Before you assume that Mark Zuckerberg and Donald Trump are polar opposites, look a little deeper.
When Zuckerberg said this week that “We didn’t take a broad enough view of our responsibility,” he said a mouthful. As far as was apparent to a casual observer, responsibility was the thing Facebook was positively dedicated to avoiding. “Move fast and break things,” is another quote the company is famous for, and while the presumption in tech is that breaking things is fun and worthwhile, it is sometimes worth asking, which things? Responsibility itself seems to have been one of the things that got broken.
President Trump has made a career in both business and politics staying one step ahead of being responsible for anything and, why look, he has moved fast and broken many things, too!
And what responsibilities could Facebook have been trying to avoid? A lot. The business plan looks simple. Monopolize social media onto the Facebook platform, hence avoiding the responsibility of dealing with direct competitors. Don’t pay contributors for the content of your platform, avoiding the responsibility of . . . paying people for content! Harvest people’s personal information and sell it, but don’t take responsibility for who buys it or what they do with it — up to and including possible foreign manipulation of U.S. elections. Oh, and don’t pay people for their personal information, either. Develop your platform as a source of news, but don’t take responsibility for the accuracy of it. And make sure no one else steps in to take responsibility for that either. And avoid paying for that too. Don’t take responsibility if you contribute to the degradation of news generally, or people’s understanding of facts or sources, or any public consequences that flow from it.
That is a Trumpian level of responsibility-avoidance, and it’s a marker of our national character in a tech-dazzled age. Some things actually do matter, and it matters a lot if they get broken — and yes, someone is responsible. Zuckerberg apologizes and Trump doesn’t. But responsibility goes beyond words and includes what you do about it. Zuckerberg has a history of quick apologies. This time he added, “I am responsible for what happens here.” We’ll see. We’ve seen what it has meant so far.
One more thing Zuckerberg has avoided responsibility for is deliberately engineering the platform for addictive attention, which has resulted in depression and other psychological problems among heavy consumers. And that’s just one more thing Facebook shares with Trump in this supine new world.
