Zuckerberg — Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is
A call to the owner state and commons managed for the maximum benefit of all stakeholders through dividends.
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Journalists continue chronicling how Zuckerberg fears Blusky’s rise while folks like
push still more towards Bluesky. Zuckerberg says he’s open to the creator economy and platforms like , yet advocates for exclusionist policies which keep the poor from legitimate seats at the table on his platform. Long hair, t-shirt, surfing, and gold chain be damned: he’s still hoarding, whatever he claims about taxing robots.So it goes.
It seemed monthly during 2018, Mr. Zuckerberg inundated his built-in following with pictures of his promise-it's-not-political-Political tour of America (now with new and improved Congressional ignorance!), advocating for listening to others and for universal basic income, a stop-by-stop road tour of feigned empathy in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica revelations. Zuckerberg’s tour paints a rather stark contrast when compared to Steinbeck’s travelogue. Does he only plan to preach or does he really does want to listen, then change his mind and habits by practicing universal basic income in his own life?
In his own company?
Time will tell. And not on a civic policy level, but on Meta’s corporate policy level. I personally believe that
’s prediction will hold true for Facebook as with any other platform. In fact, barring the direct purchase of shares in by the all of the writers of Substack, I think this platform too will face a similar fate.Why?
I have never, ever quoted Adam Smith because I abhor his philosophy, but his work Wealth of Nations applies here:
Men may live together in society with some tolerable degree of security, though there is no civil magistrate to protect them from the injustice of those passions. But avarice and ambition in the rich, in the poor the hatred of labour and the love of present ease and enjoyment, are the passions which prompt to invade property; passions much more steady in their operation, and much more universal in their influence. Wherever there is a great property, there is great inequality. For one very rich man, there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many.
The affluence of the rich excites the indignation of the poor, who are often both driven by want, and prompted by envy to invade his possessions. It is only under the shelter of the civil magistrate, that the owner of that valuable property, which is acquired by the labour of many years, or perhaps of many successive generations, can sleep a single night in security. He is at all times surrounded by unknown enemies, whom, though he never provoked, he can never appease, and from whose injustice he can be protected only by the powerful arm of the civil magistrate, continually held up to chastise it. The requisition of valuable and extensive property, therefore, necessarily requires the establishment of civil government. Where there is no property, or at least none that exceeds the value of two or three days labour, civil government is not so necessary.
Why else would Zuckerberg visit Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring? He needs protection. Why? He and other billionaires and CEOs are scared of something like a French Revolution and, considering the United Healthcare CEO assassination, I honestly don’t blame him for that anxiety, at least based on logic alone. Adam Smith is right: it makes sense that he would worry. The funny thing about the rich is that this anxiety causes them to grow poor in spirit while the one group of people who could help them is the poor, who don’t actually want wealth, but access and a seat a the table. The rich have connections to education, job postings, politicians, creative collaborations, awards. Meanwhile the poor can always eradicate the loneliness of the rich better than anyone else because of their frankness and intimate language. Because of community resilience. The problem in both cases is that they don’t know one another. Even zoning prevents this. Yet the rich cling to their hoard and clutch pearls and worry about another French Revolution, this time against oligarchs. As Bloomberg noted: it is in the self-interest of Billionaires and Trillionaires (and, for future audiences, Quintillionaires and Centillionaires) to solve inequality because one way or another, history always reverts wealth towards the mean. They might as well make it as nonviolent as possible and participate in the process of the Jubilee so lauded in the Tanakh of Zuckerberg’s own Reform Judaism.
Adam Smith goes on to speak of what causes and circumstances subordinate one’s subjects and the first cause out of four is not birthright, old age, or wealth:
The first is the superiority of personal qualifications, of strength, beauty, and agility of body; of wisdom and virtue of prudence, justice, fortitude, and moderation of mind. The qualifications of the body, unless supported by those of the mind, can give little authority in any period of society. He is a very strong man, who, by mere strength of body, can force two weak ones to obey him. The qualifications of virtue can alone give very great authority.
Mark?
If you’re reading this through some Google alert fluke, you know that anxiety you feel over your wealth and power?
Do you know Adam Smith’s other causes for subordination later in the quoted passage? They are wealth, age, and birthright. You already have too much wealth, too much age, too much birthright for any of that to settle your anxiety. You’re one of the richest men in the world, you’re 40 now (half dead), and you grew up in freaking Westchester New York son to a dentist and a psychiatrist with direct access to Mercy College as a high schooler. Yet you’re still worried. If you had enough, you wouldn’t still be this anxious. You would “sleep a single night in security.” The father of modern capitalism says the only way capitalism works at its logical end is with a virtuous person at the helm. Me? I have my doubts if we will ever see a virtuous CEO. I disbelieve a man like Lord Grantham in Downton Abbey exists. I think folks who hoard that radically are fundamentally selfish until divest enough to learn the habits of virtue. Wealth doesn’t teach virtue. It teaches it hoarding. Unlike Ayn Rand, I think selfishness can never be a virtue for this reason. Let alone a fundamental society-building virtue. This is why we need Jubilee. You’ll notice not even Adam Smith lists hoarding as a virtue.
