By: John Naughton

Mark Zuckerberg will be hauled before Congress this week. He’ll apologise – but his company doesn’t know how to change its brand of ‘surveillance capitalism’

Ponder this … and weep. The United States, theoretically a mature democracy of 327 million souls, is ruled by a 71-year-old unstable narcissist with a serious social media habit. And the lawmakers of this republic have hauled up before them a 34-year-old white male, one Mark Elliot Zuckerberg, the sole and impregnable ruler of a virtual country of about 2.2 billion people who stands accused of unwittingly facilitating the election of said narcissist by allowing Russian agents and other bad actors to exploit the surveillance apparatus of his – Zuckerberg’s – virtual state.

How did we get into this preposterous mess? Answering this question requires an understanding of (among other things) the peculiar nature of digital technology, the ideology of Silicon Valley, the astonishing political naivety of Zuckerberg, the ethical tunnel vision of software engineers and – most important – the business model that has come to be known as “surveillance capitalism”.

A key factor was the astonishing capacity of network effects to facilitate monopolistic outcomes. Facebook is a closed private platform that was constructed on a public platform – the world wide web – which in turn was built on the open internet, a public facility created by taxpayers’ money.

It was created by Zuckerberg as a software application that enabled people to hook up with one another and share personal information. Because the underlying architecture – the web – already existed, and because the service it provided was free, it spread like wildfire.

And although it was not the first social networking application, it was more astutely designed and robust than incumbents such as MySpace and it eventually wiped them out. As it grew, the network effect kicked in – to the point where if a teenager wanted to get laid s/he simply had to be on Facebook. So in the social-networking market it became the winner that took all.

In the beginning, Facebook didn’t really have a business model. But because providing free services costs money, it urgently needed one. This necessity became the mother of invention: although in the beginning Zuckerberg (like the two Google co-founders, incidentally) despised advertising, in the end – like them – he faced up to sordid reality and Facebook became an advertising company.

Given that its users were generously providing all kinds of information about themselves (what they liked, what schools they attended, what they did for a living, etc) it was easy to assemble a detailed profile of each one. And this information could be used to enable paying customers (called advertisers) to aim commercial messages at them.

In this way, Facebook became a surveillance capitalist – deriving revenues from surveilling its users. And the more they “engaged” with it – the more time they spent on the site – the more “monetisable” data they generated.

This turned out to be a licence to print money and it made Facebook the sixth most valuable company in the world at one time. Zuckerberg’s programmers built a remarkable automated system to assist advertisers in choosing particular audiences and refining their messages – and in the process boosted their boss’s net worth to $62bn.

Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of all this is that Zuckerberg and his colleagues apparently didn’t twig that their automated system could also be used by politically motivated customers to direct political or ideological messages at Facebook users.

How else can we account for Zuckerberg’s air of outraged innocence when evidence began to appear in 2017 that this was precisely what had happened during the presidential election, and his slow and grudging acceptance of the awful truth which culminated in admissions of the extent to which Cambridge Analytica’s activities had undermined the privacy of up to 87 million Facebook users?

“We didn’t focus enough on preventing abuse and thinking through how people could use these tools to do harm as well,” he finally conceded last week. “That goes for fake news, foreign interference in elections, hate speech, in addition to developers and data privacy. We didn’t take a broad enough view of what our responsibility is, and that was a huge mistake. It was my mistake.”

Before we get carried away by this latest contrition fest, it’s worth remembering that this is par for the Zuckerberg course. There have been – by one count – at least 11 previous scandals involving Facebook, and in many of them the boy-wonder CEO has been trotted out to do his shtick. It’s got to the point where one can write the script. It goes: sure we screwed up; we’re determined to do better in future; but, hey, “life is about learning from the mistakes and figuring out what you need to do to move forward”.

As the Guardian’s Nils Pratley put it the other day, “This breezy I-promise-to-do-better mantra would be understandable if offered by a schoolchild who had fluffed an exam. But Zuckerberg is running the world’s eighth largest company and $50bn has just been removed from its stock market value in a scandal that, aside from raising deep questions about personal privacy and social media’s influence on democracy, may provoke a regulatory backlash.”

Kenneth Tynan memorably defined a neurosis as “a secret you don’t know you’re keeping”. The problem with Zuckerberg’s apologetic cant is that it serves to conceal the secret that he must know he’s keeping – namely that the root of the company’s problems, and the reason it can’t fix itself, is its abusive business model.

Facebook extracts the personal information and data trails of its users to paint virtual targets on their backs. And it has to keep increasing user “engagement” to justify its stock-market valuation (and maintain Zuckerberg’s net worth).

As a senior company executive, Andrew Bosworth, once put it in a leaked internal memo: “The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is de facto good. It is perhaps the only area where the metrics do tell the true story as far as we are concerned ... That’s why all the work we do in growth is justified. All the questionable contact importing practices. All the subtle language that helps people stay searchable by friends. All of the work we do to bring more communication in. The work we will likely have to do in China some day. All of it.” Yep: all of it.