It was only a matter of time, really. Congress finally got around to sending a few pointed questions to Facebook. The next step in that time-honored minuet, of course, is a subpoena. Hey, it’s happened to a lot of people considerably more intelligent, more creative, more insightful, more honest and much, much, much more useful to humanity than the likes of Mark Elliot Zuckerberg. It’s happened to people with far more integrity, incredibly greater character, vastly superior talent, and decidedly more impressive imagination than he, to boot. But, on the other hand, Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is, as of today, anyway, technically speaking, a billionaire. In United States dollars, unfortunately, but nevertheless, some kind of billionaire anyway, and obviously superior, in a monetary sense, at least, to some rag-tag Russian, Hong Kong or Japanese billionaire, most of whom wouldn’t be real US dollar billionaires if you did the math, of course; not to mention a Zimbabwean billionaire, who, not being a Zimbabwean trillionaire, may not be able afford to live in a house constructed by others, or even, for that matter, be able to feed his family.
And yet, on another hand (three or four hands being routinely permissible among Hindu deities, economists and Inside the Beltway Consultants such as Yours Truly), plenty of genuine criminals, egregious miscreants and totally despicable scum bags have also been dragged before Congress to be grilled to a fine toast over the last couple of centuries. That, as far as I’m concerned, gives me enormous respect for the Framers of the United States Constitution, who had the foresight grant Congress, in that document, the power of subpoena.
My guest this morning was one Trey Codepiece, who visited me on behalf of Mr. Zuckerberg, whom, Trey earnestly told me as he stood uncertainly in the center of my office, gazing at the furniture, is a bit anxious concerning the intentions of Congress.
“You’re supposed to know about this stuff,” Trey finally declared as he chose the chair immediately in front of my desk. “So Mark sent me here to ask you about it.”
“About what?” I coyly responded, being a fellow who charges by the hour.
“You know,” Trey replied with a slight tone of incredulity, “that letter Facebook got from the um… ah… uh…”
“The House Energy and Commerce Committee,” I helpfully chimed in.
“Yeah, yeah,” Trey nodded, “that thing. They asked a whole bunch of questions, you know, like… uh…”
“Like,” I suggested, “what procedures does Facebook have in place to detect or prevent third party applications that may breach the terms of its privacy policy?”
“Uh-huh,” Trey agreed.
“And,” I continued, “what kinds of information may have been stolen from Facebook users of third-party applications like Farmville, Mafia Wars and Texas Holdem. And whether Facebook notified users of security breaches, including the specific nature of the information shared without their consent. And what procedures does Facebook have in place to detect or prevent third-party applications that may breach the terms of your privacy policy. And to what extent has Facebook determined that data relating to minors 17 years of age and under were breached. And how much revenue does Facebook derive from deployment of third-party applications such as Farmville, Mafia Wars and Texas Holdem on its social networking platform, and…”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Trey interrupted. “A whole bunch of questions like that.”
“Eighteen of them,” I clarified.
“Sounds about right,” Trey conceded.
“So,” I discreetly inquired, “with all the money Facebook has, you can afford Ted Ullyot, the super lawyer. He charges even more per hour than I do, but here you are – Mr. Sugar Mountain has flown you all the way out here to Washington…”
“Who,” Trey demanded with an extremely puzzled look, “is Mr. Sugar Mountain?”
“’Zuckerberg,’” I informed him, “means ‘sugar mountain’ in Yiddish; also in German.”
“Okay,” Trey muttered, staring down at the floor. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means,” I shot back, “that at least he’s not named Lipshitz. So what is it that Mr. Ullyot – whose name I won’t explain – can’t do for Facebook that Mr. Zuckerberg thinks I can?”
“Well, uh… “ Trey mumbled as he scuffed his Nikes on my hand woven Oriental rug, “he… that is, Mark… well, I guess Mr. Ullyot… yeah… Mr. Ullyot told us about how Facebook had better answer those questions by October twenty-seventh like Congress says, ‘cause if we don’t, then the committee might subpoena him, and if Mark gets a subpoena from Congress, he either has to march up the steps of the Capitol in Washington and tell the truth about Facebook in front of the entire world and stuff, or else he has to take the Fifth Amendment and end up looking like Al Capone.”
“I am not a lawyer,” I cautioned, “I’m a policy consultant. But nevertheless, that sounds fairly accurate to me.”
“So then,” Trey slowly choked out, “we asked Mr. Ullyot what Facebook can do about all this, and he told us he’s an attorney, not a public relations expert. So we asked Elliot…”
“Eliot Schrage?” I asked, “Your vice president for public relations?”
“Uh-huh,” Trey acknowledged. “And he said… well, I can’t really repeat what he said exactly, but what he basically said was that he’s a public relations expert, not a policy expert. So then, we put our best technical staff member on it, and he did an Internet search on who’s the best policy expert in the United States, and he found you.”
“A reasonably smart fourteen year old could have done the same,” I noted.
“Um, in fact,” Trey confessed, “our best technical staff member is this, well, smart-[expletive] fourteen year old, anyway.”
“Do his parents know he works for Facebook?” I sought to confirm.
“Actually,” Trey confessed, “right now, he’s the only member of the family who has a job. Both his parents were laid off from SAIC. Mark likes him because he works cheap.”
“It looks to me,” I opined, “like the little brat should have a bright future in the IT industry. All right then – you’ve found me – the dog has caught the car. Now what?”
“Um, ah, er, uh…” Trey stammered, trying to collect his thoughts, “well… as a member of Facebook, I’m sure you understand…”
“What on God’s green earth,” I indignantly beseeched, “leads you to believe something like that?”
Trey threw me a completely bewildered look. “Like what?”
“’Like,’” I mocked, “that I am ‘a member of Facebook.’”
