Glenn Harlan Reynolds

Opinion columnist

A year ago, I wrote in these pages to ask "Could Facebook swing an election?" But the new question is, could Facebook swing an election for Mark Zuckerberg? And if so, what else could it swing? Well, that’s the problem.

There’s been some talk about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg running for president, but the idea has been stirring up objections from across the political spectrum. And personally, I think those objections have a lot of force. So does The Nation's Jake Bittle, who writes that the idea is “terrifying.”

"His potential presidential candidacy should make us uneasy not because he’s a CEO, but because he’s the CEO of Facebook, the company 'responsible for the largest and most brazen data-collection project in human history.' As its user base has grown to encompass more than a quarter of the world’s population, Facebook has built an unparalleled system for tracking, analyzing and exploiting our behavior. The company owns (and sells) a totally unregulated storehouse of data about our most minute habits and inclinations: what we bought and when and where, whose pictures we looked at and for how long, where our cursor moved, what we sent, what we typed but didn’t send, and what we deleted — not to mention patterns in our browsing history, our e-mail activity, and our facial structures. This fearsome data apparatus has been pitched as part of Facebook’s 'journey to connect the world.'"

You don’t have to believe the most lurid Internet rumors about Facebook’s connections to the national security community to be concerned about the fusion of this kind of corporate power, reaching into people’s daily lives, with the immense power of the federal government. As Bittle observes: “Zuckerberg’s election would mean handing over the leadership of an already privacy-violating government to the creator of one of the world’s most invasive surveillance platforms. Although he’s only ever worked in the private sector, Zuckerberg’s history of pushing data collection and analysis well beyond reasonable limits suggests that he would take the technocratic elements of Obama’s presidency into overdrive.”

Zuckerberg is almost as smart as he thinks he is, but so what? The smartest presidents of the past century were probably Jimmy Carter and Herbert Hoover, neither of whom was particularly successful. And a president who thinks he’s smarter than everyone else is unlikely to be a very effective one.

But Zuckerberg’s biggest problem may not even have to do with his own personality, or even with Facebook’s intrusiveness. His biggest problem may be that Silicon Valley has lost its lustre.

More by Glenn Harlan Reynolds:

Welcome to our crazy years

Google needs a new CEO

An industry that once seemed to be about personal liberation and empowerment — as illustrated in that famous 1984-themed Apple commercial — now seems to be creepy and controlling, and has signed up as enforcers in the culture wars that many Americans fear (66% of Americans, in a recent Rasmussen poll, fear speaking out for fear of penalties; only 28% think Americans “have true freedom of speech today.”) Some are even arguing for new laws to limit corporate censorship on social media.

So while a decade ago a Zuckerberg-like figure might have been able to run as a stainless nerd-knight, above the culture wars, Silicon Valley’s headlong enlistment in those wars means that today it looks more like a cyborg version of that creepy preacher in Footloose, a grim nanny type profiting from spoiling everyone else’s fun. (Actually, it kind of looks like the bad guys in that old Apple commercial.) Joining that oppressive culture with a government that most Americans already think is too big and bossy doesn’t sound like a recipe for success.

President Big Brother? Call me crazy, but I don’t think it’ll sell.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor and the author of The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself, is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.

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