Day 18: Benevolence

The Chapter begins with Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg stating in the 2016 Social Good Forum that "Facebook has always been about building community and relationships and, in recent years it's become clear that a core part of helping grow a community is helping to keep you safe” Vaidhyanathan sees Zuckerburgs play towards services that the state and the government won’t provide on their own as a perfect distillation of the ideology of social responsibility. As Facebook realized it had built a large enough community of people from different cultures, ethnicities etc. Zuckerburg rightfully realized that Facebook had a growing responsibility of making sure the people within its community were safe from harm from others (an elaborate way version of a neighborhood watch program if you will), could mark themselves as safe to their friends and family who were also on Facebook. In my opinion, Zuckerburg’s comments on Facebook’s duty to its family of daily users should be no different from any other large corporation in the world.

Zuckerburg also stated that when Facebook had first started it was originally intended to be a platform that would help the world be more open and connnected, a goal to which Zuckerburg has arguably achieved over his extensive career as social media overlord. To this point, I would like to comment that I believe that in order for a buisness to be successful, the buisness A) has to address some sort of need that the public is in need of and B) must come from a place of love and passion from something the entrepreneur is passionate about. Think of a buisness today that is thought of as souless, a place where little to no happiness could ever be found, a place where dreams go to die, lost in a corporate nightmare; for naming purposes we will call this place McDonalds. When Maurice and Richard McDonald opened up the first McDonalds location in the year 1940, do you think that they had any idea that their buisness would be the soul devouring monster that it is today? Probably not, as it wasn’t until buisness man Ray Kroc took over the buisness and introduced ways of faster service that McDonalds began to take shape as the giant that we know it now. Think about it: like Zuckerburg, the McDonalds brothers originally started off their restaurant with the goal of serving people food at a faster pace then previously thought. They had no idea or intention of the consequences and responsibilities that the modern day McDonalds would have in terms of notifying people what they were actually putting into their bodies.

Later on in the chapter, we learn of something known as the ‘shareholder primacy’ which is the idea that businesses should be focused much more on the idea of creating revenue for themselves rather than creating their company for the betterment of themselves. Adolfo Berle, a supporter of this theory argued that “if we look to companies to fight societal ills , we grant them too much power and influence, and the glow of benevolence might shield them from power and scrutiny.” (114). What Berle seems to be arguing is a classic argument of the 1% vs the 99%, the bourgeoisie vs the proletariat, the idea that a small minority of the population hold the vast majority of economic power while the people below suffer in poverty. In essence this idea of shareholder primacy is directly attacking companies like Facebook before they even existed. Because Facebook has made betterment of society such a primary objective in it’s mission statement, it is one of the biggest online companies in the world and has the funds to do basically whatever it wants to do.