Scoundrel of the Year

1 year ago

The nitwit founder of Facebook has created the worst, most damaging website in the world. And we're just supposed to accept it.

It doesn't matter.

This is the taunt implicit in everything Zuckerberg does at this point in his reign. Here is a man who got unconscionably rich off the worst website that has ever existed, a website that has broken brains on a scale previously unimaginable in human history, and here is his stupendously wack vision for the future -- and everyone is just going to have to deal with it. There are many things to abhor about Mark Zuckerberg and his works, but the fundamental mediocrity of it all -- the lack of vision, the absence of any moral sense or shame, the inability and unwillingness not just to fix but even reckon with the dangerous and ungovernable thing he's made -- is what feels both most egregious and most of this moment. It is embarrassing and not a little enraging to realize that you are subject to the whims of an amoral and incurious capitalist posing as a visionary optimist. It is especially humiliating when the all-bestriding and inevitable figure in question is such a dim, dull nullity.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

Tags: big brother, computers, conspiracies, corporations, doomed

2 Responses:

1. Leonardo Herrera says:

   1 year ago at 8:00 am

   Guess what, we will accept it. It's useless: people don't want to do the hard work of thinking. That's why we end up with stupid rulers all the time, then we overthrow them just to be replaced by a worse one.

   And I don't know if the Facebook guys are so much worse than the guys who should be regulating it.

   Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

2. Karellen says:

   1 year ago at 6:17 am

   Reminds me a lot of this Steve Jobs interview:

   The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And what that means is - I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way - in the sense that... they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their product. And you say "Well, why is that important?" Well, you know, proportionally spaced fonts come from typesetting and beautiful books; that's where one gets the idea. If it weren't for the Mac, they would never have that in their products.
   So I guess I am saddened - not by Microsoft's success. I have no problem with their success. They've earned their success. For the most part. I have a problem with the fact that they just make really third-rate products. Their products have no spirit to them. Their products have no, sort of, spirit of enlightenment about them. They are very pedestrian. And the sad part is that most customers don't have a lot of that spirit either. But the way that we're going to ratchet up our species is to take the best, and to spread it around everybody so that everybody grows up with better things, and starts to understand the subtlety of these better things. And Microsoft's just - you know - it's McDonalds.
   So, that's what saddens me. Not that Microsoft has won, but that Microsoft's products don't display more insight and more creativity.