The Zuckerberg Obfuscation

This is a really good point about the Zuckerberg 15th anniversary memo:

But in this writer’s opinion, it’s really easy to understand how Zuckerberg views Facebook: He seemingly wants it to be the internet—an inherently unruly, decentralized smorgasbord of digitized human activity, where pretty much anything that isn’t illegal is fair game. And no one ever holds the boss of the internet accountable since that boss does not exist.

Spot on. That post seamlessly confused Facebook and the internet. The internet is a decentralised, distributed system, under no single control. Facebook is a centralised, private system, under the control (effectively - thanks to the share system Zuckerberg constructed) of a single person.

Zuckerberg is obfuscating his effective and complete control of Facebook - and thus his personal culpability.

Jason Snell made an interesting point in a recent podcast: if you'd read a novel 20 years ago that posited that a global database of people, their interestes and their connections existed — and was under the control of a single young man, who has never had any serious respobilities or experience outside his company, and which was being abused by governments without consequence - you'd consider it a dystopain future.

And yet, that's exactly where we live now.