurial instinct has served America well. But as with the three hundred thousand California gold-seekers in 1849–50 who followed the fortunate ten thousand in 1848, as with the American habit of wishfulness in general, a confirmation bias kicks in: from Ben Franklin to Mark Zuckerberg, the stories of the supremely successful entrepreneurs obscure the forgotten millions of losers and nincompoops. The fabulous successes seem like proof of the power of passionate belief in oneself, our American faith in faith. Entrepreneurs exist on a smoke-and-mirrors spectrum, from small-time fabulists to legitimately world-changing visionaries.

…

The first generation of digital entrepreneurs to get amazingly rich, in the 1980s and ’90s—Gates, Jobs, Bezos—became billionaires in early middle age. In this century, before and after burst bubbles and meltdowns, it happened to younger, digital billionaires at thirty (Larry Page of Google) or twenty-five (Evan Spiegel of Snapchat) or twenty-three (Mark Zuckerberg). Which serves only to make the dream all the dreamier. What’s the new term of art for the most financially successful tech start-ups? Unicorns, after the magical creatures in which only children believe. It’s correct to say that the financial meltdown of 2008 resulted from too much deregulation, too many arcane Wall Street innovations, and some fraud.

Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America's Schools
by Steven Brill
Published 15 Aug 2011

There was lots of activity, and lots of reasons for both sides to cheer, or to be alarmed. * * * 1 This is a paraphrase, based on the accounts of two people at the meeting. Punch, Counterpunch Winter–spring 2011 Across the Hudson River from New York, the news as 2011 began was that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg had pledged $100 million to the Newark school system so that Democrats for Education Reform stalwart (and friend of DFER co-founder Boykin Curry) Mayor Cory Booker could work with Republican governor Chris Christie in order, says Curry, “to explode the number of charters in Newark.” It certainly was futile ground.

…

The supposed wonderfulness of American commercial aviation aside, what Curry meant was that the old notion that charter schools could be small laboratories for reform should be discarded and replaced with a bigger idea. He believed that charters had to gain critical mass, as they had in New Orleans, Washington, D.C., and Harlem, and as he wanted to have happen in Newark with Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook money. Only that would create the kind of truly visible demonstrations of schools that work and the accompanying critical mass of parents that would force the old system to be thrown out. “We are fast reaching that moment,” Curry assured me, “when things will flip, and all schools will be charters, or be forced to act like charters.

End This Depression Now!
by Paul Krugman
Published 30 Apr 2012

But what’s the marginal product of a corporate executive, or a hedge fund manager, or for that matter of a corporate lawyer? Nobody really knows. And if you look at how incomes for people in this class are actually determined, you find processes that arguably bear very little relationship to their economic contribution. At this point someone is likely to say, “But what about Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg? Didn’t they get rich by creating products of value?” And the answer is yes—but very few of the top 1 percent, or even the top 0.01 percent, made their money that way. For the most part, we’re looking at executives at firms that they didn’t themselves create. They may own a lot of stock or stock options in their companies, but they received those assets as part of their pay package, not by founding the business.

Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet
by Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider
Published 14 Aug 2017

They’re becoming public utilities. The less we have a choice about whether to use them, the more we need democracy to step in. What if a new generation of antitrust laws, instead of breaking up the emerging online utilities, created a pathway to more democratic ownership? Rather than donating Facebook shares to his own LLC, Mark Zuckerberg could put them into a trust owned and controlled by Facebook users themselves. Then they, too, could have a seat in the boardroom when decisions are made about what to do with all that valuable personal data they pour into the platform—and they’d have a stake in ensuring the platform succeeds.

The Barefoot Investor: The Only Money Guide You'll Ever Need
by Scott Pape
Published 22 Nov 2016

My super does the same thing, but it's also got the 200 biggest Aussie companies — like the banks, Telstra and BHP. Pauline: Well, I just don't understand shares. You: Honestly, I don't know a balance sheet from a bedsheet, but I have faith that the world has amazing businesspeople like Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon's Jeff Bezos. With my super I automatically become a part-owner in their businesses, and they share their profits with me. Pauline: I don't like it. You: Well, I have my plan on autopilot so I don't have to think about it. It just ticks over until the day I retire (and beyond). It's been created with an accurate understanding of historical rates of return, and it's designed to outpace inflation and ensure I'll never run out of money.

