Facebook’s founder should tell busybody politicians to shove it.
Facebook’s founder should tell busybody politicians to shove it.
‘O ut of control” is how Senator Brian Schatz (D., Hawaii) describes Facebook.
If only that were true. It would be an enormous improvement.
Facebook was everybody’s favorite thing in the world five minutes ago. It isn’t any more. Democrats have decided to blame Facebook for the election of Donald Trump, as though Mark Zuckerberg were the one who advised Herself to take Wisconsin and Pennsylvania for granted. The alternative — that Donald Trump was freely elected president of these United States because a great many Americans preferred him to that dusty sack of vipers the Democrats nominated — is too terrible to contemplate. Must have been some kind of high-tech conspiracy involving Facebook, the Kremlin, and a bunch of knuckleheads who talk like characters from early drafts of Glengarry Glen Ross.
Democrats hate Facebook because of 2016. Republicans hate Facebook on general principles: The GOP is still the party of Big Business, provided those businesses represent industries from the 19th century. Republicans don’t care for the American businesses that make lots of money and employ lots of Democrats, especially West Coast technology companies and East Coast financial firms. They lump Facebook in with YouTube and Twitter, which, they complain, intentionally suppress conservative voices. Which of course they do: YouTube is cool with Jew-hating conspiracy fruitcakes such as Louis Farrakhan, but it has fits about Dennis Prager, a mild-mannered Jewish radio host who thinks narcissism is unhealthy — a man who dedicates an hour of his show each week to the theme of happiness. Facebook, in the Republican view, is emblematic of the incurable hypocrisy of Silicon Valley, whose leaders claim to value intellectual openness and curiosity but who act as heavy-handed commissars when it suits them.
Shareholders don’t think much of Facebook right now, either: The firm has shed 35 percent of its value in recent months. Zuckerberg has been losing — personally — more than $1 billion a month throughout 2018. At this rate, it’s a very real possibility that his great-great-great-grandchildren might have to fly commercial one day.
Facebook is being pilloried for the way it shares users’ information with its business partners and clients. But the fundamental problem is not Facebook business practices: Facebook’s real problem is that it isn’t cool any more.
If you’re cool, you can get away with anything.
Many of you are too young to remember this, but there was a time when Bill Clinton was cool. After the presidency of Ronald Reagan — who was very cool — Democrats were convinced they’d never win again. They were going to be the party of Paul Tsongas and Walter Mondale and Tip O’Neill, grey and sour-faced old Norski dairy-state progressives and doddering urban-ethnic Catholic ward-heelers, corrupt Philadelphia party bosses and the Reverend Jesse Jackson. And then along came Bill Clinton, who was young, and smart, and a cad, and running against President George H. W. Bush, who was many things that Bill Clinton was not — a good man, a patriot, courageous, with wide-ranging experience and deep intelligence — but not cool. Bill Clinton won — and winning is the coolest thing in politics. Bill Clinton’s cool protected him from a great many things, including allegations of Harvey Weinstein–style behavior. Feminist cheerleaders cheerfully offered to get down on their knees to provide him sexual services. You could tell that Clinton’s cool had worn off when people started to take the rape allegations against him semi-seriously.
Mark Zuckerberg used to be cool, in his way. There aren’t a lot of business founders who get admiring cinematic biographies made about them before they have reached 30 years of age. But then Facebook went from being a thing the cool kids used to the thing your grandmother uses — and Nana just is not that cool. Then came the groveling after 2016 — and there is nothing less cool than groveling. Ironically, Zuckerberg has not learned the principal lesson of the soft social ochlocracy his product helped to midwife: L’appétit vient en mangeant — appetite comes from eating. The more he begs, the more they — the usual vulturine rabble that success always attracts and the more rarefied rabble that sits in Congress — enjoy it, and the more of it they want. As Donald Rumsfeld famously said: “Weakness is provocative.”