But the difference between me and you, Mark, is that you can prove me wrong through action. And you can start right now.
If only Adam Smith, the father of capitalism, had said more about virtue in his Wealth of Nations. If only he had some sort of plan we could follow:
To hurt, in any degree, the interest of any one order of citizens, for no other purpose but to promote that of some other, is evidently contrary to that justice and equality of treatment which the sovereign owes to all the different orders of his subjects. But the prohibition [above] certainly hurts, in some degree, the interest of the growers of wool, for no other purpose but to promote that of the manufacturers.
Every different order of citizens is bound to contribute to the support of the commonwealth…. It is possible to devise a tax which could produce any considerable revenue to the commonwealth, and at the same time occasion so little inconveniency to anybody.
…The subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities; that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state.
That’s right.
Adam Smith was in favor of a progressive, exponential tax that grows with the buying power of the owners.
He wanted owners to pay this tax for the sake of the commons. At some inflection point in economies of scale — and I think 3 Billion users, half the planet, might be that inflection point — “corporate reinvestment” is just investing in the user base itself. So yes, one of the ways you can scale a progressive tax in these systems is with the user. As the user base grows, so grows the internal tax to create a commons for that user base. You can even create an opt-in system of a sovereign wealth fund that’s reinvested in the global economy (as Alaska and Norway do) and pays out a regular dividend so that their portion of the Facebook commons grows.
So yes, there’s something better than banning Facebook or breaking up Google: a royalty each company pays out to the users.
Adam Smith didn’t go on, did he?
Oh.
Oh wait.
He did…
Public stock and public lands, therefore, the two sources of revenue which may peculiarly belong to the commonwealth, being both improper and insufficient funds for defraying the necessary expense of any great and civilized state; it remains that this expense must, the greater part of it, be defrayed by taxes of one kind or another; the people contributing a part of their own private revenue, in order to make up a public revenue to the commonwealth.
That means, according to Smith, to rid himself of anxiety that the other four causes of subordination clearly have not solved, Zuckerberg needs to (1) learn virtue to (2) tax himself progressively (3) in a way that benefits all stakeholders — the user base of Meta — maximally.
For everyone else: this is not an issue of yesteryear or even yesterday. It’s an issue directly related to Meta’s relationship with Cambridge Analytica and their blind refusal to repent of their Orwellian systemic evils. It’s an issue directly related to their hoarding of power, fame, and wealth by inserting themselves as the middle man between your private connections. Consider: do you need a therapist to micromanage your entire marriage? Not a couple’s therapist for issues that arise perennially like an oil change, but for every moment? Do you need a talent scount between you and all of your 5-year-old’s baseball games? Do you need a court-appointed mediator for your local opinion on fire hydrant flushing? Do you need a museum curator for your family photos?
This is what social media has been and remains, no matter the scale or code or form. It’s why we can’t get along as a society. It has disrupted not merely the internet, but society itself. Think about that. The social network disrupted civil society. Well we’re long past Zuckerberg’s “move fast and break things” point.
We’ve now arrived the “ask questions later” stage.
And at some point, you’re not talking about code or tech anymore. You’re talking about ideas those things are predicated on. As with Musk’s failure to understand how Descartes debunked the simulation theory way back in the 1600’s, Zuck fails to understand key virtues that predicate a company — and a dragon hoard — this large, regardless as to whether it’s managed in a foundation or by an individual.
One of Zuck’s stops on his promise-it's-not-political-Political tour included Alaska, the state built on the assumptions in the philosophy of commons — of resources held in common by all the citizens of Alaska. As documented in the first piece of our film —
Who Owns the Sky? The gold? The oil? The sea?
I’ve grown to know and love Dr. Jack Hickel (son of Gov. Wally Hickle, former Secretary of the Interior under Nixon; father of the economist Jason Hickel), Ian Liang, and the various board members of the Institute of the North. They have a huge mandate there at the Center for the Commons. Their mandate eventually so convicted me that I pursued a short f…
— Alaska pays out royalties from the development of her resources. The state pays those collected royalties first into a permanent fund, a sovereign wealth fund and birthright of the people of Alaska (an idea Norway and others have borrowed), and then, once the sovereign wealth fund has earned money on the global economy, they communicate that wealth to all of the people of Alaska as a dividend. It pays out to the tune of one to three thousand dollars per Alaskan citizen per year.
