Five years ago Mark Z could be heard speaking Chinese. Officially it was since he wanted to connect to his inlaws. Since his spouse was a Bostonian which parents had arrived with the ‘boat people’ after the US loss of the Vietnam war people accepted this as an explaination.
There is just one problem: Mark had wrapped his head around Mandarin. While his wife spoke Cantonese to her parents. Who had been in the country since 40 years and probably picked up a bit of English along the way. Both Mandarin and Cantonese are being spoken in China. But they are very different.
The real reason why Mark tried to learn Mandarin was since he tried to get his product into China. More than in 6 people on this planet lives in China. Marks raw material is people. He harvests their attention and sells it. Him not trying to get into China is like Exxon ignoring Saudi Arabian oil.
He failed.
China understood what he had made is very simple to build. Actually it could be made much better: WeChat has many many more features (hooks into people) than Marks Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp combined.
This (and the title) might suggest that I dislike Mark Zuckerberg. I don’t. I would not care about the person. It is just that he has the wrong position and job. Sure he made this thing and nudged it towards success and market dominance. He is really good at that part. And showed great instincts for the matter at along the way. Matter at hand is the construction of a ‘social network’. It is NOT what people would benefit from. What would bring the world further along. His lip service to those aspects are ridiculous claims. In any language he speaks. He does not build communities. His job is it to keep people using his product. He is much like the Tobacco industry in the 50-70s in that respect. Getting more users and getting them hooked more is the goal. Who cares if people die of lung cancer later or countries are internally at each others since they feel so divided.
Our current troubles are entirely related in human nature. The bad aspects of it that get willingly or unwittingly amplified by Facebook.
WeChat users started wearing masks real quick. People getting their information by the censored and controlled Chinese outlets behaved much better for the greater good than Marks billions. Something he could have controlled and changed with great ease. It is not that his believe in democracy would be the reason for him not doing this. Nobody at Facebook understands or cares. Trump took 2016 away without them noticing that he do so on Facebook. Cambridge Analytica behaved like the fox in the henhouse. And nobody at Facebook noticed. I doubt somebody could pull of the same stunts in China.
Image by Bob Bicknell-Knight “Mark’s First”, 2019