There isn’t much in the way of serious philosophy underpinning Silicon Valley’s exertions. It’s a world of doers not thinkers, and the thin patina of Medium “thought pieces” written by “thinkfluencers” wears off with the mildest intellectual rubbing.

One possible exception is the late René Girard, an erudite philosopher and literary critic famous for two overarching theories, both of which are key (if only subconsciously) to the billion-dollar pixel empires of Silicon Valley.

Antonio García Martínez (@antoniogm) is an Ideas contributor for WIRED. Before turning to writing, he dropped out of a doctoral program in physics to work on Goldman Sachs’ credit-trading desk, then joined the Silicon Valley startup world, where he founded his own startup (acquired by Twitter in 2011), and finally joined Facebook’s early monetization team, where he headed its targeting efforts. His 2016 memoir, Chaos Monkeys, was a New York Times best seller and NPR Best Book of the Year, and his writing has appeared in Vanity Fair, The Guardian, and The Washington Post. He splits his time between a sailboat on the SF Bay and a yurt in Washington’s San Juan Islands.

This first is that of mimetic desire, whereby humans greedily desire some commodity, in part because they are imitating some admired tastemaker. People also aspire to be such a tastemaker, a greed for the very spectacle that attracts desire. Consider the highly curated and idealized online identities we maintain for such lifestyle showcases as Facebook or Instagram. Viewed via those selective lenses, our lives are a parade of epicurean meals on tastefully arranged tables, life-changing adventures in far-off locales, and carefully color-filtered milestones like new jobs or relationships. We jockey not just to possess those things but to show them off, and the best show-offs are exalted with little blue check marks next to their names and a million jealous followers.

This cycle of mimetic exhibitionism holds even for metaphysical things like moral values, which in a world colonized by capitalism have become a wearable commodity. The “social justice warriors” strut their wokeness like so much jewelry via the newfound pastime of online virtue-signaling. Whatever society values, whether Cartier or intersectionality, we want to be the celebrity endorser who wears the alluring bauble with graciousness and cool. The Facebook congressional hearings have us fixated on the Trumpian elements of the social media brouhaha, but in non-election years, it’s the mimetic Kardashian element that keeps us glued.

The constant mimetic jousting in society creates tensions, which brings us to the second Girardian contribution: the scapegoat. The original narrative comes to us from Leviticus, where on Yom Kippur the high priest would heap the sins of the community on a sacrificial goat, which was then expelled and abandoned to die in the desert, presumably taking the sins with him. Christians reprise the same symbology in the Christ figure: In Catholic liturgy, the priest intones “the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world” as he fractures the host. Other traditions have their own collective violence and repudiation: the pillorying of the early American Puritans, stoning in the Muslim world, or Amish shunning.

The point of the ritual is to cleanse the community via collective violence against or repudiation of the moral transgressor, irrespective of actual guilt. Girard hypothesized that this serves to unite different (and often hostile) elements of the community in their moral scorn for the scapegoat: The expulsion or stoning must be done with moral fervor, enough to (temporarily) paper over the community’s factionalism, much of it due to mimetic jealousy.

Which brings us (finally) to the Facebook hearing.

There sat the Harvard dropout and son of a Dobbs Ferry dentist who’d somehow managed to concoct the ersatz version of human social life, finally getting his comeuppance and being called to account. It was an exceptionally watchable and entertaining stoning.

Conservatives like Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) accused Facebook of being ideologically biased and one-sided. Diversity advocates like Representative G. K. Butterfield (D-North Carolina) lambasted Zuck for not hiring enough minority managers. Senator John Kennedy from Louisiana excoriated Zuckerberg for his indecipherable user agreement, demanding he write something in “English, not Swahili!”

Representative Diana DeGette (D-Colorado) asked basic questions about Facebook’s balance sheet and previous litigation, to admissions of ignorance from Zuckerberg, causing an incredulous DeGette to ask, “You’re the CEO of the company, correct?” (Zuck knew the answer to that one). Representative Billy Long (R-Missouri) even plumbed the tech titan’s ignominious beginnings by asking about Facemash, the classmate-hotness-ranking app that Zuckerberg had floated before Facebook, coyly asking if it was still in operation (Zuck smirked a “No, congressman ...”).

Most of our nation’s legislators did not seem even vaguely equipped to ask the detailed technical and legal questions necessary to dissect Facebook and its creator, but frankly, neither does most of the journalistic chattering class. I often serve as a source on the vagaries of Facebook monetization, and the politicians’ questions were no dumber than those I’m regularly asked by working journalists. But again, this is all the beside the point. The skill of the stone-throwers matters little to the spectacle.

So what sins are we self-servingly heaping on this poor billionaire’s head? What are we atoning for via this C-SPAN stoning? If only for a moment, let’s talk about Facebook users rather than Facebook.

When we the users are given a magical device that mimics our social interactions so well we ingest the simulacrum as real, and the device offers us a way to connect globally with anyone 24/7 in real-time, we don’t use the device to usher in a new and utopian age of human empathy and communication, as its creators so naively intended.

No. Instead, we use that device to rally ethnic cleansing, advance fantastical and self-serving political agendas, and otherwise undermine the very intellectual and scientific underpinnings (like a belief in objective, measurable reality) that made the magical device possible. Facebook’s news feed, or Google’s search ranking for that matter, is coldly aloof and amoral, and merely shows us what its creators think will keep us engaged. If technical disquisitions on Einsteinian relativity or humane reporting on the civilian tragedy of the Syrian Civil War drew more interest than celebrity wedding news and the latest in the ongoing Trump psychodrama, then that’s what would populate Facebook. Our feeds are ultimately a reflection of ourselves, not in the narcissistic way we intend, but as a collective human self-portrait.