Trey’s chin hit the floor. “You mean, you’re not?”
“Exactly,” I assured him.
“But… but…” Trey protested, “everybody with a computer is a member of Facebook!” His eyes darted around wildly in a momentary fit of confusion, then settled intently on me. “Aren’t they?”
“Trey,” I gently probed, “do you know anything about statistics?”
A rather protracted silence ensued. After about ninety seconds, Trey replied. “A little, I guess. I mean, mostly, I’m like a Web designer, you know?”
“Of course,” I assented. “I understand. Look, you’ve heard of IQ, haven’t you? It’s a measure of intelligence.”
“Oh yeah, oh yeah, sure, sure,” Trey attested. “Mark’s always telling us how high his IQ is.”
“So you know,” I presumed, “that IQ is normally distributed – in a bell shaped curve, around the IQ of one hundred.”
“Oh yeah,” Trey responded, a small light sparking in his eyes, “sure, sure – an IQ of one hundred is normal intelligence.”
“Absolutely correct,” I averred. “Now, I’m sure you must also realize that because of that, fifty percent of the population has an IQ above one hundred…”
“Yeah, yeah, I get it…” Trey smiled with a self-congratulatory interruption.
“And,” I resolutely persisted, “likewise, by definition, the other half have IQs that are below normal.”
At that, Trey knit his brow in concern. “Half?”
“Of course,” I pressed on, homing in on my point, “that’s the nature of a normal distribution – half of the people are above average, and half of them are below average. But the ones who are below average, call them sub-normal, morons, cretins, idiots or just plain stupid – it doesn’t matter – if you ask them how intelligent they are, nearly all of them will say they are ‘above average.’ Which isn’t really all that surprising, because they all have IQs less than one hundred and, consequently, are way too dumb to realize that they’re actually not very smart. Get it?”
Trey considered my line of reasoning for another minute of awkward silence, then shrugged indifferently. “Yeah. So what?”
“So,” I explained, “once upon a time, only smart people had computers – scientists, mathematicians, engineers, statisticians, economists and the occasional genius artist or musical composer. They hung around universities, research institutes, conservatories, observatories, national laboratories and think tanks with other smart people and everything was cool. Then, as technology advanced, all those places where smart people with their computers hung out with each other got connected together with something called the Internet. And that was even cooler. Then a brilliant scientist at a place called CERN, over in Europe, invented the Web browser, and things became as about cool as they could possibly get – for about three years, at which time the entrepreneurs showed up and turned the Internet and Web into an obscene parody of itself. They did that by putting people with IQs of less than one hundred on the Internet and giving them computers equipped with Web browsers. What shall we call them, these persons with IQs of less than one hundred? Yes, some of them are, in fact, genuine morons, cretins and idiots in the classical senses of those words – others are just plain stupid, and no bones about it. For the sake of analysis, let’s just call them bozos. Okay then, right about 1995, here came the legions of bozos – each armed with a personal computer, an Internet service provider and a Web browser. And do you know, Trey, what bozos did with that technology?”
Trey, whose eyes had begun to glaze over noticeably, looked away from the picture window, where he had been staring out at the White House, and turned back to confront me. “Duh – what?”
“The bozos used their computers, the Internet and the World Wide Web to access pornography,” I related. “They used it to gamble in on-line casinos; they indulged their half-witted get-rich-quick fantasies at stock trading Web sites; and they spent countless hours watching videos of things such as bozos like themselves getting injured in the crotch doing asinine stunts, or poor unfortunate cripples in wheel chairs falling down escalators. Some of them – the ones with IQs between 85 and 94 – cooked up ridiculous fraud schemes, then began sending out millions, billions, trillions and finally quadrillions of e-mails touting them to everybody on the Internet. The intelligent people, who were still on the Internet, of course, gave it a name – “spam.” And today, it’s gotten so bad that ninety-nine point nine-nine-seven percent of all e-mail communications on the Internet are nothing but spam and responses to spam, which various authoritative studies have shown originate with the rest of the bozos – the ones with IQs below 85. But it got even worse, as bozos everywhere began to sell things to and buy things from each other on eBay, which evolved into the largest and most absurd yard sale in history, with millions upon millions of bozos auctioning off the worthless junk in their basements to other bozos, who would then, cackling with demented hoarder’s mania, stow that useless crap in their own basement until they themselves decided to sell it on eBay to another benighted bozo. And so forth and so on, ad nauseum, for Jesus Christ’s sake! But it couldn’t stop there, not by a long shot. No, there was Twitter, the answer to every bozo’s narcissistic fantasies, where each and every one of them could clog up the world’s digital telecommunications channels with tweets about things such as what their cat just puked up on the kitchen floor! But was that absurd, ridiculous, wasteful, exhibitionist, senseless, lamebrained, fatuous, gormless, mindless, bubble-headed, brain-dead, vacuous, witless and asinine enough? No! Because then, Mark Elliot Zuckerberg gave them Facebook, the clueless bozo’s ultimate delight!”
“Um… so… you don’t belong to Facebook?” Trey was still obviously having trouble grasping the concept. He gestured tentatively at the computer on my desk. “I mean, like, ah, you do have a PC…”
“It’s a workstation,” I corrected, “and it runs Linux!”
“Uh, yeah… okay…” Trey sighed. “So… um… what should I tell Mark Zuckerberg you think he should do?”
“In my humble opinion,” I advised, “Mr. Zuckerberg should find a tall object, such as the Willis Tower in Chicago…”
“Yeah?” Trey interjected, “and then what?”
“Go to the top and jump off.”
“So I should tell him,” Trey asked in a tremulous tone, “you told me that?”
“Tell him I told you?” I spat back contemptuously. “I’m telling everybody!”