13 years later, he wields unquestioned formal and informal control over a company that is now the battleground for elections as well as home to cultural discourse and basic family relationships.

That’s the crucial background for Mark Zuckerberg’s now-concluded tour of 30 American states, a photo-op-heavy barnstorm that has served, it seems, as a remedial education for Zuckerberg in what it means to be a normal person in America. Time and again, Zuckerberg has marveled at how people’s communities are enriched by their unions, churches, schools, and other civic institutions.

Most recently, for example, this was how he described his major takeaway from his travels at the concluding stop at the University of Kansas. “The thing that struck me everywhere I went—and I have stories from every state that I visited—was how central communities are to people,” he said.

You don’t say!

This level of naïveté sounds unbelievable until you remember that the only two states of adulthood the man has known are Harvard undergraduate and CEO of a company with unending funding and growth. His childhood was financially comfortable and individualistic in the way wealthy childhoods usually are. Where was he supposed to acquire an understanding of the ways that most places—middle-class, working-class, and poor—hold themselves together?

The tour has given Zuckerberg a new way of talking about his role at the company. “I think I started this year as an engineer, and now I’m wrapping it up thinking of myself as more of a community builder too,” Zuckerberg said in the Kansas interview.

This is a fascinating thing to say for a guy who opened up every conference call with his investors by talking about the enormous size of “the Facebook community.” Thirteen years and 2 billion people into this adventure, Zuckerberg is signaling that he’s evolving, with the implication that Facebook, as he built it, is not yet up to the task of undergirding real communities.

How are we to understand his professed new grasp of his company’s responsibility and goals relative to what went before? I used the University of Wisconsin’s database of Zuckerberg’s appearances and posts to pull every time he uttered the word “community” in public, from 2005 to today. There were more than 150 documents to pore over.

From this reading, it seems that there have been three periods of his conceptualization of community on Facebook. The first was simple: Facebook was a database of people, searchable and useful. The second was triumphalist. It began in 2011, but became dominant in 2014, marked by the open satisfaction about what connecting people on Facebook had accomplished. And then in 2016, a new darkness entered the way Zuckerberg conceived of both the world and the social network. Over the last 24 months, Facebook became a way of reversing the “inward” turn away from globalism and technological “progress” by strengthening people’s bonds on the social network.