Condemned to connection? Network communitarianism in Mark Zuckerberg’s “Facebook Manifesto”

Introduction

On February 16, 2017, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg published a roughly 6000-word open letter titled “Building Global Community.” The letter, addressed to “our community,” outlines Zuckerberg’s plans for Facebook’s future. At the time of our writing, a year later in early 2018, it might seem strange to be paying so much attention to this document, given that since its publication, Facebook has seemingly lurched from catastrophe to catastrophe and continues to have its central business model and its (mis)use of user data subjected to intense public, media, and political scrutiny and criticism (The Guardian, 2018). However, this article argues that the letter (hence referred to as “the Facebook Manifesto” or simply “the Manifesto”) was not really (or not only) about Facebook, but constituted a coherent political or more accurately anti-political (cf. Mouffe, 2005) statement about ubiquitous social media and the future of government in an era characterized, in terms of conventional nation-state politics, by a global turn to authoritarianism.

This article is organized into four sections. The first section outlines the context of the Manifesto by giving an account of the rise of network capitalism and its attendant spirit as formulated by Boltanski and Chiapello (2007). The second, central section then investigates the Manifesto itself, positing two predominant tensions that run throughout the text: first, in the definition of Facebook as social infrastructure and, second, in the definition of Facebook as community. The third section then turns to the question of politics, developing the argument that Zuckerberg deliberately or otherwise presented Facebook as the “answer” to authoritarianism and, even more generally, as the “solution” to the problem of government and politics themselves. In this sense, we argue that the Manifesto frames Facebook’s connexionism, as part and parcel of the third spirit of capitalism, or the projective city (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007), as an antidote to a global turn toward authoritarianism. Here, we evoke Japanese philosopher Hiroki Azuma’s (2014) reworking of Rousseau’s concept of “General Will” in the social media age, and we argue that one of the most dangerous aspects of the Manifesto is that it might be, within its own ideological framing, “correct” whether we approve of Zuckerberg, Facebook, and their particular economic and ideological motivations, or whether indeed the company rides out this wave of catastrophes to cement its position as the world’s largest online social network or collapses into MySpace-like obscurity. The fourth and final section concludes by suggesting why scholars should take the Manifesto seriously.

Connexionism, the Californian ideology, and anti-statism

McKenzie Wark (2016) argues that we might now be in an era that is no longer strictly capitalist and that information has already transformed production and class structure. While we would agree that this “connexionist world” (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007) is perhaps the most significant shift of the mid- to late-20th century, we still see the value in defining it as a form of capitalism, one that is characterized by increasing precariousness of labor and economic security as well as a rise in network theories, organizational forms, and technologies (see, for example, Andrejevic et al., 2014; Aouragh and Chakravartty, 2016; Arvidsson, 2016; Bilić, 2016; Couldry, 2015; Fisher, 2010; Mager, 2012; Servaes and Hoyng, 2017; Van Dijck, 2012, 2013). Boltanski and Chiapello (2007) partially attribute the emergence of network capitalism in the late-20th century to widespread critiques of Fordist capitalist structures as disenchanting, inauthentic, and oppressive. This critique had two primary claims: (a) that mass-produced goods erased individual uniqueness and did not allow for personal expression, and (b) that goods produced under the Fordist system could never be truly authentic, because workers were alienated from their labor. Firms commodified the former critique: they began manufacturing goods advertised as “authentic” and allowing consumers to express their individuality. In practice, this meant advertising that products were manufactured under humane conditions, to collect donations for philanthropic organizations, or were good for the environment (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007). In response to the latter critique, however, firms moved toward maximizing the purported freedom, autonomy, and creativity of workers. This produced a semblance of worker control over the products and exercise of their labor power. Specifically, management strategists of the time proposed that the Fordist firms of the mid-20th century should be transformed into “lean firms working as networks with a multitude of participants, organizing work in the form of teams or projects, intent on customer satisfaction, and a general mobilization of workers thanks to their leaders’ vision” (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007: 73). In the networked firm, work is seen to be less alienating and more creative, fun, playful, and individualized (Bilić, 2016; Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007; Fisher, 2010; Turner, 2006).

