Mark Zuckerberg: Building Global Community

Would you want to be able to change your brain so that you can productively work 70 hours per week? I wouldn't - it'd quickly become the standard against which you're measured, while the rewards for passing the test stay about the same.

There's a similar argument to be made for being able to share your life on facebook - it displaces alternative interpersonal interactions, so you have the same amount of human connection except with your social graph sold to marketers.

Quitting Facebook doesn't effectively prevent it from affecting you and your social network.

Gotcha, thanks for clarifying! That's not what I see; I'll try to figure out why that happens.

To the upper classes, Globalism means the ability to invest in and control labor and material, internationally, for their own benefit. The objective being if the upper classes in multiple countries have their economic livelihoods intertwined, then stability is improved for all. The upper classes have a motivation to provide security for their progeny, so they tend to erect walls to technological progress and form monopolies and oligopolies. As we all know, the first generation builds the business, second generation runs it, and the third ruins it; this is a constant for small businesses and huge organizations. The best solution that has been found is to produce a system of elite schools and elite jobs where the working class could never hope to enter due to the expense.

Due to this, you end up with conflicting viewpoints between upper classes in different countries being resolved on the back of the market. What the working class see's is a system that, on the outside, looks fair, but once you delve any deeper than the surface, you realize it's a system of men not rules; the IRS tax code, for example, cannot be understood by one person, it can only be understood and executed upon by an organization. That's the point of many laws, and how arbitrage is executed against individuals.

As one example of this; I once interviewed at a company named Catamaran, who's entire existence was based upon taking complex contract terms for prescription drugs and lining them up with insurance plans. We've got a medical industry, insulated completely from anti-trust law, producing a massive economic distortion from being able to do things that in any other industry would be criminal. In the middle of this industry, there's a multi-billion dollar company that does prescription management largely for drugs that are developed to treat symptoms instead of resolve diseases. Thousands of people doing a largely useless paper shuffling job.

By contrast, I work for a tiny forging company, not even 100 people, and one of the products that company manufactures allowed an international automotive company to undercut the competition by enabling their autos to reduce fuel mileage by a substantial percentage and they are currently cleaning the floor with every other manufacturer out there. Similarly, we have other products for the energy industry that have were similarly innovative.

Ultimately, this system generates wage arbitrage as a waste product and wage arbitrage generates the erosion of culture as a byproduct; the upper classes increasingly chase values so abstract and divided from reality that have absolutely nothing to do with delivering real value to society or getting anything done. I make peanuts compared to what I could make working at a place like Catamaran, but on the same token, working at Catamaran, frankly like working at most silicon valley companies, wouldn't be honest or meaningful work. The company I work at right now has an authentic culture; Catamaran was, like most companies, a faceless mass with no culture (except for political correctness and other Marxist\leftist ideals which isn't a culture unto itself) to speak of.

Ultimately, globalism as it is right now is self-destructive; we waste our time running around in circles to provide a few elites job security. Technology, as the atom bomb taught us, is sometimes terrifying, and it's going to happen whether we are ready for it or not. Our best and brightest need to be leading, and society needs to have the freedom to choose its own culture and values. Without that, much like face-book today, you're a train headed on a predefined set of track for a cliff.

Change occurs in bursts and spurts. Perhaps we are seeing some backlash to the current wave of globalism. But do you really think the fundamental forces that push us towards globalism will stop?

As barriers to communication and travel continue to diminish over time, cultural diffusion will naturally increase, leading toward the major differences being smoothed over. We will become well acquainted.

Eventually, we will reach some point of "globalism saturation". But it seems to me that, currently, there is plenty of opportunity for continued melding of cultures and people groups. This is a natural process that is unfolding, an emergent dynamic resulting from our social nature and changing technological context.

We've barely begun, especially when considering future tech advances that will further reduce many of the artificial, anachronistic barriers between people groups. Most large differences in culture are just accidents of history and distance, not fixed, immovable characteristics.

Of course, we shouldn't blindly proceed. New, important concerns will spring up as the world gets smaller. Surveillance is one obvious example. There will be many more, and we will have to remain vigilant.