The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine
by Peter Lunenfeld
Published 31 Mar 2011

Here are the tales of Microsoft stock bought at twenty dollars and sold at two thousand, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard working in their rented Palo Alto garage, Ross Perot quitting IBM to found Computer Data Systems in Texas, Jeff Bezos opening an online bookstore, naming it after the largest river in the world, and then getting on the cover of Time magazine as the CEO of Amazon.com, and Mark Zuckerberg transforming the Harvard University first-year-student listing service into Facebook, the dominant and most valuable social media site in the world. These are the stories that have sustained the bulk of people’s interests in the history of computing. This is the history of computing as plutography, stories about money.

Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide to Wealth and Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
by Jerry Kaplan
Published 3 Aug 2015

Charles Abrams, The City Is the Frontier (New York: Harper and Row, 1965). 11. https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/housing/census/historic/owner.html, last modified October 31, 2011. 12. http://www.epa.gov/airtrends/images/comparison70.jpg, accessed November 29, 2014. 13. “History of Long Term Care,” Elderweb, accessed November 27, 2014, http://www.elderweb.com/book/history-long-term-care. 14. http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005140.html, accessed November 27, 2014. 15. As an experienced entrepreneur, I can assure you this argument is completely ridiculous. Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, would have worked just as hard for a tiny fraction of the rewards he reaped. The founders of Fairchild Semiconductor widely regarded as the seminal Silicon Valley startup—were thrilled to strike it rich when the parent company bought them out for the princely sum of $250,000 each.

Effective Programming: More Than Writing Code
by Jeff Atwood
Published 3 Jul 2012

So when you do spend money, keep these eight lessons in mind to maximize whatever happiness it can buy for you. And remember: it’s science! Lived Fast, Died Young, Left a Tired Corpse It’s easy to forget just how crazy things got during the Web 1.0 bubble in 2000. That was over ten years ago. For context, Mark Zuckerberg was all of sixteen when the original web bubble popped. There are two films which captured the hyperbole and excess of the original dot com bubble especially well. The first is the documentary Startup.com. It’s about the prototypical web 1.0 company: one predicated on an idea that made absolutely no sense, which proceeded to flame out in a spectacular and all too typical way for the era.

Big Data at Work: Dispelling the Myths, Uncovering the Opportunities
by Thomas H. Davenport
Published 4 Feb 2014

Some of the smaller start-up firms don’t even have in-house IT functions; they outsource business IT. Some of the big data lessons from start-up and online firms are derived from and are similar to other general IT and entrepreneurship lessons from Silicon Valley firms. They include the injunction, popularized by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, to “move fast and break things,” and not worry too much about making mistakes. Another is to have bold and audacious goals that involve objectives other than simply making a lot of money. Facebook hopes to “make the world more open and connected.” Google’s well-publicized mission is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

Work in the Future The Automation Revolution-Palgrave MacMillan (2019)
by Robert Skidelsky Nan Craig
Published 15 Mar 2020

They have a monopolistic tendency that emerges not through any sort of artificial means, whether collusion or mergers. Instead, the very nature of a platform business tends towards monopolisation. This is for a few different reasons. One is network effects: the more people who use a platform, the more valuable that platform becomes for everybody else. Again, Facebook is a good example. You may despise Mark Zuckerberg, hate the surveillance practices of Facebook and dislike the way they have handled fake news, but if you are going to join a social media network it will be Facebook, simply because that is where all your friends and family already are. That is the power of network effects, and once they reach a crucial tipping point, they grow and grow and grow.

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
by Oliver Burkeman
Published 9 Aug 2021

“Attention is the beginning of devotion”: Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays (New York: Penguin, 2016), loc. 166 of 1669, Kindle. the former Facebook investor turned detractor Roger McNamee: Quoted in “Full Q&A: Zucked Author Roger McNamee on Recode Decode,” Vox, February 11, 2019, available at www.vox.com/podcasts/2019/2/11/18220779/zucked-book-roger-mcnamee-decode-kara-swisher-podcast-mark-zuckerberg-facebook-fb-sheryl-sandberg. In the words of the philosopher: Quoted in James Williams, Stand Out of Our Light (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), xii. “distracted from distraction by distraction”: T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” in Four Quartets (Boston: Mariner, 1968), 5.