But with this shift in material organization came changes in the system of moral values and judgments workers mobilize to justify participating in capitalist structures. This justificatory apparatus—called the projective city under network capitalism—sets the terms for what constitutes success, which values people rely upon to make judgments, how they discriminate between good and bad behavior, which new roles are to be created and who should fill them, and which human attributes or characteristics should be deemed important (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007). In the connexionist world, the common superior principle, or “the principle in accordance with which acts, things and persons are judged in a given city” (p. 108), is any activity which extends connections in a network (referred to as mediating activity). Whether a person or organization is judged as good or bad depends on whether they extend a network or remain isolated. What is important for our discussion, however, is what is new about the projective city: it changes mediating activity from being a means to an end to being an end in itself. In this sense, mediating has become “autonomized—separated from the other forms of activity it [has] hitherto been bound up with—and identified and valued for itself” (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007: 108). This offers not only a set of justifications for which to judge individual actions, but a foundation for reformulating understandings of human nature itself: “in a connexionist world, a natural preoccupation of human beings is the desire to connect with others, to make contact, to make connections, so as not to remain isolated” (p. 112, italics in original).

In the projective city, people who embody the city’s values are mobile, engaged, flexible, and always looking for new connections. When they discover new information, they spread it to other members of the team, refusing to keep it to themselves and always putting people in contact with others. On the contrary, individuals who embody the absence of the city’s values are unadaptable, immobile, intolerant, local, and have little to no network ties, or at least ties that are redundant. These individuals “are threatened with exclusion—that is to say, in effect, with death in a reticular universe. They risk not finding a way to attach themselves to projects, and ceasing to exist” (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007: 111).

It is thus no surprise that the politics of this age are transforming based on the values and objectives of the major computing corporations that are central to this connexionist world. Those based in Silicon Valley in California remain predominant among these companies in their market capitalization and global online influence, although new challenges are emerging from very large Chinese and Indian corporations. In the early 1990s, the politics of Silicon Valley was dominated, at least in how it was perceived externally, by baby-boomer thinking, which contemporary commentator Erik Davis (1999) described as a “gnostic macho libertarianism.”

In many ways, California provided a unique incubator for this connexionist philosophy, in part due to the converging of New Left and New Right ideals. Near the end of the 20th century, California hippies and market fundamentalists came to be united by shared ideals of technological determinism and anti-statism (Barbrook and Cameron, 1996). Under this “Californian Ideology” (Barbrook and Cameron, 1996), the then still emerging Internet was understood according to not only its supposedly liberatory potential but also on a Manichean split between a controlling authoritarian government, which was to be mistrusted and resisted, and an informed new generation of computer users, who were staking out new territory on the “electronic frontier” (Rheingold, 2000 [1993]). But as Barbrook and Cameron (1996) point out, this frontier is not so much about building a new future as it is returning to the past, one characterized by Jeffersonian democracy, rugged individualism, and social segregation. In this sense, the philosophy was as much a restatement of American White settler values as the reflection of a new information and communication context.

Yet at the same time, this ideology masked a political economy which was dominated by US state military funding (Levine, 2018; Mattelart, 2010) aimed at continuing the project which Paul Edwards (1996) described in the context of the Cold War, whence it evolved, as the creation of a “closed world,” that is the entire planet as a surveillable, manageable space. Indeed, as Fred Turner (2006) has chronicled, the New Communalists of the late-20th century—a group which was vital to developing the Californian Ideology—emphasized a return to the land, building alternative communities that stressed authenticity, consciousness, creativity, decentralization, and dehierarchization at the same time they adopted the cybernetic and interdisciplinary language of the military-industrial complex.

Today, the key to platforms’ political and economic power is that they position themselves between users and as the foundation on which users and groups of users interact (Srnicek, 2017). This not only leads to monopolies—a result of what Srnicek (2017) calls “network effects,” or the tendency for platforms to become more valuable for users as the user base increases in size—but also to some companies occupying the role of gatekeepers. In addition, the combined transformation of state and economy has been characterized by Benjamin Bratton (2014, 2016) as the emergence of a new form of social, economic, political, and ecological life toward planetary computing. Bratton (2014) recasts Boltanski and Chiappello’s connexionist corporations further as platforms, that are “[n]ext to states and markets […] a third form, coordinating through fixed protocols while scattering free-range Users watched over in loving, if also disconcertingly omniscient, grace.” And one of the key ingredients of the connexionist economy has been the accumulation, analysis, and application of bigger and bigger data, so much so that Foster and McChesney (2014) and Zuboff (2015) have termed it “surveillance capitalism.”

