Congratulations to Facebook for traveling public. Congratulations to the advisers that are now millionaires. Congratulations to the founders who are now billionaires. Congratulations to the bankers, attorneys and investors who accept added to their already ample wealth. You’ve grasped the assumption ring we’re all extensive for.
Yet the aggregation that’s been created isn’t what I wish from Silicon Valley.
Let’s lay abreast for a minute the foibles of the founders: Mark Zuckerberg’s hacking Harvard’s servers and the email accounts of journalists, his accommodation to “fuck” the Winklevii “in the ear” and Eduardo Saverin’s antic tax dodge. Let’s overlook about the Facebook Beacon “mistake” or the animadversion censorship thing. Let’s overlook about the aloofness implications. Just yield annihilation that makes you anxious about the aggregation and put it in a box for one minute to accede Facebook objectively.
Facebook sells advertising—it may be the a lot of able commercial belvedere back Google, or not—but that’s not the best use of the brightest minds of our generation. Commercial doesn’t beforehand our antithesis of trade. It doesn’t lift humans out of poverty. It doesn’t apply the abundantly skilled. It doesn’t extend activity expectancies or yield abroad pain. It doesn’t beforehand our accepted of living.
Silicon Valley is at its best if it uses its different aggregate of aptitude and basic to beforehand society, to actualize even bigger accoutrement for creation, to alleviate the abeyant of humans not just here, but beyond the globe.
Where Facebook Falls Short
There’s an old bank adage that if you don’t apperceive who is the accoutrement at the table, it’s you. The aforementioned ability be said of online businesses these days: if you don’t apperceive what’s been sold, it’s you. Facebook sells your content, your connections, your time, your attention, your claimed advice to advertisers. The aggregation is alone a aqueduct for what you do. Its value, set by the bazaar on Thursday, is a absorption of the account of what you’ve contributed and created.
Yes, anniversary time you assurance in to Facebook, you’re traveling to plan for Mark Zuckerberg. Anniversary time you amend your status, column a video, analysis in or just sit and watch everybody away do it, you band his pockets.
And I wouldn’t apperception that a bit. In fact, I would acclaim it, were the artefact of these hours added profitable.
The actuality is that abundant of the time spent on Facebook is wasted. The aggregation says in its S-1 that users spent an boilerplate of 175 actor hours per day on Facebook in February 2012. That’s a lot. Compare that to say, the 100 actor hours Clay Shirky and a researcher at IBM account it took to actualize all of Wikipedia.
What’s Wikipedia worth? I anticipate it’s priceless, but aback in 2008, Business Insider estimated that if it were to become a bartering enterprise, Wikipedia would be account $7 billion. Say it’s just bisected that—adjust for the Henry Blodget factor—and you’d see that the amount of contributions to Facebook, were they as admired as the time spent accidental to Wikipedia, care to be account $6.125 billion per day.
But it’s not. Accidental to Wikipedia increases the availability of the world’s knowledge. “Liking” Starbucks contributes alone to the ability advertisers can use to bigger ambition you.
It’s abundant bigger to watch television. Television, like Facebook, gets paid by advertisers for your time.When advertisers pay TV channels, the money flows to abounding altered pockets. There’s the TV stars, of course, but there’s aswell the crew: the craft-services, the set designers, the costumers, the band producers, the complete engineers, electricians, gaffers, writers and key grips. All the humans who accomplish the TV appearance get a allotment of that commercial dollar and these are acceptable jobs, abounding unionized, that don’t crave a adorned Stanford computer science degree. And anniversary getting active authoritative TV shows pays taxes and pumps their salaries aback into the economy.
And the artefact of their plan can be exported. When the U.S. sells movies and TV shows away it improves our antithesis of barter and helps accomplish the articles we import, such as iPads and oil, beneath expensive.
When advertisers pay Facebook, the money goes into the pockets of Facebook shareholders, advisers and computer makers. Most of Facebook’s banal is captivated by a individual getting and alone a small, baddest accumulation of awful accomplished programmers can defended a atom on the payroll. The abundance created by Facebook gets concentrated into the easily of a few—some of whom accept banned to pay taxes on their gains—instead of getting recycled into the greater economy. And the computer makers that accumulation Facebook await on apparatus alien from added countries, sending basic away and abrasion our antithesis of trade.
Facebook’s acceleration is abundant for Zuck, but unless you’re a part of a advantaged few, it isn’t acceptable for you.
There’s one added important aberration amid television and Facebook. Abundant television approaches art. I’ll bethink the ball of The Sopranos and the action from 30 Rock continued afterwards I’m done searching at those pictures of your niece’s baby.
We Can Do Better
The Facebook admirers are quick to avert the company’s value. It empowers connection! It brings humans afterpiece to anniversary other! You can’t put a amount on that! It helped adapt the Arab Spring, for advantage sake.
Facebook enhances apart access and keeps you in acquaintance with the humans you wouldn’t beforehand the time to alarm or address an email to. Seeing pictures of a friend’s ultrasound may be priceless, but the amount comes from you, your affiliation to the acquaintance and the phenomenon of life, not the account that delivers the image. Facebook did advice humans adapt in beforehand of the Arab Spring, but so did Twitter, email, SMS and abounding added vectors. And there absolutely were revolutions afore Facebook and will acceptable be revolutions continued afterwards Facebook admiral down its endure server.
Facebook isn’t bad. It is just a low-value use of time that doesn’t accord abundant to the abridgement above adorning the rich. What added admired things could be done with the time, energy, effort, adroitness and basic invested in its authoritative and circadian usage?
There are startups accomplishing amazing things actuality in Silicon Valley still. Sure there are the electric cars, apprentice butlers, amplitude rockets and a agglomeration of hyper-ambitious projects. But you can accept a absolute addition to the abridgement and the apple after abating blight or agronomics craving humans in Africa (there is a adventure close in San Francisco alive on acceptable agronomics if you do wish to accomplish a aberration in the subcontinent). I’m generally afflicted by humans alive to anticipate outbreaks of awful bacilli with accelerated anesthetic development or others creating systems to radically advance the activity ability of ample buildings. These companies’ goals are obtainable, their accomplishment would be benign and the articles would be the world’s envy.
With Facebook public, conceivably the accomplished half-decade of amusing networking, accidental games, basic worlds, MMORPGs, app stores, avatars and “pokes” will accord way to a renaissance of startup companies that accomplish absolute articles of actual amount that apply approved people. Such a acknowledgment to Silicon Valley’s roots could brace the American abridgement and already afresh put this different abode at the affection of animal progress.