Zuckerberg liked the idea for the same reason that thinking people for centuries have liked the idea of global commons:
It’s not communism. Meaning it doesn’t redistribute labor. It still rewards innovation.
It’s not capitalism. Meaning that it doesn’t end up with poor people living on rich land. It doesn’t let children die that I might live as I please.
It’s something closer to Chesterton’s idea of distributionism or the medieval idea of commons. It shows up in the words “fellowship” and “commonwealth” in Adam Smith. It pre-dates English enclosure. It’s also predicated on Elinor Ostrom’s work, indeed her whole crew helped write Article 8 of the Alaska constitution. It applies the idea of personal property to the shirt on your back and the meal on your table and roof over your head and assumes the “right uses of the riches of creation” applies to those things we all hold in common: water, sky, sunlight, the land, the resources, game, and the rest.
“Space” would be one. Looking at you, Elon.
So would our collected cultural mythologies, Disney.
Commons assume that no one can own natural wealth outright as an individual. Nor common heritage. The only thing that someone can own is the work of their hands and even then work should be relational and should have an eye for improving the benefit of all citizens and not merely a few. Even then, the “work of your hands” can often be communal. Consider an Amish barn raising. The internal assumption of an Amish barn raising is that you’ll show up for someone else’s barn.
Those who first lived in the Americas understood this well: the natives. Out of native thinking grew traditions like potlatch where the community considered the most powerful man to be the man who could give the most away. Modern church communities combined that idea with the New Testament love feasts into their potlucks. The most powerful churches and businesses in the Midwest — just as the most powerful chiefs in the southern Alaska native tribes — are the ones who give the most away. Consider the Bishop at the start of Les Miserables. Consider again the year of Jubilee in the Tanakh.
Mark Zuckerberg, worried as he is with Bluesky and Substack and the rest, has a great deal to give away. Both power and money. To properly subject his users, he would need to abandon his other three failing causes and learn that first cause: virtue. Virtue could build a radical consensus of 3 Billion “subjects,” as Adam Smith would call them. A commonwealth.
Zuck might claim that the lines of code he wrote is the work of his hands, but Facebook per se is primarily the work of Facebook community. Again: Meta is the middle man between social relationships the users brought to the table. Mark built a platform: the book where the faces might be posted and the words be pasted. Mark did not build the thing that rests upon the platform: the words and faces in said book. It’s not his data.
Zuck: yea so if you ever need info about anyone at harvard
Zuck: just ask
Zuck: i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns
Friend: what!? how’d you manage that one?
Zuck: people just submitted it
Zuck: i don’t know why
Zuck: they “trust me”
Zuck: dumb f*cks
It’s yours.
Should you get a share in the profit?
Absolutely.
In reality, Facebook is now one of the largest commons in the entire world. Certainly Creative Commons. With over three billion active users, very very few commons have as much use. Wikipedia is one, but it’s already operated as a commons on a razor thin staff with a clear give-and-take. Outside of the entire internet, we’d have to go to larger natural phenomenon like oceans, weather patterns, crops to find a larger user base.
But the difference is that Facebook — in their user agreement — claims to own everything you post. Meaning that back before I deleted my Facebook account, every time I had a conversation with my mother about where to host my grandpa’s birthday, Team Zuck made money off of ads in the sidelines. Every time I posted a cat photo that got eighty likes, that’s anywhere from five to twenty bucks going to Facebook.
Who owns the sky?
Who owns the ocean?
Who owns the internet?
In the Philippines, Zuckerburg claims to, but does he?
Zuckerberg likes the idea of commons and the idea of natural wealth. He likes the idea of universal basic income. Good. Relationships — and the fruit of relationships — are natural wealth. Love is not mere labor, be it sex, friends, or the kind of sacrifice we see social media encourage during natural disasters. Ask any brand new mother in the birthing ward: it’s the child, not the labor, she’s concerned about. That’s why we make a distinction and call such an effort “a labor of love.” It’s not capital. That’s why the metaphor makes sense. It’s not the work of your hands. Again, it could be compared to an Amish barn raising. That’s why the metaphor implies passion and virtue instead of produce and profit. Love, in addition to everything else it does, composes the interstitial fluid of the use of all commons, in general.
And if someone reasonably argued that Facebook was entirely a work of labor, we must ask: whose labor?
That we all contributed to this commons means, of course, that we all own it.
Instead of starting with this assumption, the assumption Alaska makes in Article 8, Facebook went into my mother’s China cabinet, pointed to decades of our family’s photos and said, “That’s all mine.”
Kind of creepy on par when you consider the behavior of most dragons.