By way of comparison, consider the case of Dolce & Gabbana, the Italian fashion house whose founders rile polite society from time to time. They are planning to open up a shop at a high-end mall in Dallas, and the local social-justice warriors are up in virtual arms: D&G is a very naughty company.
When D&G made a commercial that was criticized as trafficking in Chinese stereotypes, Stefano Gabbana retorted to one critic that, in his view, China is a “country of” — this being the Internet, what followed was a poop emoji, or rather, three of them — and that “we live very well without you,” that China is run by an “ignorant dirty smelling mafia,” etc. English is not his first language, and his opprobrium is slightly amusing to read. There were remarks about dog-eating. Not very nice stuff, to be sure, but the fashion industry is not run by — or for — nice people. D&G have cheesed off gay-rights groups with skepticism about gay adoption (Stefano Gabbana and Domenico Dolce are gay, and were a couple for many years), have said hurtful things about in-vitro fertilization (“synthetic” babies!), and are great admirers of Melania Trump. “Rich, extravagant, and politically incorrect,” the Washington Post called them — so, of course, they must be punished.
But they refuse to be punished. That’s the unspoken truth of these kinds of affairs: One has to cooperate to truly be victimized by them.
Rebecca Jennings, writing in Vox, inadvertently gave voice to the inner totalitarian within every member of every pissant social-media mob:
Because Dolce and Gabbana themselves are so fabulously wealthy that they are free from the burden of pleasing investors, they can continue posting rude comments about celebrities and saying politically incorrect things to journalists with fewer consequences to their business than others.
A smaller company, or one with less artistic cachet, for instance, might be bankrupted by committing just one of the many social crimes of Dolce & Gabbana; consumers could boycotts [sic] or investors could withdraw funds. Yet brands such as Dolce & Gabbana or Chanel, whose creative director Karl Lagerfeld has rarely managed to do an interview without saying something wildly offensive, face no such threat.
“No such threat.” And where would we be without the power to make threats against people whose political and social views differ from our own?
If you’ve ever wondered why the Left hates Charles Koch so much, the answer isn’t his libertarian politics. It’s because he has what former Treasury secretary Don Regan liked to call “F***-you money” — and because he says “F*** you!” from time to time. You can lean on some nobody who needs his next couple of paychecks, and you can lean on a little company that is worried about losing a few sales — or on a big company in a mass market that makes it vulnerable to the Twitter age’s stampeding herds of independent minds. But D&G knows who its customers really are.
You can’t lean on D&G. It’s a great time to be in the luxury-goods market: Ferrari dealerships are sold out of new cars — even if you have the money, you might have to wait two years to get a new one. If you want to accessorize that sports car with a Rolex Daytona, there’s a waiting list for those, too. Balenciaga sneakers? Good luck. D&G is going to be just fine. They aren’t going to get bullied by penniless halfwits unless they want to.
There’s a lesson for Zuckerberg in that. He doesn’t have Peter Thiel’s natural Bond-villain vibe or the devil-may-care affect of Elon Musk, the Silicon Valley billionaire most likely to say, “Hold my beer!” He isn’t a natural bad guy — and, unlike Steve Jobs in his heyday, his cool factor is not high enough to get away with too very much in the way of truly outrageous shenanigans. But, just once, I’d like to hear him say: “Well, senator, I have a counter-proposal: How about I run my business the way I see fit and you . . . do whatever it is you do?”
Out of control? The alternative is to be under control. Whose control? Have a gander at Senator Schatz’s curriculum vitae: It’s a miracle that he ever negotiated the chasm between Pomona College and a hot meal. He held a series of low-level nonprofit jobs before entering what we now euphemistically call “public service.” He’s a hack who makes Barack Obama’s pre–White House résumé look like Dwight Eisenhower’s. If the alternative to being out of control is being under the soft little thumb of a nobody like that, then out of control is where it’s at.
Mark Zuckerberg seems to have relatively modest tastes for a man of his means.
But he does have “F*** you!” money, and that’s really, really good for one thing.