“The Facebook” was a hormonal male’s idea of how to make it easier to pick up girls at Harvard, where somehow, he was a student. The best of the best.

Somehow, it morphed into a gigantic gossip board, used by billions, for “free” in exchange for the ability to target advertising at its users.

Feb 3, 2022, the Harvard dropout pointed his finger at Apple and TikTok as the reason for losing hundreds of billions of dollars from the stock portfolios of many of his users. Money for retirement funds for teachers, police and firefighters, schools, and municipal investment funds all just disappeared, in a day. After Zuck, the two largest investors in Facebook/Meta are Vanguard and Blackrock. These huge money managers pool money in “passive investment funds” which are bought by by large pension funds and national social security funds are invested in various forms of passive funds like these.

The stock market reacted wildly because for the first time ever, people wasted less time scrolling through content curated with algorithms designed to keep them engaged.

Small businesses which depend on the platform to connect with their customers are being shortchanged- now that Zuck’s masterpiece reaches fewer people than what was promised.

News outlets, who’ve had their content stolen and shared for years, now are reaching less people. The butterfly effect can’t even be calculated with this epic news, just as the actual losses today are up for debate.

How did this happen? How did this money-printing machine run out of ink?

Disrespect for the customer, disrespect for the community, disrespect for civilization.

Mark Zuckerberg and his crew of profiteers forgot the two maxims to live by: “With great power comes great responsibility,” and, “Do unto others as you’d have them do unto you”.

The failure to protect our community from hate, from misinformation, from manipulation, has cost the company credibility and trust.

Google’s founders were the opposite of the Zuck and his pals,  hormonally driven teens looking to get laid. They started out with a goal of organizing the world’s information to make it more accessible and all of us smarter. They understood there were implications of their decisions and set the company’s founding mantra of “don’t be evil” – and yet, they too, have lost their way in pursuit of the almighty dollar.

What we have created is no less than the new patriarchy, the new kings, who have lost touch with those they control. It’s hard to understand poverty, despair, hunger, or mental and physical health issues, when you will never want for anything.

Substituting charitable donations instead of working to actively solve the challenges of the great unwashed won’t fix a thing, as long as the bottom line is allowed to dictate your values.

Imagine if Facebook worked a little like YouTube, where users can get paid for the quality of the content they contribute to the platform?

Think about if, instead of selling ads to politicians that are hyper-targeted to divide us, Facebook (er, Meta) built a true voter education system, that would eliminate the need to divert billions from our GDP to auctioning off public office to the best politician’s money can buy?

Instead of building super yachts, spaceships, self-driving cars, maybe we start worrying about things like climate change, the school to prison pipeline, pandemics, sustainability, clean energy or water systems not made of lead? Or is that too much to ask?

The sad thing is, riches could still be won and worlds improved by just realizing that money isn’t what makes value: social capital is all that should count. And because Facebook gets its capital from its social users, maybe Facebook should place a higher value on them.