However, as the Internet has grown, and the numbers of companies and people involved in its population, management, and construction has also expanded, so the politics of the Internet has become something less predictably “American” or “libertarian.” Nevertheless, the influence of this “utopian” period of Internet politics remains, seen both with happy nostalgia for a safer, more naïve time, and with a more jaundiced eye, rather in the way that hippy ideology of the 1960s was seen from the 1980s. And indeed, the analogy is a strong one: as the Internet has become moved from being the new frontier of capitalism to its sovereign territory, so its underlying economics has come to set the terms for its ideology and much the other way around.

The Facebook Manifesto

The context described above provides crucial background for understanding Zuckerberg’s Manifesto. First, the development of network capitalism and the projective city (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007) has generated a set of normative values and judgments which frame connecting, building networks, and sharing information as desirable, while isolation, rigidity, and immobility are negative traits which should be avoided. It has also redefined human nature as being primarily based on the need to connect, and the network as the most fundamental form of human organization. Second, the work of Barbrook and Cameron (1996) and Turner (2006) has shown how the New Left and New Right converged in the late-20th century around shared ideals of anti-statism, technological determinism, and the future as a return to the past. As we will argue in the remainder of this article, understanding these processes is not simply a historical exercise, because they continue to provide motivating logics for action in the future, to the point that in many cases their underlying assumptions have become common sense.

The Manifesto itself is a culmination—whether zenith or nadir remains to be seen—of a long process of transformation in the public rhetoric of Mark Zuckerberg and transformations in the discourse of what Facebook is, could, and should be. This transformation has been superbly covered by Hoffman et al. (2016) in this journal and we do not intend to repeat their full analysis here. We agree with their argument that Zuckerberg has shifted in his discourse; however, we would extend this to argue that the Manifesto represents the first full articulation of a further movement toward Facebook as a genuine platform in the way that Bratton has described. We would also argue that this is not simply a cover for simple exploitative capitalist motivations and that Zuckerberg’s argument should be considered seriously in itself and, as we will argue in the next part of the article, has implications beyond Facebook itself, regardless of whether the company prospers or is irreparably damaged by the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Indeed, as we will suggest, the Manifesto can be interpreted as an attempt to reassert the legitimacy of the projective city in the face of a global turn toward authoritarianism.

The Manifesto begins by stating Zuckerberg’s plans for the future direction of Facebook: to build a community that is (a) supportive, in that strengthens membership in institutions; (b) safe, because it prevents harm, helps during crises, and rebuilds afterward; (c) informed, in that it exposes individuals to new ideas; (d) civically engaged, because it encourages participation in political processes; and (e) inclusive, in that it spans to include individuals from many nations and cultures. Underlying Zuckerberg’s appeals to building global community are assumptions about the nature of networks and their role in human history. These assumptions exist alongside a vision for a community governed not by the state, but by a small circle of Facebook executives under the guise of “self-governance,” and where social programs are replaced by crowdsourcing and fundraising via social network ties.

We argue that the Manifesto can be understood as the interaction between two definitions of the site—Facebook as social infrastructure and Facebook as community—and what these definitions make visible and invisible. For example, at the most basic level, Zuckerberg makes Facebook visible as a profoundly significant technological artifact, and invisible as a corporate platform that influences user behavior. These tensions are navigated by (a) appealing to user’s concerns and critiques of contemporary economic and political institutions by creating a seductive image of natural human organization and (b) absolving the corporation from legal, social, moral, or economic responsibilities.

A primary tension that runs through Zuckerberg’s manifesto is between the founder’s mobilization of Facebook as a political infrastructure and the normative politics inherent in valorizing connectivity. Zuckerberg repeatedly invokes Facebook not only as an essential tool for bringing about a Francis Fukuyama–style “end of history” but also as neutral technology that has no agency or ability to influence the actions or behavior of users. Particularly, Zuckerberg repeatedly refers to Facebook as “social infrastructure.” This term not only implies that the social networking site is an autonomous technological structure that has no capacity to act, but carries with it connotations about being a public service that benefits all who use it, regardless of background or intention. Facebook as a social infrastructure is not only neutral, but it is a public good, a social service. The impact of this framing is similar to that of the term “platform,” as social media firms have embraced the label as a method for placating advertisers, evading regulatory authority, and attracting users (Gillespie, 2010). “Social infrastructure” accomplishes many of the same goals, with the addition of using language typically used to refer to public goods.

