The Great Zuckerberg
Dear Zuck,
I don’t know, pal. I really don’t want to believe I overestimated you. But you’re not making it easy on me.
It’s tempting to think you’re going to shake off this FTC thing like a bad case of fleas. Maybe you thought I forgot you kicked this hornets nest before. Maybe you think you’re still fast enough to outrun the bees. I don’t know. But I can tell you this:
You’re gonna be 34 in May. You may not think you’ve lost a step. But fast-twitch fibers fire faster at 27 than they do at 34. And that multi-billion-dollar personal fortune you’re lugging around is going to make you considerably slower out of the blocks this time. Trust me. You just might get stung.
Pearls Before Swine
Please, dude. Whatever you do, don’t think I’m unsympathetic. With a psychiatrist for a mom and a dentist for a dad, you had to believe you were born to the throne. The drive from White Plains to Cambridge must have felt like nothing more or less than justice. Poetry. Destiny. And once you got on campus at Harvard, the world must have seemed like … well … your platform.
In some weird way (that worries me about myself), I can relate to your naïve conviction that you could expand that platform beyond the ivy walls to achieve some kind of global, utopian vision of bringing the people of the world together in the kind of starry-eyed harmony only an undergrad could imagine — to go so far as to insist, in fact, that connecting more people to the internet, and to Facebook, could reduce global poverty, as you did with those unimaginative dimwits at the 2016 APEC CEO Summit in Peru. How could they not see that sending computers to South Sudan, for example, and creating Facebook accounts for all of its citizens, would pretty much take care of everything? SMH.
Man, that vision must have seemed bright, magical, and promising. And it’s gotta smart to realize that, to those stuffed shirts at the FTC, it’s as unreal as Oz and elusive as its Wizard.
The Green Light
Really, Zuck. I understand how you must feel. I get that the promise of Facebook — the promise of overcoming the entire history of humanity and the darkest and most pervasive aspects of human nature — must have seemed as bright and mystical as the lights of the Emerald City. You must have thrilled to that promise as Dorothy does to the promise of the Yellow Brick Road, swooning with its power and the potential of your own once you’d united the planet electonically. You must have felt the singular, fleeting wonder of dreams as yet undimmed by realization. And, really, who could be heartless enough to blame you for not knowing you’d have to grow up? Hell, some Scottish jamoke named J.M. Barrie got famous writing about a guy like you.
At risk of mixing my literary metaphors completely beyond control, I find another parallel to your pain, Champ. It comes at the end of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Nick Carraway, the novel’s narrator, contemplates the feelings of the Dutch sailors who first set foot on then-Edenic Long Island. Nick might just as well have been contemplating your dream of an electronic Paradise. It’s a sad, glorious, stunningly human moment in which Nick reveals that, from his relationship with Gatsby, he’d learned the necessity and the tragic reality of dreams:
I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock … For a single transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath … compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
Bitter Pills
In Fitzgerald’s romantic fatalism, in your quixotic fantasy of the power of electrons to achieve pacific perfection, Utopia may yet be commensurate with our capacity for wonder. But without willful suspension of disbelief unto psychosis, it ain’t gonna happen here. Not in this life. Not on this planet.
And here’s another tough nut: The promise of dreams is sustained only in anticipation. Once dreams are realized, like the New World of the Dutch sailors, they begin to fade; their promise, as Nick Carraway also understood, is like the green light, Facebook, and:
the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but thats no matter to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther … And one fine morning
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
Time, proximity, and the light of day are the measures of all promise; and up close, in the unforgiving glare of wakeful reality, the silk purse of our dreams reveals the wax and veins and bristly hair of the sow’s ear.
I’m sorry, pal. I really am. And I remain …
Your humbly curious observer,
Mel