Gigged: The End of the Job and the Future of Work
by Sarah Kessler
Published 11 Jun 2018

Most had little or no experience in the industries that they now set out to disrupt. Among the horde of tech entrepreneurs who launched service-sector startups in the wake of Uber’s funding announcement, Dan Teran and Saman Rahmanian made an unlikely pair. Not only did they both depart sharply from the Mark Zuckerberg brand of young, nerdy founder, but they did so in nearly opposite directions. Dan, with floppy blond hair, blue eyes, and the tall athletic build of a former college rugby player, could have looked like a preppy frat boy if he’d wanted. Instead, he went too long without a haircut, smoked openly, and developed a dry, sometimes biting, sense of humor.

The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality
by Brink Lindsey
Published 12 Oct 2017

That earnings premium stood at around 25 percent back in the late 1970s and has risen to roughly 50 percent more recently. This premium reflects the combined effects of supply-constricting and demand-inflating government policies.47 While the average American may think of Warren Buffett and Mark Zuckerberg when they envision the top 1 percent, it is actually the surgeon who replaced their hip, the dentist who performed their last root canal, or the lawyer who handled their divorce who are the more typical representatives of that elite demographic. What they all have in common is that their incomes are substantially inflated by occupational licensing.

Built for Growth: How Builder Personality Shapes Your Business, Your Team, and Your Ability to Win
by Chris Kuenne and John Danner
Published 5 Jun 2017

Its fusion of beautiful design simplicity, functional technology, and innovative business models continues to reflect the transformative power a Driver can have—even when he or she sees way beyond everyone else’s headlights. Facebook’s Explorer In building Facebook into the global phenomenon it is today, Mark Zuckerberg revealed his Builder Type’s defining curiosity, systems thinking, and fascination with an interesting challenge: how can I attract, engage with, profile, and then connect with my friends or people I’d like to date? Zuck, as his friends know him, epitomizes the Explorer personality. Although Facebook’s headquarters are just up the road from Apple’s, you’d think you were in a different world altogether if you roamed the halls of Facebook and talked with its employees.

The Metric Society: On the Quantification of the Social
by Steffen Mau
Published 12 Jun 2017

The days are long gone when you could gauge a person's socio-economic status accurately from their clothing and adjust your expectations accordingly. Nowadays, the cultural encoding of distinction often takes subtler forms – in fact, a person's status is often belied by their outer appearance and we see government ministers riding to work on rickety bicycles, streetwear becoming part of Wall Street culture, and the likes of Mark Zuckerberg turning up to the flotation of Facebook on the stock market in a hoodie. Today, we are no longer dealing solely with material inequalities and the associated practices of cultural distinction, but also with numerical inequalities. Numbers describe, create and reproduce status and, as such, they contribute to the institutionalization of certain orders of worth.

The Wondering Jew: Israel and the Search for Jewish Identity
by Micah Goodman
Published 10 Nov 2020

They launched an initiative called Unplug Yourself, in which they call on people to abstain from technology one day a week.7 They do not demand a complete disconnection from technology: they travel on the Sabbath and use electricity. Their disconnection is from all contact with the virtual world. No email, no internet, no social media. The initiative has enjoyed notable success, with increasing numbers of young Americans joining it. Randi Zuckerberg, sister of the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, argues that people need a weekly detox to cleanse their minds from the toxins of technology.8 Reboot is not a rabbinical initiative. Those who answer the call to abstain from digital technology one day a week are not adherents—they are participants. So the question of how halakhic secularism can become a reality remains.

The Minimalist Home: A Room-By-Room Guide to a Decluttered, Refocused Life
by Joshua Becker
Published 18 Dec 2018

As Henry David Thoreau said long ago, “Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.”2 In most cases, it is classic fashion, not the trending pieces and colors, that stands the test of time. In his later years, Albert Einstein usually wore the same suit. Steve Jobs favored a black turtleneck, jeans, and sneakers. Mark Zuckerberg likes to wear a gray T-shirt. Their reputations certainly didn’t take a hit because they simplified their wardrobe decisions. Well, those are all men. Could it be different for women? Evidently not. Alice Gregory is doing fine with her iconic wardrobe. Similarly, Matilda Kahl, an art director for a leading New York ad agency, wears the same style of clothing to work every day and says it simplifies her morning routine while leveling the playing field with her male colleagues.3 My good friend Courtney Carver minimized her wardrobe down to a capsule set with only thirty-three items.

Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence
by Anna Lembke
Published 24 Aug 2021

We’re now comparing ourselves not just to our classmates, neighbors, and coworkers, but to the whole world, making it all too easy to convince ourselves that we should have done more, or gotten more, or just lived differently. To deem our lives “successful,” we now feel we must achieve the mythic heights of Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg or, like the Theranos corporation’s Elizabeth Holmes, a latter-day Icarus, go down in flames trying. But the lived experience of my patients suggests that prosocial shame can have positive, healthy effects by smoothing some of narcissism’s rougher edges, tying us more closely to our supportive social networks, and curbing our addictive tendencies.

Secrets of the Autistic Millionaire: Everything I Know Now About Autism and Asperger's That I Wish I'd Known Then
by David William Plummer
Published 14 Sep 2021

Perhaps if a neurotypical person reading this is able to understand the characteristics, routines, and habits of high-functioning individuals with autism, they too will be able to increase their odds of success through learning new approaches for their own lives. There is no easy way to know if public figures such as Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg are on the autism spectrum. If they are, none have publicly shared that information, and unless and until they do, it’s a private health matter that I won’t speculate on. We can, however, observe and identify certain traits and characteristics that they exhibit in common with people on the spectrum and note how they may have served to make those individuals so driven to success in their endeavors, regardless of whether they experience the disorder.

The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution Is Transforming Currencies and Finance
by Eswar S. Prasad
Published 27 Sep 2021

The project is in many ways reminiscent of internet.org, a Facebook-led initiative launched in 2013 with the goal of “bringing internet access and the benefits of connectivity to the portion of the world that doesn’t have them.” The service was intended to provide free access, through the Facebook mobile app, to websites handpicked by the company. The initiative was heavily criticized for violating net neutrality principles and for “digital colonialism.” Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg was unapologetic, asserting that some access to the internet was better than nothing. He noted that libraries “don’t contain every book, but they still provide a world of good” and that “public hospitals don’t offer every treatment, but they still save lives.” In 2015, the project was rebranded as Free Basics and opened up to developers and other apps.

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The digital colonialism phrase is taken from Olivia Solon, “ ‘It’s Digital Colonialism’: How Facebook’s Free Internet Service Has Failed Its Users,” Guardian, July 27, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/27/facebook-free-basics-developing-markets. The announcement of the rebranding of internet.org as Free Basics is available here: Mark Zuckerberg, “Free Basics,” Facebook post, September 25, 2015, https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10102388939996891. Zuckerberg’s quotes are taken from his article in the Times of India: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/toi-edit-page/free-basics-protects-net-neutrality/. In early 2016, in the face of strong government pushback, the Free Basics platform was withdrawn from India.

Epic Win for Anonymous: How 4chan's Army Conquered the Web
by Cole Stryker
Published 14 Jun 2011

It made its founder billions of dollars, brought generations of people online and furthermore made them active. Facebook has redefined how humans communicate. Speaking purely in terms of scale, 4chan is a tiny playground for bored geeks in comparison. In David Kirkpatrick’s The Facebook Effect, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg famously declared: The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly . . . Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity. Facebook has struggled over the last few years to define its stance on privacy as it relates to the site’s sometimes shockingly targeted advertising platform.

Platform Scale: How an Emerging Business Model Helps Startups Build Large Empires With Minimum Investment
by Sangeet Paul Choudary
Published 14 Sep 2015

.” – Sean Parker, on Facebook’s micro-market strategy The odds were stacked against Facebook when it launched. Friendster was already a big social network and Myspace was growing fast. Of all platform businesses, social networks are probably the most unforgiving of late market entrants. Why would someone, who was already on Myspace or Friendster, get onto Facebook? In hindsight, Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to launch Facebook in closed campus clusters, whether borne of calculation or convenience, was a master stroke. It helped achieve early network effects for what would ultimately become the Internet’s largest network. SOLVE A PAIN POINT FOR A NICHE SEGMENT Facebook focused on serving ‘underserved’ university students, to start with.

Choose Yourself!
by James Altucher
Published 14 Sep 2013

The top right of the matrix (figure 2) is when you are an Idea Machine: you are working nonstop on your own excellent ideas that help the lives of others. You mind dips into dreams, and you make them reality or art or abundance. Founder of PayPal and first investor in Facebook Peter Thiel underlined this for me when he told me the story of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg turning down Yahoo’s offer of $1 billion to buy his company in July of 2006. Zuckerberg would’ve made $250 million that summer. Thiel, who was advising Zuckerberg at the time, wanted him to take it, or at least consider accepting the offer. Zuckerberg decided in ten minutes: No. As Peter put it, ideas were more valuable to Mark than money.