Framing the site as infrastructure also contributes to Zuckerberg’s recasting of human history as a story of increasing connectivity. As described above, the projective city redefines human nature as based primarily on the need to make connections. A consequence of such a redefinition of human nature is that it becomes possible to reformulate all of human history in these terms.

Zuckerberg projects backward the contemporary valorization of mediating activity to reconceptualize history as the gradual accumulation of network ties: he opens the letter by describing human history as “the story of how we’ve learned to come together in ever greater numbers—from tribes to cities to nations.” In defining Facebook as “social infrastructure,” Zuckerberg further makes the site commensurable with previous forms of human societies, which positions Facebook not only as the inevitable next step in the linear progression of human history, but as the culmination of centuries of network building. Facebook is the world’s first “global community,” the epitome of social infrastructure on a scale never before seen. In addition, this framing serves to distance Facebook from any competitors. How does a company compete with a global network? There is no possibility of building a larger network, or even a different one, if Facebook incorporates the entire Internet, or indeed the entire planet. In practice, we have seen the reality of this ambition with the controversial “Free Basics” product, which essentially sets up Facebook as a portal to the Internet for those in countries where access would otherwise be very limited but which, research has shown, has quickly come to be understood by its users as the same thing as “the Internet.” This is clearly something that Facebook has encouraged, given its ownership of the internet.org domain.

After establishing Facebook as social infrastructure commensurate with cities and states, Zuckerberg positions the firm as a provider of social services and public goods typically reserved for government agencies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). For example, the founder states that Facebook’s future goals include building “global safety infrastructure” which “prevents harm, helps during crises, and rebuilds afterwards.” Rather than rely on “traditional institutions”—membership in which Zuckerberg claims is declining—individuals should look to Facebook for needs normally met via social entitlement and welfare programs. For example, Zuckerberg (2017) states,

we’ve built infrastructure like Safety Check so we can all let our friends know we’re safe and check on friends who might be affected by an attack or natural disaster … We recently added tools to find and offer shelter, food and other resources during emergencies.

He goes on to mention Facebook’s role in raising money to help victims of the earthquake in Nepal and organizing blood donations in the wake of the shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, and that in the future, “there are even more cases where our community should be able to identify risks related to mental health, disease or crime.”

There are several interesting tactics and tensions involved here. First, Zuckerberg makes an explicit connection between the network structure of Facebook and the company’s capacity to provide social benefits:

the Facebook community is in a unique position to help prevent harm, assist during a crisis, or come together to rebuild afterwards. This is because of the amount of communication across our network, our ability to quickly reach people worldwide in an emergency, and the vast scale of people’s intrinsic goodness aggregated across our community.

By drawing legitimacy from network theories which argue that the most efficient and rational solutions emerge from the aggregation of many individual nodes into a network (Fisher, 2010), Zuckerberg frames the activity on Facebook as more organic than that with traditional institutions because it emerges from an amalgam of decentralized, nonhierarchical human activities (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007).

Second, by emphasizing Facebook as a network rather than a corporation, Zuckerberg frames the site as superior to existing efforts by governments and NGOs to prevent, aid, and rebuild after humanitarian crises. The attribution of Facebook’s ability to respond to crises to the network structure of the “Facebook community” is notable because it relies on different justifications than market-oriented logics. Rather than emphasizing the efficiency, rationality, and adaptability of corporations over public institutions, Zuckerberg instead opts to link the public good services of Facebook with “the amount of communication” across the site. As Fisher (2010) argues,

the significance of the digital discourse lies not in its overt embrace of free market ideology … [but] precisely in its rejection of ideology as such. The digital discourse strives to be precisely what a free market ideology, like neoliberalism, might have a hard time being—not an ideology at all. (p. 75)

Thus, the tension that emerges here is between making Facebook visible as public, social infrastructure and invisible as a profit-seeking corporation.

