An Open Letter to Max’s Parents (full letter)
Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan: #GiveUsFacebook
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Dear Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan,
Thank you for your life’s commitment to sharing. Reading your letter to Max, I can see that your hearts are full of newborn love and that you truly intend for this commitment to improve our children’s collective welfare.
Like both of you, I believe that all lives have equal value and that we have a moral responsibility to future generations. I also believe that human potential can only be fully harnessed when people have shared ownership over our collective resources.
So I feel compelled to encourage you to consider an even worthier use of the shares you have committed to charity: Redistribute your shares in Facebook to its members and disrupt the social paradigm of inequality and marginalization.
You have the opportunity to create an everlasting legacy by engineering the greatest redistribution of wealth and power in human history.
Designing and improving social programs on behalf of recipients will never promote human potential and equity on the scale of your inspiring ambition. Building yet another philanthropic initiative would only perpetuate the entrenched systems of power and ego that corrupt our global society.
Throughout our history, those with wealth and access have made decisions on behalf of those without. You cannot solve the world’s problems by reinforcing this paradigm. We need and we deserve a society that gives everyone a voice in decisions that affect our lives.
In your letter you avoid the trap of our ego and acknowledge that you do not know what is best for the rest of us. You say you want to ask the experts; we are the experts! Poor people are the experts in poverty. Young people are the experts in youth unemployment. The margianalized are the experts in social exclusion. The only way to unleash human potential is to unhand the leash of inequality.
Our world’s deadliest disease — killing more people, plants and animals than heart disease, cancer, stroke, neurodegenerative and infectious diseases combined — is social and economic inequality. Inequality is a social disease that affects all humans regardless of genetics. As you rightly indicate in your letter, we must solve this problem for Max and for all of our children.
Inequality weakens our collective resilience and is the source of every challenge we face. We cannot heal the human condition by simply bandaging the symptoms of this social affliction. Climate change, for example, is not a technological problem that requires a technological solution. Climate change is a human problem. It is not our planet’s environment that is sick, it is our planet’s inhabitants.
How can we expect people to take care of the environment, if the majority of us have no share in its harvest? Protecting our environment requires dialogue, distributed ownership, and the untethered potential of our collective intelligence and experience to design appropriate solutions. Climate change is not a tragedy of the commons; it is a tragedy for the common.
You must be deeply passionate about bringing people together, because you have dedicated your life’s work to democratizing access to information and facilitating social organization while ushering in the new sharing economy.
You epitomize the Silicon Valley ideal of being bold enough to re-imagine how the world should be and persistent enough to do it. You are transforming how we communicate and share. With your wealth and ownership, you now have the opportunity to disrupt an even greater paradigm by redistributing power to the people you serve.
Although we are more networked than ever, we are less connected. Globally, we are witnessing a return to fundamentalism, extremism and fascism. You have networked those of us with access to the Internet and empowered us with tools to share ideas and mobilize like never before. But we remain divided.
These ubiquitous divisions permeate every community, including Facebook. Facebook recently made an exception of its hate-speech policy to allow Donald Trump to make divisive comments about muslims invoking “the value of political discourse”. But what discourse and debate did you engage in before making that decision on behalf of the body politic?
On Facebook, Donald Trump is allowed to say things that others cannot. This just ensures that his voice remains louder than the rest, reinforcing the social inequality you want to fight.
Political discourse will never be free while a closed room of individuals and corporate interests control the algorithms of mass communication. Before we can have a truly free political discourse, we must first democratize control of our resources and institutions.
I’m typing this letter from Cairo, where Facebook was an important tool for young Egyptians to organize the 2011 revolution. But 58 months after the revolution — after citizens occupied the streets for 18 consecutive days to demand political change in the face of devastating violence from their own government — the space for political discourse in Egypt has retreated even further.
During the revolution, youth protesting in Tahrir Square were literally blinded by their own police who shot at their eyes to suppress their voices. It is painful to stand in Tahrir Square in 2015 and witness — with two, open eyes — the ephemerality of achievements paid for with the blood of children.
