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Who is Mark Zuckerberg? We got Social Network, the movie, but who is this man in relation to this Facebook he has created? We got the chance to hear a little about the King of the Undead and why his products are what they are- his abhorrence of the sounds of whirring fans and the consequent result that Apple computers do not have fans as their cooling mechanism. To an extent it is easy to imagine that Facebook is now bigger than Mark Zuckerberg and I don’t really know to what extent it is how it is because he is how he is. Here is my very rudimentary analysis gleaned from what I know of human beings, my life experiences, and various internet sources that offer tid bits of biographical, anecdotal and first person information about Mark Zuckerberg. This is no way scientific or painstakingly researched or a psychological profile. It’s just some thoughts based on some information. My main sources of information were Wikipedia, a few news articles and Mark Zuckeberg’s own Facebook profile.
His parents are both doctors, a psychiatrist mother and a dentist father. A Jewish family, which I can only imagine, was resplendent with Jewish guilt and pressure to achieve. As a young man, he was well versed in Classics and musically talented. At this point, I am poised to like him; a well read guy with a talent for music, not really an individual I would imagine as being the spearhead of one of the most evil inventions of all time. He is a vegetarian. Again, to me, indicates a concern and respect for life, unless we think of it as “well I’ve really hurt humanity so to compensate I won’t harm animals”. But then we get this kind of odd proclamation from him about his vegetarianism: “My 2011 challenge is to become a vegetarian and only eat meat if I kill the animal myself. The reason for this is that I feel lucky for having such a great life. I like eating meat and before this year I ate it almost every day. In order to practice thankfulness, I want to be more connected to the food I eat and the animals that give their lives so I can eat them.” Um. What? By killing the animal yourself, you are more appreciating the work of the farmer. As far as I know, animals don’t just see a hungry human, lie down, and offer themselves, “giving their lives” to lucky humans. This isn’t about respect or appreciation; it is about a more primal connection with his kills.
The Social Network makes him out to be a kind of nerdy, socially awkward guy, with no luck with the ladies so he creates Facebook as a manifesto of his spurned sexuality and Fuck you to the world that has marginalized him. But, Mark Zuckerberg had in fact met his now wife, Priscilla Chan, the year before he created Facebook. And he has kept her without an “upgrade” to any type of gold-digging, supermodel type he might now be able to snag? I think the “kids were mean to me” and “girls didn’t want to have sex with me” analysis is too simple.
Moving along, we see what Mark Zuckerberg has to say about himself or, I guess more accurately, the profile he has created of himself to present to the public. For his work at Facebook he lists his occupation as “Making the world more open and connected”. In a similar theme, his about me claims, “I am trying to make the world a more open place”. Openness seems like a worthy goal, secret police aren’t hiding in the open. In 2004 we see not that he graduated Harvard but rather that he “left Harvard University”. We can admire that as a man who did not “need” school but rather left to do real life or you might take it, as I do, as a sort of fuck you audacity of leaving Hahvahd- it smacks of a certain arrogance that I find also in his chosen attire (case in point, ringing the Nasdaq bell in his hoodie). It seems disrespectful or even deceptively innocent. Is that man in a hoody for goodness sake really wielding such power? His favorite quotes tell us more. I recoiled a bit when I saw the first one, one of MY favorite quotes, “Fortune favors the bold” from Virgil’s, Aeneid. To me this has always meant that people make their own luck, that you have to go for what you want or else you will never get it. Is providing many of the governments of the world and their secret polices with information bold? Or would tweaking Facebook in a manner that respects privacy, freedom, and humanity be bold? Next we have a quote from Pablo Picasso, “All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once you grow up.” Interesting. He thinks of himself as an artist, not a technician, not a scientist. Under his majors at Harvard he has listed computer science and psychology- creation and seeking to understand humans. Again, preoccupation with childhood, perhaps he was pushed too hard instead of just becoming who he was. His dad called him a prodigy as a child. That kind of label can be really damaging in terms of the expectations it imposes and the type of life it implies. And a desire to be an artist- what is that about? Artists are immortal, they are creators, they express. In a way they play God in their role as creators, in that they can create whole worlds. Lastly, he lists Albert Einstein’s words “make things as simple as possible but no simpler”. Reminds me of Thoreau’s imploration “simplify, simplify, simplify”. There is beauty if simplicity. Clarity. Only the really smart can state something very simply- its difficult, kind of like condensing your thoughts into only 1000 words.
-- ElviraKras - 08 Apr 2013
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