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Facebook angst for the millions

EDITORIAL | Joanna Weiss

THIS STORY APPEARED IN

February 10, 2012|By Joanna Weiss

WE ARE all Winklevi now.

You remember the Winklevi: Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the large-chinned, well-bred, Harvard-educated twins who sued Mark Zuckerberg over Facebook, on the grounds that he had kind-of-sort-of stolen their idea. Well, OK, we’re not completely like them - not in the sense that, when Facebook stock goes public, the court settlement they won could be worth $300 million.

But we are Winklevi in the sense that we’re on the outside of Facebook, looking in, with a tiny, nagging feeling that the balance isn’t right.

Hype about the company’s impending IPO was everywhere last week: Analysis of proper valuation, laundry lists of who will reap the most, from Zuckerberg to his early investors to the guy who took stock as payment for painting murals at Facebook headquarters. And with it, among a lot of people I know, has come a related phenomenon of Facebook angst, consisting of several concurrent realizations:

1) Some people are about to get extraordinarily rich.

2) This group does not include me.

3) Why didn’t I see how much the world was going to change?

Plenty of folks, it turns out, have reason to feel left behind when a company like Facebook hits the stratosphere. There are analog people who didn’t anticipate the speed and breadth of the digital world. (As a newspaper-industry exile reminded me, the papers once did what Facebook does, just more slowly: People clipped stories, sent them to friends, discussed them in the coffeeshop. Old school!)

There are mid-career people facing the standard humanities-profession realization. (You love your job and work hard at it, but you don’t make much money. Does this make you noble, or a chump? Discuss.)

There are digital people who had good ideas, but not perfect ones — or perfect ideas with imperfect execution. (This was the plight of the Winklevi: Their idea for a Harvard dating website was Facebookish, but it wasn’t Facebook.)

And then there is pretty much everyone: Facebook’s 845 million users, who give the website our time and our personal data and our preferences and our attempts at clever prose, based on which Facebook has figured out how to make billions of dollars selling ads.

It’s a stunningly effective business model, which is why Zuckerberg and his employees are about to get so rich. And it’s not that Facebook users give away so much for absolutely nothing. For no money upfront, we get a powerful tool that we can use however we want: mobilizing world-changing movements, reconnecting with long-lost friends, stalking ex-boyfriends to see if they’ve gone bald.