We Can’t Outsource Social Change: Why Mark Zuckerberg’s “Altruism” Should Have Us Worried

Like half the people in your Facebook feed, Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan have just welcomed their firstborn. But unlike most new parents in your Facebook feed, they’ve used this occasion to announce, in a lengthy open letter to their new daughter Max (short for Maxima), the launch of the philanthropic Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

Over their lifetimes, the new parents will fund various causes involving “personalized learning, curing disease, connecting people and building strong communities” by donating 99% of their Facebook shares – currently worth about US$45 billion.

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is pretty vague and diffuse so far. And troublingly, it’s expressed through the ‘frictionless’ ideology of Silicon Valley entrepreneurship that describes the deliberate ‘disruption’ of regulatory practices as clever, virtuous innovation. But in practice, the growth of the entrepreneur class comes at the expense of the most socially vulnerable.

We shouldn’t be putting capitalists in charge of social change, no matter how idealistic the capitalists, and how much social good they actually achieve with their billions. Instead, we should demand a polity where all citizens have both agency and accountability.

It shouldn’t be just your fame and fortune – or your adherence to entrepreneurial philosophies that further oppress the poor – that drive your ability to change the world. For all their flaws, democratically elected governments still possess the best mechanisms for accountable, equitable social change.

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American Philanthropy Robs From The State

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is notable because of Zuckerberg’s relative youth (he’s only 31) and the vast size of the donation, which eclipses previous record philanthropic donations by Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal (US$32 billion), Bill and Melinda Gates (US$28 billion) and Warren Buffett (US$8.3 billion).

In 2010 Gates and Buffett launched The Giving Pledge, a campaign to encourage epic philanthropic gestures among the super-rich. More than 130 billionaires – including Australian mining magnate Andrew ‘Twiggy’ Forrest – have so far heeded the clarion call to give away their fortunes. But is it really social responsibility driving this sweet charity… or something more venal?

The American non-profit sector has always disproportionately shouldered responsibility for social welfare, whereas in Europe it’s traditionally handled by the state. In part, this is because the American rich get tax breaks to lock their wealth away in complex non-profit trusts and foundations, rather than paying the income and estate taxes required to fund government social policies.

This means that welfare spending and the establishment of social institutions – which should be part of the democratic apparatus – are increasingly being surrendered to the personal whims of wealthy individuals.

As German shipping magnate Peter Krämer argued in a 2010 interview vocally opposing the Giving Pledge: “It is all just a bad transfer of power from the state to billionaires. … What legitimacy do these people have to decide where massive sums of money will flow?”

In Australia, philanthropy has historically been discreet and private. But that’s changing – public ‘mega-gifting’ is becoming a trend here, too. Dick Smith, who once donated $4 million to the Salvos in order to avoid being on the BRW Rich List, says he finds billionaires “disgusting” and says they should “rack off” if they refuse to pay higher taxes. Yet he supports the Giving Pledge as an alternative to paying tax.

We should be wary of greeting grand, public philanthropic gestures with joy and gratitude, because they’re never as altruistic as they seem. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative isn’t even registered as a charity – so it’s free to spend its tax-sheltered funds on private, profit-generating investments. And in America, philanthropy has historically operated as a PR fig leaf for capitalists’ bad behaviour – which Zuckerberg should know, as his previous foray into educational funding was deliberately timed to mitigate the bad press from the film The Social Network.

The robber barons of the 19^th-century Gilded Age ruthlessly plundered resources that really belonged to the entire nation. What they went on to ‘give back’ could never truly compensate for the damage their exploitative practices had wrought to America’s environmental and social fabric. Middle-class progressive philanthropists dabbled in redressing social ills in the early 20^th century, but it took the interwar political agitation of the organised working classes to force the state-sponsored reforms of the New Deal.

Now, when we think of names like Andrew Carnegie, Andrew Mellon, James Buchanan Duke, John D Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt and JP Morgan, it’s as the benevolent founders of universities and cultural institutions. Are we already forgetting the kind of capitalist Mark Zuckerberg is?

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Facebook Shouldn’t Get To Be A Kingdom

No warm and fuzzy sentiments about shared humanity can disguise the staggering wealth, power and influence Max Chan Zuckerberg’s parents wield. It’s terrifying. If Zuckerberg decides to exercise his philanthropic power in the same way he operates Facebook, there’ll be plenty of strings attached for the recipients of his largesse, while he reserves complete impunity for himself.

I scrolled through the first 800 of the 97,000-odd comments Facebook users have so far left on Mark Zuckerberg’s open letter. It was dispiriting. Not just the blue-ticked platitudes by celebrity Facebookers including Melinda Gates, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Shakira and Martha Stewart. Much further down in the thread, ordinary Facebook users were offering earnest, humble congratulations, with personal stories and photos of their own kids. Except for a few deadset legends.

It’s disquieting how many Facebook users referred to Max Chan Zuckerberg as “Princess Max”, seamlessly shifting our emotional loyalty from the old royalty to the new. We’re King Mark and Queen Priscilla’s deferential peons, grateful to pour our affective labour into his backlit Kingdom of Facebook… an empire whose borders King Mark is ambitiously seeking to expand. “I will continue to serve as Facebook’s CEO for many, many years to come,” he threatens in the open letter.

“Can we connect the world so you have access to every idea, person and opportunity?” the Chan-Zuckerbergs rhetorically ask their daughter. “Can we cultivate entrepreneurship so you can build any business and solve any challenge to grow peace and prosperity?”

It’s their money, so they can spend it on the values they hold dear. And that’s precisely the problem. Should we harness sweeping social change to a digital imperialist’s ideas of connectivity and entrepreneurship? Let’s face it: Zuckerberg is not talking about unionism here, or other grassroots forms of political solidarity and resistance.

King Mark’s long-term vision is for Facebook to become the interface for all everyday social interactions: a realm without end, in which everyone’s most intimate moments are published and sold to advertisers. As journalist Dave Pell has noted: “by the time [Max is] old enough to read, the line between our public and private lives will be so blurred that this article will make no sense at all.”

And while Zuckerberg is happy for his business to be intimately enmeshed in everyday life, Facebook has none of the reciprocal responsibilities of fair governance. As feminist commentator Clementine Ford recently wrote, “Facebook’s methods for responding to abuse are useless, and the company has made it pretty clear that their scope for community standards lies squarely on the side of free use of sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic and ableist slurs.”

But it wouldn’t matter if Zuckerberg ran the most deliriously progressive wet dream of a social network, or if the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative goes on to improve the lives of millions. The basic fact remains that under capitalism, wealthy individuals are accountable to nobody. And any social change they bring about is meaningless – and even fascistic – if it impedes the political agency of poorer individuals by evading the structures and mechanisms of the democratic state.

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Mel Campbell is a freelance journalist and cultural critic. She blogs on style, history and culture at Footpath Zeitgeist and tweets at@incrediblemelk.