Founder of Facebook and Meta. 1984 -
"He looks just like H.P. Lovecraft in most photos."
— wertperch
Mark Elliot Zuckerberg was born. Or, if you believe he's an alien robot, initialised. In any case, this event occurred on 14th May, 1984 in Westchester County, New York, to wealthy parents (his father Edward was a dentist; his mother Karen a psychiatrist) it became apparent at an early age that he was going places. Davis taught Mark the, um, basics of Atari Basic and it was quickly clear that the lad had a talent. His parents hired a software developer to continue this learning and by his early teens he'd' developed a program called Zucknet which connected computers at home and his father's office to enable messages to be passed between them.
The whizzkid wasn't limited to tech geeikness however. At Exeter Academy he excelled in languages, and is proficient in French, Hebrew, Latin, and ancient Greek. He also speaks fluent Mandarin Chinese, and delivered a presentation and Q&A at Tsinghua University in Beijing in Mandarin. Not only that, but beware engaging him in a fight, as he was captain of the fencing team at school. Beware of challenging him to a cage match; I'm looking at you, Elon Musk.
Harvard, Facebook and shit
Remember amihotornot? Whilst at Harvard he developed a similar website called Facemash. According to Zuck's roommate Arie Hasit:
"We had books called Face Books, which included the names and pictures of everyone who lived in the student dorms. At first, he built a site and placed two pictures or pictures of two males and two females. Visitors to the site had to choose who was "hotter" and according to the votes there would be a ranking. The next day, the head of the university denied Zuckerberg access to the Internet. People complained that Mark used their pictures without permission. He apologized and ultimately the university decided not to expel him even though there were columns in the campus newspaper that argued that what he did was completely improper."
Some of the history of Facebook is captured here already so I'll skip much of that. In brief, Zuckerberg started development of what was to become Facebook in January of 2004, using ideas garnered from the putative social connection site HarvardConnection, an idea launched a year earlier. From the outset, it's clear that he was capable of, and willing to, manipulate and deceive others. He had agreed to work with the developers to move their project forward, when it is (and I'm almost obliged to use the word "allegedly" here) clear that he had other motivations. The ethics of the early Facebook are questionable. To quote Cory Doctorow, it was founded to "non-consensually rank the fuckability of Harvard undergraduates, and it only got worse after that".
The developers had met with Zuckerberg in November 2003 to explain their plan and he was given the neccessary details to finish the HarvardConnection code. On December 17th they met again after Zuckerberg had apparently been working on the project, but not sharing what he'd produced. On 11 January, he registered the domain thefacebook.com and the rest is history. thefacebook launched on 4th February and the HarvardConnection team learned of it two days later. Did he lead them on in order to steal their ideas and get ahead of them? Yes. Maybe. Allegedly. The Harvard Crimson newspaper certainly thought about enough to launch an investigation.
However in all of this it's clear that Zuck had ideas to capitalise on the trust that people were placing in him and his website. As thefacebook expanded out of Harvard to other universities, and as it grew enough for Zuck to drop out and open offices in Palo Alto, he became involved with Peter Thiel and some other frankly shady people (venture capitalists). The Social Network film relates much of the legal and personal controversy surrounding this period, and whilst it may not be quite accurate in every case, it certainly shows him to be an acquisitive and uncaring lizard.
With more financial backing he was able to get Facebook growing fast. When it opened up to those outside academic institutions, people joined up in their millions. He was quick to turn Facebook from a social website to an advertising and influencing resource, and there has been much controversy surrounding the use of Facebook to mine personal data and sell profiles to advertisers (and possibly others). I'm not saying he knew about the collection of personal data by Cambridge Analytica, but he'd certainly created the ability for outsiders to mine data using information collected from Facebook.
No hero to privacy advocates
He's come under attack for enabling the manipulation of minor children, largely through Instagram, and has been heavily criticised for censoring his children's faces when posting on Instagram. He has no fans among the tinfoil-hat online privacy brigade, and in his testimony to Congress, confirmed that whilst his privacy was very important to him, he was unwilling to compromise on real changes to his business model to help others preserve theirs.
So keen is he to remain private that he's been known to purchase any properties surrounding his own. Clearly not a fan of being in the public eye. In Hawaii he built a six-foot wall about his 700 acre property, to the dismay of others on the island. Unable to fence of the beach (public property on the island) he nevertheless made it as inaccessible as possible to others. Then according to the BBC
…in early 2017, Zuckerberg’s lawyers filed lawsuits against hundreds of local Hawaiians who may own an interest in small pockets within his estate’s boundaries. The “quiet title” suits are used to clarify the often complicated history of land ownership in the state and can often force owners to auction off their lands. In certain cases, defendants are even required to pay the legal fees of the plaintiff – in this case, the world’s fifth richest man.
As you may have gathered, I'm no fan of the man. Certainly I admire his talent, his ability, his get-up-and-go. But his humanity is in doubt. He's effectively sold the souls of everyone who uses his products. See photos of him with his family and you'll see a truly human smile. See him testify to Congress and you'll see why many consider him a robot or alien lizard.
Clockmaker says I am disappointed that in Mark Zuckerberg you did not mention his weirdly translucent, gelatinous-seeming axolotl skin. That's his most inhuman trait!
Includes some history pre-Facebook
Iron node 14
$ xclip -o | wc -w
1064