Not merely a villain but also a fool

Excellent essay by Cory Doctorow on how (and how not to) break up tech giants like Google and the walking anti-trust violation formerly known as Facebook. The opening passage fits nicely with our long-running tech messiah thread.

Science fiction has a longstanding love-hate relationship with the tech tycoon. The literature is full of billionaire inventors, sometimes painted as system-bucking heroes, at other times as megalomanical supervillains.

From time to time, we even manage to portray one of these people in a way that hews most closely to reality: ordinary mediocrities, no better than you or I, whose success comes down to a combination of luck and a willingness to set aside consideration of the needs of others. It’s easy to find such people atop our increasingly steep economic pyramid, but it’s very hard to find any who’ll admit it. There is nothing a successful person hates more than being reminded that “meritocracy” is a self-serving myth, a circular logic that says, “The system puts the best people in charge, and I am in charge, therefore I am the best.”

But while the powerful remain blissfully insulated from the bursting of the meritocratic delusion, public sentiment is increasingly turning against the ultra-wealthy, and in the most interesting way possible. Today, the commercial tyrant isn’t merely seen as a villain, but also as a fool – someone whose greatness is due to an accident of history and a vacancy of mor­als, not the result of a powerful genius gone awry.

It’s a distinction with a difference. If Facebook is Facebook because Mark Zuckerberg is a once-in-a-millennium genius who did what no other could, then our best hope is to somehow gentle the Zuck, bring him into public service, like a caged ET that govern­ment scientists either bribe or torment into working on behalf of the human race. That’s the constitutional monarchy model, the model where we continue to acknowledge the divine right of kings, but bind them to the material plane by draping the king in golden chains of office whose ends are held by an aristocracy that keeps the monarch from getting too frisky.

But if Facebook is Facebook because Zuck got lucky, if he just combined cheap capital with regulatory tolerance for buying out the competition and building a legally impregnable walled garden around his users, then we don’t need Zuck or Facebook. There’s plenty more where he came from, and all we need to do is withdraw the privileges that regulatory forbearance granted him. That’s the republic model, where we get rid of the king and govern ourselves.