Egyptians no longer consider political protest and organization an avenue for positive social change. An Egyptian student explained to me last year why his community of former political activists had shifted their focus to entrepreneurship. “If we want to have a voice in the politics of Egypt we need to build businesses and gain economic power!”, he said.
Today, Tahrir is just a neutral roundabout in downtown Cairo. The stage has been redesigned to reflect the current political theatre. Where diverse citizens once came together and erected makeshift barricades to protect each other from the authorities’ attacks, the government has staged potted plants and flowers.
Political discourse is more restricted than before the revolution, and yet society is driving around in circles as if nothing ever happened. Our circular momentum is not the result of apathy. It is the product of a flawed design. If we want to exit this roundabout of elite control and deliver human progress, we must redistribute power.
What is true for Egypt is also true for the United States and everywhere else. We teach our children that our forefathers joined hands at different stages in history to end feudalism and slavery and discrimination and “taxation without representation”, but we are teaching them fairytales.
Tahrir is just one of many examples of our stubborn atavistic tendency towards elite rule. While some families earn billions, living standards for many are falling. Youth around the world are struggling to find work. And for those of us who do manage to find work, on average our wages are not keeping pace with our expenses.
These are not just headlines. We face real scarcity, and many of us are struggling. It is only our aspirations for social mobility that keep most of us engaged in this self-defeating kabuki theater directed by the elite. But how long will that last?
The American Dream of sitting in a dorm room, moonshotting an idea and accumulating an unimaginable wealth is just a pipe dream for all but the most gifted and lucky. It is your exception, Mark, that legimitizes your rule!
The exportation of this false dream will never solve the underlying problems of distribution. Capitalism and democracy only work when there is equality of opportunity and that is only possible when the quality of our positions is less unequal.
We now know that a model combining poorly-regulated capitalism and philanthropic donations allocated by the elite will never produce an equitable distribution of wealth. Getting there requires courageous people with vision to redistribute their power to make society more equal.
Facebook has a market capitalization equivalent to roughly 35 times the GDP of Rwanda, the country where I live and work. This illustrates how important it is for corporate governance to reflect our aspirations for democracy. How can companies have more power but less oversight than our public institutions?
Companies will only be accountable to citizens once their ownership and decision-making structures include the people they serve and impact. This shift is also in the ultimate benefit of the corporations. Businesses only exist to serve their customers. Democracies derive their legitimacy from the social contracts they have with their citizens; corporations derive their value through the relationships they have with their clients.
Facebook only has value because its members belong to it and generate content on the platform for their peers. Without its members, Facebook has no value. Distributing ownership in Facebook not only sets an example for redistribution of economic power and decision-making, but also strengthens the network’s business model and resilience.
Redistributing corporate ownership and governance at such a scale will no doubt pose immense challenges. But if anyone is capable of engineering solutions to these complex problems, it is you, the founder of the largest social network.
The structure of Facebook’s corporate governance could become a model for the equitable inclusion of people and ideas regardless of their languages, origins, gender identities, religions, and aspirations.
Think about what this could mean for humanity. Think about what happens when hippies and anarchists and bankers and “birthers” and Tea Party and religious missionaries and students and everyone else with access to the internet can co-own a global community for facilitating connection.
Mark and Priscilla, you can become the cofounders of the world’s largest and most inclusive trans-boundary and co-owned nation. You can tear down the borders that separate us from each other and from ourselves, and together we can change the world.
In closing, I want to thank you again for revolutionizing social networking. You have made it easier for us to interact and organize global campaigns such as this. And I want to thank you for committing to donate the wealth you have personally accumulated through tenacity and innovation for our collective wellbeing.
I invite you to lead this movement and continue fulfilling your life’s incredible potential by giving us shared ownership of our network. Empower us to co-author the first chapter of a shared human future that will bring us all closer together and unleash the potential of all future generations.
In hope,
Jon Stever
To learn more about the #GiveUsFacebook Movement: click here
To lead the #GiveUsFacebook movement with us: click here
