12-25-2018
What history could tell Mark Zuckerberg
Breaking Newstags: democracy, facebook, privacy, Mark Zuckerberg
Perhaps Mark Zuckerberg obsessed over the wrong bit of history. Or else didn’t study his preferred slice of classical antiquity carefully enough, faced, as he now is, with an existential crisis of ‘fake news’ simultaneously undermining trust in his own empire and in democracy itself.
A recent New Yorker profile — questioning whether the Facebook founder can fix the creation he pressed upon the world before the collective counter-pressure emanating from his billions-strong social network does for democracy what Brutus did to Caesar — touched in passing on Zuckerberg’s admiration for Augustus, the first emperor of Rome.
“Basically, through a really harsh approach, he established two hundred years of world peace,” was the Facebook founder’s concise explainer of his man-crush, freely accepting there had been some crushing “trade-offs” involved in delivering that august outcome.
Zuckerberg’s own trade-offs, engaged in his quest to maximize the growth of his system, appear to have achieved a very different kind of outcome.
comments powered by Disqus
News
- One Absurdity of Texas's Divisive Concepts Law? Call to Rename Slave Trade as "Involuntary Relocation"
- 3 Law Profs: Connecting Abortion and Voting Rights at SCOTUS
- The Other Cancel Culture: A University Administration Caves to a Conservative Crusade
- Unserved Warrant for Carolyn Bryant Donham's Arrest in Till Lynching Discovered in Box in Courthouse Basement
- 1989-2001: America's "Lost Weekend" When the Nation Blew its Shot at Peace and Prosperity