The Zuck Stops Here

Earlier this year, as he set out to visit all fifty states, speculation swirled that Mark Zuckerberg might be considering a future run for president. Of course, that theory brings up an obvious question: Why would he want the demotion? He already runs a virtual nation with a population that’s headed towards the two billion mark. But like the physical country in which he resides, there is a growing divide in Zuckerberg’s online community about the role of globalization. “Facebook stands for bringing us closer together and building a global community. When we began, this idea was not controversial.” It is now. And the Internet that was designed to bring us all together may in fact be driving us further apart. As I’ve mentioned before, the open communication network we thought we were building turned into a hunting ground for trolls and spammers; unavoidable because of our ferocious addiction to our mobile screens. Social media evolved into a confirmation bias-riddled cesspool of lies, hate, and totally unrealistic versions of our lives; which would gradually amount to little more than weightless collections of Retweets and Likes. And somehow – with more tools to connect than ever before — we made our lives less diverse; racially, politically, and culturally; each of us left to sink in the quicksand that lines the thickening walls of our silos of homogeneity. So we’re left with a question. Can Zuck fix it? From Mike Isaac in the NYT: Facebook’s Zuckerberg, Bucking Tide, Takes Public Stand Against Isolationism.

+ Cade Metz in Wired: Mark Zuckerberg’s answer to a world divided by Facebook is more Facebook. (That’s always the technologist’s solution to the damage done by technology.)

+ Here’s Zuck’s 5800-word treatise on Facebook’s mission to build global community. (Which might be 5660 words longer than the modern attention span can take.)

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