Makers
by Chris Anderson
Published 1 Oct 2012

For most of history since then, entrepreneurship has meant either setting up a corner grocery shop or some other sort of modest local business or, more rarely, a total pie-in-the-sky crapshoot around an idea that is more likely to bring ruination than riches. Today we are spoiled by the easy pickings of the Web. Any kid with an idea and a laptop can create the seeds of a world-changing company—just look at Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook or any one of thousands of other Web startups hoping to follow his path. Sure, they may fail, but the cost is measured in overdue credit-card payments, not lifelong disgrace and a pauper’s prison. The beauty of the Web is that it democratized the tools both of invention and of production.

Do Over: Rescue Monday, Reinvent Your Work, and Never Get Stuck
by Jon Acuff
Published 6 Apr 2015

Blogs were in their baby stages and couldn’t easily be updated. Imagine if I had sat at my kitchen table and thought to myself, “I need to figure out my dream.” Is it possible that I would have been able to conceive the invention of Twitter? Might I have daydreamed up Facebook? What then? Would I just wait for Mark Zuckerberg to invent it? Me and my Moleskine notebook, writing: “I hope there’s a talented developer and two gigantic twins who are fighting over an idea right now that will one day be where I hustle.” That’s ridiculous. The same goes with picking a college major. When I was in college, almost nothing I’m doing now was a reality.

The Achievement Habit: Stop Wishing, Start Doing, and Take Command of Your Life
by Bernard Roth
Published 6 Jul 2015

Many students develop the idea that they’re supposed to follow a prescribed path, in which they’re not allowed to achieve anything until after they get a diploma. And if they don’t develop the habit of doing things of their own volition, they will not change after they graduate. Many of the greatest entrepreneurs already had their businesses going during college—and many never graduated. Today’s clearest example is Mark Zuckerberg and four fellow students, who started Facebook from the dorms at Harvard University. Based on this thought, I decided the class project directive would be: Do something you have really wanted to do and have never done, or solve a problem in your life. The projects served to introduce the achievement habit.

The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man
by Luke Harding
Published 7 Feb 2014

A few days before their appearance at the review panel, Silicon Valley CEOs had gathered at the TechCrunch Disrupt Conference in San Francisco. The mood was mutinous. Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer said her company had to obey FISA court orders, even though it didn’t like them: ‘When you lose and don’t comply, it’s treason.’ Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg put it succinctly. The ‘government blew it,’ he said. During meetings with the review panel, however, the tech companies didn’t say anything about restricting NSA surveillance. Instead, some attendees suggest, the companies’ chief aim was to tell the customers a good story about how they were all protecting their data.

The Year Without Pants: Wordpress.com and the Future of Work
by Scott Berkun
Published 9 Sep 2013

They'd invested heavily in tools and systems but put the onus on employees, even new ones like me, to decide how, when, and where to do their work. These attributes of culture didn't arrive by some technique sprinkled around the company years after it started. How did it happen, then? In 2002, eight years before I was hired and two years before Mark Zuckerberg would start Facebook, eighteen-year-old Matt Mullenweg, a recent graduate of Houston's High School for the Performing Arts, went to Washington, DC. An avid photographer, he wanted to add the pictures from his trip to his popular photo website, photomatt.net. He'd been using a program called Cafelog, but he was increasingly frustrated by it.

Smart Money: How High-Stakes Financial Innovation Is Reshaping Our WorldÑFor the Better
by Andrew Palmer
Published 13 Apr 2015

With a traditional loan, the asymmetry still exists, but the obligation to repay at least offers greater protection to the interests of the investor. Information asymmetry goes hand in hand with a problem known as “adverse selection.” Imagine that the year is 2003, and an investor decides to put her money into a promising young Harvard undergraduate named Mark Zuckerberg. As the years roll on, it becomes clear that the investor has made a spectacularly good decision: Zuckerberg’s social-networking site, Facebook, is steaming toward a public listing, and a small share of his annual income is still a big amount of money. But what if Zuckerberg decides to pay himself a nominal salary during these early years in order to avoid handing over dollops of cash unnecessarily?