The Mark 2010

Sex, drugs, parties; you won't find any of these in The Facebook Effect, David Kirkpatrick's "inside story" about Facebook's early days.

In 1993, I founded one of Canada’s very first internet start-up companies. My partners were a group of University of Ottawa graduates with no former business experience. Together we published a magazine, a book, and a training video, provided consulting services to the Canadian federal government, and were invited to speak at business conferences all around the world. Three years later, my company was bankrupt and I was also bankrupt, divorced, and living on welfare. I had experienced the high-tech start-up from hell.

I won’t tell you about the sex, drugs, and wild parties, but for the most part, neither does David Kirkpatrick when he relates the story of Facebook’s early days and later successes in the book, The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World. This makes Kirkpatrick’s book particularly frustrating and suspect, as the reader is left with the distinct feeling that the tale is less of an inside story and more of a carefully constructed public relations spin job.

Through privileged access to Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, and Zuckerberg’s closest associates, Kirkpatrick weaves a detailed and often dull account of the people and deals that turned Zuckerberg into the latest poster child of new media billionaires. Facebook is on the verge of morphing into a universal symbol of intrusive advertising and privacy invasion. Yet Kirkpatrick gives these subjects a sophomoric treatment that is bound to leave anyone modestly informed about Facebook, social networking, online advertising, and privacy quite dissatisfied. What can one say about a book that purports to be an “inside story” yet was written in close proximity to Facebook’s own public relations counsel? As noted in the New York Times review of the book, “Their cooperation has resulted in a mostly sympathetic – at times, gushingly laudatory – account of the company.”

Nonetheless, there is enough in the facebook effect to leave the reader to draw their own conclusions. Zuckerberg comes off as either a high-tech whiz-kid that has seen the future and is going to drag the rest of us screaming and kicking into it for our own good, or as yet another Silicon Valley megalomaniac who believes that he can engineer a safer internet and a better world.

In Zuckerberg we encounter typical Silicon Valley mythology about the power of new media. People are now “in control” of the economy and their online information. The transparency and sharing promoted by social networking will create a “better-governed world and a fairer world.” Behind these claims is Zuckerberg’s naïve and self-serving notion of “radical transparency.” Facebook is supposed to be building a “safer, more trusted version of the internet” and people should be willing to share all of themselves on this corporate property.

The obvious and unanswered question is, “Why should people be radically transparent when corporations such as Facebook are proprietary and highly secretive?” Google, Facebook, and other emerging new media oligopolies are constantly encouraging us to trust them with our data, yet in so doing we are being conned into building a new world in which a few corporations control vast amounts of highly detailed information about billions of people. Zuckerberg’s “radical transparency” is the foundation to concentrated economic power that is increasingly removed from public scrutiny and government oversight. It is all highly convenient and very profitable.

For a man who seeks to profit handsomely from our radical transparency, we are never told in The Facebook Effect that Zuckerberg once described anyone who trusted Facebook with their personal information as “dumb fucks”. We do not get a sense that the main contribution of Facebook to the internet is the monetization of personal information and the further socialization of consumption.

Facebook is constantly trampling over people’s privacy and repeatedly undermining the trust that is essential for its own business model. The news is filled with stories of the public relations snafus that this has led to in numerous countries across the world. The final Facebook effect may well come as a result of the company’s naïve philosophy and growing hubris – somewhere out there on a university campus is another whiz kid plotting to take the internet by storm and change the way we connect to each other. I hope he or she is smart enough to keep details about the sex, drugs, and parties off Facebook.