If you’d like to read Mark Styen’s first “take” on the Zuckerberg testimony and trust me you do, it’s here, but this snippet captured my imagination (for the moment).
To be sure, I doubt [Mark Zuckerberg] thinks of himself as a rags-to-riches story. If you’re inventing Facebook in a dorm room, it helps if the dorm room is at Harvard, which most Americans will never get anywhere near. In that sense, Zuckerberg might be more emblematic of a calcifying class system and diminishing social mobility. As the middle class shrinks, we’re moving toward a Latin-American social structure, with a rich, corrupt, self-reinforcing elite, and a great dysfunctional mass underneath, and ever less in the middle, and not much by way of a viable path for anyone at the bottom to advance toward the top.
I’ve not even waded through the pundit’s reactions, let alone dared to watch the testimony, but I have little doubt given the genesis of Facebook and its founder™ (or his obvious progressive tendencies) that he is happy to be considered as the Zuckerberger-Meister-Berger of connecting and community. Or perhaps minister of sharing is warmer and fuzzier and less jack-booted and ugly like the truth.
When you are hollowing out the middle of a culture and eliminating that pesky class of voters not yet wholly committed to a life of government dependence, you want to ease them gently into that goodnight.
