My hands are always in my pockets or gesturing
I'm usually skeptical of "great man" approaches to history in which individuals are given excessive credit or blame, but in an essay for the New Republic, David Roth makes a pretty convincing case for Mark Zuckerberg as not only "scoundrel of the year" for 2021 but as one of history's greatest monsters.
As per Hannah Arendt, what seems most evil about Zuckerberg is a certain banality, though one which expresses itself not as a myopic bureaucratic attentiveness to making the death trains run on time, but as a willful indifference to the responsibilities incumbent on "connecting" people and subjecting them to a massive identity-registration system, introducing totalizing surveillance heretofore unknown in the world with no aim any grander in mind than to systematically further expose people to advertising. To this end it not only fosters divisiveness and hate (what it calls "meaningful social interaction"); it implements forms of algorithmic personalization that inculcate a consumeristic selfishness: You are obliged to be interested only in what is targeted at you, which also constitutes the limits of your personality.
Roth emphasizes Zuckerberg's full willingness to become the human embodiment of capitalism's intrinsically stunted imagination:
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 [the metaverse] — 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.
Being subject to Zuckerberg's phony optimism and his amoral whims is analogous to being subject to those of capitalism in general, and its innovations in exploitation. Using Facebook, being sucked in to its junk content and controversies, is as humiliating as watching Zuckerberg speak and realizing that he exercises actual power in the world. "It’s a terrible thing to say about someone, but Mark Zuckerberg really is Facebook," Roth writes. "It shows."
Zuckerberg makes an interesting contrast with another dubious tech "visionary," Elizabeth Holmes, currently on trial for fraud related to her blood-testing startup Theranos. Unlike Facebook, which is nothing more than the maximally exploitive implementation of the internet's most obvious capabilities, drawing on the well-established ideology of consumerism, Theranos actually wanted to change how people thought about medicine. Of course, it wanted to make it more consumeristic and individually driven, a neoliberalistic matter of personal responsibility, as if well-being was not a social question but a matter of extracting the maximum amount of metrics from a single person's drop of blood. This delusional project, which was potentially worse in its anti-social implications than anything Facebook has achieved, failed, but not because people weren't willing to believe it or throw money at it.
Ultimately, Theranos was doomed because it wasn't only an ideological project; it promised actual test results that could be proved false or incomplete. Facebook, by contrast, is premised on the limitless and immeasurable promise of advertising, the endless malleability of what people can believe other people can be made to want.
Essays like Roth's reflect this in the negative. They insist that Facebook's products are self-evidently terrible while taking for granted that they are also massively popular. Popularity itself appears as terrible, the proof that capitalism will irresistibly mold us into the shapes that scale. But all the while, Facebook's products don't seem to be changing us at all; they are just carrying forward the logic by which we make our worst, laziest choices and making them far, far easier to make. We all want to be manipulated in ways that feel like freedom or indulgence.
One can read Holmes's masochistic notes to self (like the one above that had been entered as exculpatory evidence) as instructions for rising above and rejecting what Facebook expects of its users: "I am not impulsive. I do not react. I am always proactive." Cultivate those traits and you can be an entrepreneurial operator in this culture and not one of its (feminized) dupes. Yet by the end of her self-programming, Holmes is grounding herself in the essence of Facebook's latest pitch, the "metaverse" vision of a world so immersive and personalized that self-alienation becomes impossible and being is simply a matter of appearing: "I am fully present." There may be nothing more delusional and destructive than believing that could be so.