This framing is important for several reasons. First, it positions Facebook as the provider of social services typically provided by government bodies. Rather than running for public office—at least at the time of writing, we will return to this question below—Zuckerberg is generating and consolidating Facebook’s political power in an effort to reconstruct the company as the primary provider of social goods. This certainly helps compensate for, but also undermines, already fragile government social programs, which have been decimated by austerity measures since at least the 1980s. Second, by advocating for a shift in the provision of social services to a private sector corporation but not a concurrent change in transparency, Facebook will continue to profit from its image as a public service provider while keeping hidden the mechanisms through which this activity generates revenue streams.

The second tension builds on the definition of Facebook as social infrastructure in order to position the site as a facilitator of natural human interaction, keeping its profit-making activity invisible (Uldam, 2016). In order to reinforce the definition of Facebook as social infrastructure, Zuckerberg is careful to avoid indicating that the site is anything more than a simple tool, especially not a media company. For instance, he at one point states that “compared with getting our news from the same two or three TV networks or reading the same newspapers with their consistent editorial views, our networks on Facebook show us more diverse content.” In this case, our networks show us content; Facebook does not. The most Facebook can be said to do in this case is provide a platform for individuals, groups, and organizations to publicize their views and content. This turns Facebook into a “mere facilitator, supporter, host” rather than a “gatekeeper, [or] even curator” (Gillespie, 2010: 353).

Zuckerberg deploys this tactic repeatedly, particularly in his discussion about “fake news.” Rather than focus on the distribution of disinformation on Facebook, Zuckerberg claims the more effective option would be to increase the range of viewpoints available on the platform. To do this, Zuckerberg states that “over time, our community will identify which sources provide a complete range of perspectives so that content will naturally surface more.” Instead of focusing on banning misinformation, Facebook will focus “more on surfacing additional perspectives and information, including that fact checkers dispute an item’s accuracy.” The repeated use of the term “surface” is instructive here. Facebook is making invisible its editorial control and monitoring of content, downplaying its role as a media corporation. Instead, by framing the company as infrastructure that “surfaces” content, rather than editorializing, curating, selecting, or censoring, Zuckerberg is able to effectively avoid any responsibility for the content produced on his site. Such a position also enables him to avoid being subjected to the same regulatory control of other media outlets (Gillespie, 2010).

Zuckerberg’s definition of community also serves to hide the company’s profit motive. By invoking and reinforcing the assumption that networks are the most organic, natural form of human organization, Zuckerberg positions Facebook as nothing more than a facilitator of natural human interaction. To a certain extent, it is allowing users to be more human in that they can now make connections that previously were not possible. Zuckerberg defines the community built through Facebook as one of affinity. For instance, he suggests that

watching video of our favorite sports team of TV show, reading our favorite newspaper, or playing our favorite game are not just entertainment or information but a shared experience and opportunity to bring together people who care about the same things. We can design these experiences not for passive consumption but for strengthening social connections.

Thus, the most natural form of human organization—decentralized and nonhierarchical networks—is said to form through ties of affinity.

This is reflective of what Couldry (2015) calls “the myth of ‘us.’” The myth of “us” “encourages us to believe that our gatherings on social media platforms are a natural form of expressive collectivity, even though it is exactly that belief that is at the basis of such platforms’ creation of economic value” (p. 608). This idea that there is a natural form of collectivity that exists, that is consistent with human nature at the most fundamental level,

is particularly seductive because, on this story, media institutions, at least in their normal form, drop out altogether from the picture of “what is happening.” This myth offers a story focused entirely on what “we” do when, as humans like to, we keep in touch with each other. (Couldry, 2015: 620)

This myth is generated, at least in part, by Facebook itself, including in public relations exercises such as Zuckerberg’s periodic letters. It serves to make Facebook invisible not only as a corporation, but as any type of actor at all, creating a romanticized image of organic human interaction free from institutional pressure—the ultimate manifestation of human agency.

