Like Dr. Victor Frankenstein, Mark Zuckerberg has learned to have regrets. Until very recently, the Facebook CEO wouldn’t have seen himself as a villain in a horror novel but rather the hero of a happier genre, a classic American rags-to-riches story in the tradition of Horatio Alger. From his dorm room in Harvard in 2004, Zuckerberg created the outstanding economic success story of our century—a social media giant that now has more than two billion active users and a capitalization of $445 billion. Even if you don’t like the site, it’s hard not to be awed by the scale of its reach, which is almost without parallel in human history. As Max Read notes in a recent survey of the internet leviathan in New York magazine, Facebook users represent “the single largest non-biologically sorted group of people on the planet after ‘Christians’—and, growing consistently at around 17 percent year after year, it could surpass that group before the end of 2017 and encompass one-third of the world’s population by this time next year.”

Yet as it continues on its path to world domination, Facebook finds itself increasingly mired in political controversy—a fate it shares with other mammoth internet platforms like Google and YouTube. During the 2016 election these internet brand names no longer seemed liked neutral venues for sharing ideas; rather, they became hothouses of fake news and propaganda. Social media in particular has played a pivotal role in the still-developing story of Russian interference in 2016 presidential balloting. The latest revelations in that scandal indicate that Russian-linked anti-Clinton ads harnessed a Facebook micro-targeting feature to home in on key voters in the swing states of Michigan and Wisconsin.

Yet even before the specter of foreign electoral hacking surfaced on the site, critics have long pointed to another civic bug of our Facebooked lives: the self-reinforcing character of the site’s news feeds. By swamping users’ accounts with content tailored to their past browsing habits, Facebook has gradually come to quarantine users in news bubbles of their own making. And there’s no incentive for Facebook to puncture those bubbles, given the wider monopoly structure of the tech economy, liberal critics have argued. “Our lives are increasingly dominated by a series of big companies that have achieved something close to the state of monopoly,” former New Republic editor Franklin Foer explained recently in an interview for Slate. Foer noted that even politicians who have been traditionally friendly with big business, like New Jersey Senator Corey Booker, are now increasingly critical of the tech giants on the grounds that the logic of their business models distort and stunt our democracy.



Indeed, Facebook’s maximum leader has begun to register this critique in his own public statements—albeit in his own stunted and distorted way. In his 2017 message carrying his resolution for the new year, Zuckerberg acknowledged the mounting sense that Facebook is no longer purely a force for good. “For decades, technology and globalization have made us more productive and connected,” he wrote. “This has created many benefits, but for a lot of people it has also made life more challenging. This has contributed to a greater sense of division than I have felt in my lifetime. We need to find a way to change the game so it works for everyone.”

Like many of Zuckerberg’s statements, this was bewilderingly vague—a sign, perhaps, of the great social-media impresario’s near-total detachment from the conditions of public life in twenty-first-century America. In what sense is globalization a “game,” exactly—and who’s chiefly benefitting from all these storied gains in productivity and connectivity?