February 4, 2004 was a banner day for kittens and narcissism when a nerd from White Plains, New York opened a social internet network out of his Harvard dorm room, making today
NATIONAL FACEBOOK DAY!
That nerd was Mark Zuckerberg, who we have made an irritating boy billionaire by joining Facebook and elevating time-wasting to epic dimensions. Originally an in-school network for Harvard students, it soon spread to other schools, then the world, gathering over 3 billion users in 70 languages.
In 2013 Zuckerberg took the company public and became instantly worth $15 billion. Just 41 and now worth $229 million, Mark Zuckerberg seems destined to hang around as a public figure due to his great wealth, not his great ideas.
Unlike his productive and creative predecessors in the Instant Boy Billionaire Club, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, Zuckerberg had only the one great idea, but it was a beaut, giving him a life of almost unfathomable wealth and enough time on his hands to dabble in fascist politics, then change his mind completely and decide to give away most of his money to good causes and learn to give a crap about the other guy before changing his mind about that too, then getting caught selling our personal information to predatory corporations, then involving himself in toxic election-tampering, fascism and toxic masculinity, further obscuring just who is the real Zuckerberg.
If we weren’t so busy hooking up with people with whom we hadn’t bothered to keep in touch for decades, posting pet videos and food photos, making political pronouncements and denouncing cancer, we might be intrigued by the girlish Mark Zuckerberg’s spiritual odyssey, his creepy robotic features and series of bad haircuts. But probably not. The man seems determined to remain the least interesting celebrity ever, as personality-free as the algorithms he put in charge of public morals on Facebook.
•Suggested Activities: Being in the right place at the right time, liking, sharing.