Why do we refuse to believe Mark Zuckerberg can grow up?
Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t live in his Harvard dorm. He isn’t 20. His creation, Facebook, is a modern institution. It has changed. He, like anyone else, has probably changed. After all Bill Gates today isn’t the introverted, arrogant guy he was seen as in the 90’s and Steve Jobs is clearly a different man then the one who left Apple in the 80’s.
With Gates and Jobs it took the media longer than the public to realize the difference and we’re making the same mistake with the new kid on the block.
If you were to sum up our collective judgement, Zuckerberg is at best a social retard who sees his fellow men and women as 1s and 0s and at worst a cheat-to-win savant who will bleed his crop for all it’s worth, no matter the moral cost.
All, some or none of that might be true. All, some or none of that might have once been true. No matter that years have past since that meteoric rise. His life has no doubt shifted. Priorities reset. Maybe his mood has mellowed. Like anyone after a seismic shift in their lives, it is safe to guess he’s probably adjusted on some level.
Yet we stick to our caricature.
Most of these concepts are chronicled best in Ben Mezrich’s fantastic tome The Accidental Billionaires. As good as the book is it cleverly writes around a glaring hole: his main character didn’t give his side of the story. Considering all the primary sources, it is no disrespect to the talent of Mezrich or the honesty of those interviewed to say the recollections of those with axes to grind should be taken with a grain of salt.
Even if we assume the worst from Billionaires, we are admittedly looking at a year and a half window in the life of a young man in his early twenties trying to make sense of a greased-wheels joy ride paved with sick money, sleepless nights of coding, ego-ballooning success and dizzying expectation.
And lo, that’s Zuckerberg. We point to the chat transcripts of a 20-year-old to indict Facebook privacy policies made in 2010. Are they relevant? Maybe. Does coming to that conclusion automatically hinder the search for more relevant data? Absolutely.
It’s not fair, which it’s why it’s helpful to believe Zuckerberg is selfish, greedy putz. This way, he deserves our prepackaged scorn.
But maybe it’s not so cut and dry. Maybe, it’s complicated.
Justin Robert Young is the co-host of the NSFW Show on the TWiT Network. He is also a founding partner of Blurbtastic.com. His personal blog can be found at JustinRobertYoung.com.
