Mark Zuckerberg has done more harm to the human race than anyone his age.

I see Zuckerberg as Big Brother. He has the power to know what we think, how we feel, and what we like. Every click on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp? feeds into the endless sea of data he has already collected from us. Every day, his "gift" of convenience lures us into giving him more information about ourselves. As he continues to collect our data, he continues to gain access to our pasts, presents, and futures. He continuously strengthens his power to understand how our thoughts and beliefs have evolved, and how they will continue to evolve.

As someone who has given so much information to Facebook, WhatsApp? and Instagram throughout my lifetime, I believe that Zuckerberg harmed the human race by stripping it of its humanity. What makes our race human is its composition of individuals, who regardless of being physically controlled, have always found refuge in their own minds. No man, even the most powerful ruler could have full access to the continuous flow of someone’s thoughts. Gandhi was aware of this truth when he stated, "You can chain me, you can torture me, you can even destroy this body, but you will never imprison my mind." Gandhi knew that despite being physically controlled, he could NEVER be stripped of his exclusive access to his “self”. But Zuck. Zuck could be said to have done what many vicious tyrants before him have failed to do, even with the most sophisticated torture methods. Users of his products can no longer seek refuge in their own minds. Their thoughts no longer belong exclusively to them but are appropriated by a superstructure (a.k.a. ZUCK) that becomes perpetually more omniscient at the cheap cost of everybody's individualities.

Yet, tyrants usually have the power to impose their will on their subjects - but people like me have “submitted” to Zuckerberg voluntarily, for the consideration of convenience. So maybe, the harm he has caused is not linked to his power or “tyranny.” While he could know my thoughts if he wanted, he has never actually used such knowledge to control me. Frankly, Zuckerberg does not care about me. He doesn’t know or care about my name, my birthday, my thoughts, my ambitions, my beliefs, what I do in my free time, my religion, or my individuality. He could control me if he wanted to, but he does not seem to be in search of power – at least the power that controls us.

Hence, some believe Zuckerberg has harmed the human race by empowering humans to harm one another (rather than harming it through his own power). Zuckerberg's introduction of a social network like Facebook enabled the emergence of a dual dynamic of mass sharing and trivialisation. The first dynamic involves the immediate and mass sharing of “fragments of life”, the creation, behind a screen, of an online persona that we develop and embellish as we please, in the manner of The Sims for example, and the “romanticization” of said lives. In other words, the possibility of being, or pretending to be, someone completely different behind our screens, including who we want others to see us as. The second dynamic involves the trivialization and encouragement of such sharing of information, to the point of numbing or even annihilating our ability to ask ourselves, before pressing the “post” button, i) whether it's normal for the Internet world to have access to fragments of our lives, and ii) who “the Internet world” really is. This dual dynamic has created an extremely powerful and dangerous ouroboros, fuelled by both the desire to exist, when we post, and to know, when we consume. It doesn't matter what we post, as long as we post, because if we post, we exist. Likewise, it doesn't matter what we know, as long as we know, because if we know, then we're relevant - and if we're relevant, then we exist. Zuckerberg has given humans a simple, effective, comfortable and seemingly free way to spy on everyone, for the modest sum of being spied on in return, by other platform users, governments, Zuck, his companies and his customers. But since Facebook/Instagram is not advertised as a social network for spying or stalking, we sign up without thinking about what we're giving up but rather we are attracted by the promise of what we stand to gain: existence and knowledge. Even if it's a rubbish existence and rubbish knowledge, and even if our personal information is worth its weight in gold. It may be too late to turn back the clock, but the title of Michelle Goldberg's famous NY Times opinion piece sums up one of the greatest and most dangerous societal problems of our century, created almost exclusively by Zuck: “We Should All Know Less About Each Other” (Nov. 2021). Hence, it could be said that while the “ZUCK superstructure” has appropriated people's individualities to some extent, it is society, at every level, which continuously takes advantage of such appropriations.

Perhaps such different views exist as a result of different experiences with Zuckerberg. I view Zuckerberg as a tyrant and panopticon (Bentham/Foucault) because I gave him power over me. But unlike me, some are fully cognizant of the dangers of “surveilled reading/sharing”. Unlike me, some do not fear missing out (FOMO), and some refuse to conform to socialization’s shift from in-person, phone calls and letters, to behind screens. They can’t see Zuckerberg like I do, they can’t see him as powerful because he has (almost) no power over them. Instead, they view him as an enabler for people to become panopticons of each other – a facilitator for spying at every societal level with him as the middleman. He is not Big Brother, but he has turned the very fabric of society into Big Brother.

-- AbdulMerhi - 12 May 2025