Mark Zuckerberg delivered the commencement address for the class of 2017 at Harvard University last Thursday. It’s a tour de force in its synthesis of utopianism, globalism, cosmopolitanism and millenial narcissism.
Though the speech wasn’t overtly political for the most part, it was extremeley ideological. Listen to the speech below (1.5x speed or more is fine) or skim through it in the link above.
The world envisioned by Mark Zuckerberg is alien to me though we’re barely a year apart in age. Having spent over a third of my life working at Stanford University, I’m familiar with the leftist progressive worldview that he was steeped in as a child in New York and then throughout his 20s in uber-left Silicon Valley.
If he was honest about wanting to create a world where people had a “cushion” to take long shots in life, he’d fund experiments in basic income with his own $60+ billion. He’d rather skip that though and go straight to government programs that will gouge taxpayers to death and the economy to stagnation.
You’d think the owner of the most successful website in history thus far would understand that you try something on a small scale before you try to re-engineer a society. He does understand this of course, it’s what Facebook is all about. And despite his platitudes about “citizens of the world”, his appeals are too transparently self-serving to his business model to “connect the world” (by vacuuming up as much private data as possible and selling it to advertisers).