In reality, the creation of the image of facilitating natural human interaction forms the basis for Facebook’s profitability. As is well known, Facebook’s main source of revenue comes from advertising. But the company’s approach to advertising is quite different than many of the firms of the 20th century. Instead of altering individuals’ habits, Facebook “assembles micro-publics, not necessarily of individuals, but of interests, affinity and other expressions of affect that are tailored to a specific message” (Arvidsson, 2016: 9). But these micro-publics are not built on the actions people take in their daily lives; rather, they are built “on the ways in which they are related in the abstract data space that Facebook creates” (p. 9). Thus, defining communities as based on affinity is central to Facebook’s business model. In order to make this invisible, Zuckerberg generates a definition of human nature which holds networked forms of organization as the most natural and organic method for interaction.

Zuckerberg’s definition of community is also centered on the notion of inclusion. A preoccupation with issues of inclusion and exclusion plays a central role in the projective city (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007). As mentioned above, the person who embodies the negative qualities of network capitalism is separated from the rest of the network, remains in isolation, refuses to be flexible, and is generally immobile. One of the consequences of using inclusion and exclusion as barometers for equality is that it minimizes talk of exploitation, based on group- or class-based analysis (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007). The use of exclusion over exploitation has significant consequences for how Zuckerberg conceptualizes inequality. Because networks are visualized as nonhierarchical and decentralized, discussions of power differentials are notably absent from much of network discourse. Power might be associated with single nodes—perhaps someone who is an entrepreneur (Fisher, 2010)—but any group- or class-based analysis of inequality becomes difficult under connexionist logic. In class analysis, there is exploitation, struggle, and antagonism—words that do not readily apply in a structural sense to networks (Fisher, 2010). Instead, individuals are excluded, rather than exploited. The difference between these two regimes for understanding inequality is that the exclusion framework “permits identification of something negative without proceeding to level accusations. The excluded are no one’s victims, even if their membership of a common humanity … requires that their sufferings be considered and that they be assisted” (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007: 347). Indeed, the excluded become defined “primarily by the fact that they are without: without a vote, without a home, without papers, without work, without rights, and so on” (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007: 349).

By deploying the exclusion framework, Zuckerberg positions Facebook as the provider of social equality in that its focus is on including individuals and giving them a voice. He claims, for instance, that Facebook’s future focus will be on “developing the social infrastructure for community—for supporting us, for keeping us safe, for informing us, for civic engagement, and for inclusion of all.” Thus, users are without safety, information, and civic engagement—they are excluded, and require Facebook to provide them with the network ties that will bring them into the fold. Without an understanding of power differentials, antagonism, or conflict, misfortune can be resolved by simply including others, bringing them into a network, and providing them with that which they are missing. Facebook, being a “global community,” is uniquely positioned to accomplish this task. Thus, not only does Facebook generate a social imperative for its existence, but it also takes on a moral character in which those who oppose Facebook are denying individuals improved quality of life.

Facebook communitarianism versus global authoritarianism

Through a recasting human history as being based on connectivity, making Facebook commensurate with historic forms of human organization such as cities and states, and conceptualizing decentralized, nonhierarchical networks as the most natural form of human interaction and organization, we suggest that the Manifesto represents an attempt to not only capitalize on the normative values associated with the projective city, but to reassert the legitimacy of the city itself. This is done, in part, by using Facebook’s success as evidence for the projective city’s continued significance and fecundity. On this point, it is notable that Zuckerberg does not rely on market-oriented justifications for why Facebook can, and should, provide social services. Rather, he draws on broader connexionist discourses about networks and how they function, “naturally.”

Going further, one might argue that the Manifesto is a euphemistically expressed call for platform politics in a deeper sense: the replacement of nation-state governments per se and more generally to speak for ubiquitous social media as a new kind of economic, political, and social arrangement. Although Zuckerberg argues that Facebook aims to encourage and increase participation in political processes, at the same time, the Manifesto argues for the removal of so many things from the sphere of conventional government that it is hard to see exactly what kind of politics in the conventional sense it is really supporting. Beyond the Manifesto, sociologists should expect social media providers’ incursions into the provision of public services—such as in voting systems, healthcare, or mortgage loans—to intensify, whether the proposed provider is Facebook or not.

