Zuckerberg: a guest blog by Thomas Fuller
Zuckerberg's hairline disturbs me--I know it's a superficial judgement and immaterial to the matter at hand, but it's the first thing I see when I see Zuckerberg.
Zuckerberg's the William Randolph Hearst of the 21st century.
No, that's only partially true. Zuckerberg's transcended Hearst; Zuckerberg's gone into journalism without going in to journalism. Zuckerberg's written code for journalism without producing anything resembling journalistic content.
This is an extraordinary moment, actually, in American business history. Hearst produced yellow journalism; Zuckerberg's producing journalism three-times removed from journalism, journalism that is advertising first, the marketing of privacy second, and then journalism, but without the cloak of journalism and without journalistic responsibilities.
From the black and white photographs I've seen of William Randolph Hearst, it looks to me that he had a kind of pasted-on life; that he was living a life that he either pasted on himself or one that was pasted on him by others, and that it wasn't a real life the way H.L. Mencken had a real life, or Upton Sinclair. Zuckerberg looks like he's living a kind of pasted-on life too, he looks like he's living in a place he never imagined living in, and how could he have imagined it?
(Gutenberg: what did he look like?)
Zuckerberg looks like a rabbi or a priest sometimes, a Jewish Roman or a Roman Jew. Sometimes, when he turns his head slightly right or left, there's the hint of a tonsure and I glimpse a slightly spiritual cast to his being. At a time like this I can feel sympathy for Zuckerberg--a very young man, slight, a code writer who got into Harvard and who never imagined his life would become what it's become. Zuckerberg looks like he works out too, something William Randolph Hearst looked like he never did.
I too dislike Facebook, I deplore their logomark--the hideously gratuitous thumbs up--and I'm not a fan of suveillance capitalism in any form, yet I have a soft spot in my heart for Zuckerberg the man.
Events are pushing all our buttons these days, to the point where we're currently experimenting with a populist new-fangled form of facism. It seems that the world just won't stop being made up of lies and hidden connections, or connections that pose as community, things we just can't seem to do without.
Thomas Fuller is a writer who divides his time between Berkeley, CA and upstate WY. He has a Facebook page, but it's largely dormant. His novel, The Classical World, will be published in June by IFSF.