Postscript to Accidental Billionaires

Postscript: July 19, 2009 There must be something strongly seductive about Facebook that makes so many people use it. There is something quite obscene about the fact anyone or anything could be worth that much money (in the billions). What does it say about our society that such a thing can come to pass. It is not Zuckerberg or any other computer minds that annoy me. It is the fact that so much time is spent on Facebook with people doing mindless things, taking stupid quizzes that are truly meaningless. And many love to record minute details of what they are doing everyday. Perhaps, some day Facebook will provide important historical minutiae and insight into our ironic way of life in the beginning of the 21 Century. The bottomline for me is not that Facebook is worthless; there are some good things about it and people can use the mechanism provided for the betterment of society if they so choose and also as a catharsis to get things off their chest, that is not all bad but it is terribly self involving.

The networking part is more interesting. It can lead to complex social interaction that leads in many directions, hopefully sometimes in a constructive direction offering people a platform for ideas across borders and above the narrowness of place and inbred thinking. The final question is who really should own Facebook and get the economic rewards. Society could put all this monetary outcome to better use than one young man and a few corporate buddies. If there is so much money in these software programs and related invention perhaps, more entities i.e. States, Countries, Political groups, Networks of Labor Unions should hire people like Zuckerberg to create new products so larger and ever larger numbers of people might benefit from the rewards of these computer and internet creations and sensations. Of course, the people with the creative minds and nonstop working ethics need to handsomely rewarded for their creations but not given billions of dollars. One can say, that's America for you but not in my book. I wonder if one can really hire genius. They certainly seemed to do it during WWII to build that evil bomb (The A Bomb) of ours.


Sharon Raphael