Facebook blows out 20 candles. And now Mark Zuckerberg “controls” a third of the world’s population with Instagram and WhatsApp
It was February 2004 and the new millennium had just passed. There had not been the space revolution predicted in films like “2001: A Space Odyssey” by that brilliant and visionary director Stanley Kubrick but nevertheless the technology was making giant strides: mapping the human genome, for example, but also and above all the development of Internet which had timidly come to the attention of the first hackers in 1994 but only with the new millennium did it acquire its full technological maturity. One of the products of the Internet was the Web and one of the products of the Web was social media.
Mark Zuckerberg (born in 1984 in White Plains, New York), a Jewish boy who studied at the prestigious Harvard University (Boston, Massachusetts, USA) and affiliated with the Jewish brotherhood Alpha Epsilon Pi, had just had a brilliant idea and that was to put a website online initially called “TheFacebook” and then “Facebook” (FB) which featured photographs and other information of the students; it was the digital version of a paper product produced by American universities to allow freshmen to socialize.
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In Italy FB it only arrived in May 2008, the time to cross the ocean on a journey still required by technology. After 20 years, Facebook is a global reality that has more than 3 billion users who exchange information and dialogue incessantly every month. His site is the third most popular in the world, after Google e YouTube. In reality, Zuckerberg had started with another website, “Facemash” something similar but cruder than FB, so much so that the University Council was about to expel him for violating privacy.
For the young geek they were difficult but adrenaline-filled times so much so that he said to Priscilla Chan, who would become his wife: “I had just launched Facemash and the Council wanted to see me. Everyone thought I was going to get kicked out. Priscilla and I met in line for the bathroom. I turned and told her: they’ll kick me out in three days, so we have to get out as soon as possible.”
Zuckerberg then he improved his product until the launch in 2004 and since then it has been a progressive growth until FB has become a sort of Second Reality, populated by our Avatars, digital souls in search of physical bodies. Along the way, Zuckerberg lost many of his collaborators. His Multiverse linked to Virtual reality it struggles, overtaken by other technologies, but the visionary dream of “uniting the world“, of being a “new demiurge” is intact, it is still there.
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Zuckerberg over time he also understood that MessengerFB’s original communications system, couldn’t compete with WhatsApp and so he bought it as he bought it Instagram. Now these two products represent the source of greater satisfaction, including financial, for the former American prodigy but FB is still his favorite creature to which he is most attached.
The success of its technology was also due to the far-sighted gaze of technology investors such as Elon Musk, who believed in the project right from the start. Now a new era has begun, that of Artificial intelligencewhich is also infiltrating the Socialif only as a “guardian” of the politically correct. As in every technology there is also a more disturbing side that awaits a New Ethics.
Almost half of the world‘s population is connected to FB in a sort of Other World or Simulacrum which however has only one unelected emperor, Mark Zuckerberg which thus bypasses democracy and which can already guide and influence the destinies of the world. With just one click, from the swimming pool of one of its wonderful villas.