It is at this point that we turn to the immediate political context. As Murakami Wood (2017) argued in a recent editorial in a special issue of Surveillance & Society, the election of Trump and the seething hatred found among his supporters are part of a growing global trend toward a new authoritarianism. We live in ironic times. These technologies arose from American military projects that created a global system of surveillance containment that while ostensibly promoting democracy in fact often encouraged authoritarianism both in support of that goal and in opposition to it (Mattelart, 2010; Murakami Wood, 2012). Now democracy itself has become increasingly tied to a fundamentalist form of capitalism (Brown, 2015)—the redefinition of the state as an entity whose role is neither to protect the nation nor society but the market and more nebulous-related concepts like entrepreneurship and innovation. Surveillance here has a different function than in the period of Fordism and welfarism of the mid-20th century, “where surveillance in the social democratic model was designed in part to shield citizens from the negative effects of capitalism … [now] it was intended to protect capitalism itself from the negative reactions of citizens” (Murakami Wood, 2017). The connexionist world has thus generated both (a) increasing fears as Engin Isin’s (2004) “neurotic citizens” face the possibility that precarity might be permanent and global Western (and White) supremacy might be over, and (b) increasing control and surveillance where nation-states are still able to effect it, particularly at borders (Brown, 2010). In a further irony, already existing authoritarian surveillance states like Russia and China appear simultaneously as threat and example.

Zuckerberg released the Manifesto a month into what for many liberal Americans was a hitherto unimaginable situation: the presidency of Donald Trump. There had been other indications that the seemingly apolitical Zuckerberg had already been thinking more “politically,” with some commentators remarking on his very conventionally pre-campaign meetings with diverse groups of voters around the country as signs of presidential ambition for himself (Bilton, 2017). And whereas the likes of Peter Thiel had been quick to jump onto wagon to Trump’s bandwagon (Johnson, 2017), it was clear that for Zuckerberg, Trump represented something so beyond the pale that even he had to “do something.” However, the “something” was clearly not thought up simply in response to Trump.

Rather, if one understands the Facebook Manifesto, one can see that Zuckerberg appears to believe, probably genuinely, that his social network constitutes a preexisting, ready-made solution to Trump and authoritarianism in toto. As mentioned above, the Manifesto positions Facebook as the primary alternative to authoritarian rule by framing the most pressing current social problems as resulting from “movements withdrawing from global connection,” “divisiveness and isolation,” “polarized extremes,” and “sensationalism.” In a recent interview with Vox’s Ezra Klein (2018), Zuckerberg reiterated this position:

I think over the last few years, the political reality has been that there’s a lot of people feeling left behind. And there’s been a big rise of isolationism and nationalism that I think threatens the global cooperation that will be required to solve some of the bigger issues, like maintaining peace.

Because of this arrogant hubris, there is perhaps more than a degree of schadenfreude to be found in among observers, in response to what has happened subsequent to the publication of the Manifesto. ¹ If not quite yet a tragic nemesis, at the time of writing, there remained a still growing scandal over the links between Facebook and election manipulation in the United States and the United Kingdom involving SCL and its shell-company, Cambridge Analytica, and Canada-based Aggregate IQ (The Guardian, 2018). Ironically, this has revealed not just that Facebook may itself have been partly responsible for the election of Trump but has also cut to the heart of the company’s particular economic model, that social graph-driven variant of surveillance capitalism (Foster and McChesney, 2014; Zuboff, 2015). This revelation of the heart of Facebook has come as no surprise to some, especially to serious journalists and long-time academic observers of the company, but many commentators have produced wide-eyed and shocked op-eds about the supposed betrayal of Facebook’s original “social” purpose; these have often been ignorant and ahistorical even by the standards of contemporary hot-take churnalism.