Few people properly stopped to think of the intrinsic ultimate value — truth, beauty, goodness — behind family photos, events, and conversations. The healthcare information embedded in them through biometrics. The ancestral tracking. But what about proximate value? What about their financial, social, political, and entertainment value?
Did Facebook — and Instagram and WhatsApp — rob this hidden value from us?
If Mark Zuckerberg really believed in stewarding the commons and the idea of a universal basic income, he doesn’t need to pass legislation. He doesn’t need to advocate for taxes. He doesn’t need to lobby senators. He doesn’t have to get us to charge a fee for robots and Ai. He doesn’t need to use Facebook as a platform to run for office or to tour the country and say, “See, everyone should be like Alaska.”
He’s in charge of one of the largest commons on planet earth — a userbase larger than China and a market cap larger than the national budget of all but nine of the countries in the world. It is a kind of nation state. The Borg kind.
Here’s what he could do:
1. Pay a dividend of 50% of all ad revenue from all interactions to the user.
That’s it. That’s the list. It’s one item long.
Meta is primarily a digital ad company. So pay out 50% of the revenue of the ads to the user responsible for the interaction that generated the ad views. They already track impressions and clicks, not to mention transactions. They simply need a system to log those impressions and clicks on the photos, videos, and posts of those who originally made them. Create a long-tail formula for comments upon existing posts and they’ll know how much a given interaction earns.
only takes a 10% cut. 90% is ours. And we retain our mailing lists.If Zuck did this, user engagement and new user registration would both compound exponentially overnight solving his Bluesky problem.
Drastic spending increases on ads and apps would follow.
And Mr. Zuckerberg would have contributed a meaningful easing of poverty internationally, poverty created, as Dr. Jason Hickel says in The Divide, by systemic deck stacking in favor of large Western corporations like Facebook run by Ivy Leaguers from Westchester like Zuck. Look, I have many friends in Westchester and at Ivy League schools — I’m not against your childhood. But at some point, you have to learn virtue. At some point, you have to consider your neighbors.
At some point you have to divest yourself of power and wealth because the system you built is actually negating your own influence and intrinsic value.
Of course to meaningfully ease poverty, Zuck would have to radically change his own mind, not merely those of others. Μετανοια. I doubt he’ll do it. His nonprofit advances his for-profit agenda just like the rest of the foundations here in New York (see also The Revolution Will Not Be Funded). We wouldn’t need to host galas raising money for poverty relief sponsored by Bank of America and Visa if they and others like them simply stopped practicing usury. We wouldn’t need to host galas raising money for the end of sex trafficking sponsored by Playboy if Playboy simply stopped objectifying women (see also my piece on Neil Gaiman’s prostitution arguments and groomer protagonists).
Mark Zuckerberg wouldn’t need to host galas advocating for universal basic income if Silicon Valley practiced what it preached starting with their own companies. There is no need to give to any nonprofit if the systems that create the problems nonprofits solve are fixed. Of course, they won’t be. For profit enterprises are fundamentally selfish. Silicon Valley claims to build technology that man might triumph over nature. What they really do is help one man to triumph over another man with nature as their instrument. In this case, they’ve weaponized — and exploited — our conversations and social interactions, visual, audible, and otherwise. In this case, the man that has triumphed over you with our social nature as his instrument is named Mark Zuckerberg.
Mark: you don’t own the internet.
The very word “inter-net” defies the hoarding Facebook employs. Adam Smith says the only way capitalism works, at its logical conclusion, is with a virtuous person at the helm. That’s the only cause of subjugation left for old, oligarchic, birthright Ivy Leaguers. Fascinatingly, Jesus also said to the rich young ruler, “Sell everything you have and give it to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come follow me.” He said it to the rich young ruler because, though the rich young ruler was personally righteous, the systems he had built to amass his power and wealth had stolen, killed, lied, cheated, and the rest. The disciples got this: they left everything to follow Jesus. To them, Jesus said the reward was great. But it wasn’t earth bound wealth. Meanwhile everyone from Buddha to Aristotle said that ultimate goods — truth, beauty, goodness, unity — trump proximate goods — money, power, sex, fame, honor.
If you need a more practical plan than single step thing above, Mark, these steps may help:
Admit there’s a problem. You’re powerless over the internet and your life has become unmanageable. Exhibit A — Bluesky.
All of the users own the internet and a power greater than yourself can restore you to sanity.
Turn yourself over to that power greater than you.
Make a searching and fearless moral inventory of yourself.
Admit the exact nature of your wrongs.
Prepare your heart for these defects of character to be removed.
Humbly ask that greater power to remove your shortcomings.
Make a list of all persons you have harmed, and become willing to make amends to them all. (These would be your company’s users).
Make direct amends to such people wherever possible. Now’s the time: put your money where your mouth is.
Pay the users.
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