The Real Facebook Revolution

The best thing ever written about Facebook was probably a single line in Lawrence Lessig’s review of The Social Network: “What’s important here,” Lessig says, in his characteristically vehement way, “is that Zuckerberg’s genius could be embraced by half-a-billion people within six years of its first being launched, without (and here is the critical bit) asking permission of anyone.”
To understand what Professor Lessig means—and to understand, by extension, what “revolution” might entail here in America—we have to forget, for a moment, our gripes with Facebook as it currently exists. In fact, forget everything you’ve ever read about the problems of the Web—about “the shallows,” “the daily me,” the “death of journalism,” and “digital Maoism.” And forget, while you’re at it, your own sneaking suspicion that your life, having become much more connected, is not so much more fulfilled.
Even if valid, these concerns miss the point. If Facebook is “revolutionary,” it’s not because of its technology. Alarmists forget that technology has always been accused of fragmenting our minds and pulverizing our communities. It was Karl Marx in the 19th century, after all—not Steve Jobs in the 21st—who said of modernity, “all that is solid melts into air.” Boosters will point out that Facebook helped activists make hell all across the Middle East. But let’s not forget that governments would continue to be overthrown, and we’d still be sharing information with our friends, even if we un-invented the Internet tomorrow.
What excites me about Facebook, then—what makes it “revolutionary”—is the story of its creation: the fact that this monumental public project was envisaged, executed on, and scaled to epic proportions “without asking permission of anyone.”
Facebook is used by more people every day than there are citizens in America, and yet unlike other basic infrastructural tools—unlike the postal service or the highway system—Facebook was not created by committee. No powerful person granted Zuckerberg imprimatur to begin; no agency mandated that we, his users, sign up; and no one (not even the Winklevosses’ lawyers) could stop him once he started. The manic energy and ruthless ambitiousness of the marketplace, of Harvard’s campus, of a free and uncontrolled Internet, were brought to bear on the creation of a vital public institution, by a dorky kid the same age as the writers of this magazine. This could be the slogan for a renascent activist class in America: “launched without asking permission of anyone.”
Most Americans will never understand what it’s like to be part of a revolution. The pathos of Tahrir Square are as foreign to us as are the pleas of Tom Paine, or the poetry of Gettysburg. Yet the Facebook story suggests that the capacity to create social revolution has never been more widely distributed, or more deeply enmeshed in our lives, than it is today. The conditions are ripe for a new revolutionary age in America. Yet the choice to become revolutionaries remains as always ours alone to make.