However, the biggest danger in all of this is that Zuckerberg’s Manifesto is further ridiculed or forgotten altogether. Ultimately this is because Zuckerberg may be, at least in his own terms, correct. The Japanese philosopher, Hiroki Azuma (2014) has argued that while Rousseau’s enlightenment era idea of the “general will” was almost certainly wrong at the time and unworkable, it becomes actually possible in a more highly connected society characterized by ubiquitous social media use. In such a system, big data can be analyzed continuously in order to understand both broad collective and specific community. Thus, Facebook, as has become almost a commonplace observation, is perhaps the biggest and certainly one of the most creepily intimate and mundane surveillance systems ever established (Marwick, 2012). If, as we argued earlier, surveillance is one of the key characteristics of the authoritarian government to which Zuckerberg is (implicitly) contrasting the networked community, then one has to wonder what exactly it is about authoritarianism that concerns Zuckerberg. Is it simply a question of political aesthetics, that dislike for extremes (of any kind) and the fetishism of centrist, “balanced” politics, that characterizes the likes of Emmanuel Macron in France? In this sense, the Facebook Manifesto is profoundly anti-political in the way that Mouffe (2005) argued, and may be completely wrong in a world which is not already egalitarian and balanced but is quite likely to become true in an equally but differently oppressive manner because it aims at being both a ubiquitous data collection, analysis, and marketing device and a unifying form of social organization. With economic process remaining obscure to most, and with politics as they were lacking credibility, the General Will 2.0 represented via a Facebook model might well become a seductive and self-fulfilling prophecy in which members are trapped in their affinities and condemned to connection.

Conclusion

As we have argued in this article, the Manifesto mobilizes, and attempts to reinscribe, the normative values and judgments which constitute the projective city. This marks a dual move: Zuckerberg simultaneously (a) capitalizes on preexisting circulations of connexionist grammar, while (b) equating Facebook’s business model with the justificatory apparatus of the projective city, thus making invisible the assumptions about human nature and activity underpinning Facebook’s profit model.

Given what we have argued in this article, we conclude by encouraging scholars working at the intersections of platforms and politics to continue pursuing lines of research which account for the interplay of materiality, ideology, and power. What the Manifesto suggests is that Zuckerberg’s connexionist ideas about human nature, particularly when framed as antagonistic to authoritarianism, are co-constituted with the material structure of the platform itself. If the problem is isolation, then the solution is connection. If polarization is the problem, the solution is to allow individuals to curate their News Feeds so as to see less objectionable content (however, the user defines it). Thus, the normative judgments and political philosophy outlined in the Manifesto has material consequences for how users use and experience the platform—consequences which we have yet to fully grasp.

Thus, especially at this historical juncture, it is essential that we, first, make visible that which Facebook would rather keep invisible, such as how it curates, selects, and censors images and information, and the labor which goes into moderating content. But this also means making absences visible as well, such as the lack of institutional entitlement and welfare programs which makes Facebook-hosted fundraising for healthcare costs, refugee housing, and voter registration an appealing (and sometimes necessary) route for individuals facing dire economic, social, and political situations. We have seen a significant body of work arise in this area in recent years, and we support continued work along these lines, especially that which takes into account Zuckerberg’s philosophy as outlined in the Manifesto.

Second—and, arguably, less frequently acknowledged by social scientists—it is just as important that scholars question the assumptions underlying Facebook’s claimed raison d’être. This means critically examining the normative claims and values of the projective city which animate our current age of network capitalism: that extending a network is an unequivocal good, that the network can replace other social institutions, and that inclusion is justice. Without interrogating these assumptions, our critiques may never get to the root of the problem. The problem, in a sentence, is this: Zuckerberg’s manifesto, by depicting Facebook as a global social infrastructure and, by extension, the next step in the progression of history, not only minimizes the company’s role in the platform’s operations and removes it from accountability (a common tactic among social media firms which scholars have been quick to point out), but further reinscribes the assumptions about human nature and activity which underpin its profit model. The consequence of this is a proliferation of a certain understanding of the world which is conducive to Facebook as it currently operates: the most basic human need is to connect, and with a network, we can do anything, including providing disaster relief, raising funds for healthcare expenses, and finding shelter for refugees.

The global turn to authoritarianism makes this work that much more important. At a time when it seems increasingly likely, we might conclude, that a new city is germinating in response to the excesses of network capitalism, authoritarianism has stepped in to fill this role. Indeed, authoritarianism, rigidity, and intolerance are values Boltanski and Chiapello (2007) argue to be antithetical to the projective city. Not only are we faced, then, with establishing an alternative grammar to the projective city, but to authoritarianism at the same time. Understanding the philosophical underpinnings of the Manifesto is essential to contributing to forming an alternative grammar because, as Nick Srnicek (2017) points out in Platform Capitalism, “how we conceptualize the past and the future is important for how we think strategically and develop political tactics to transform society today” (p. 5).