The Facebook Fiasco

Dear Zuck,

I gotta hand it to ya, pal. I don’t know how many people could have pulled off what you did, for as long as you did, invoking as many of our epidemic syndromes as you did. You managed to appeal to EBMS (everybody but me syndrome), PFS (point fingers syndrome), and COTUS (center of the universe syndrome). And you even managed to make people think — even as they gave up and you gave away personal information on more than half the people on the planet — that not one of them was responsible for any of it. Wow.

It’s tough to identify the best part of a swindle like this. But the way you used Farmville and Candy Crush Saga to make people think you were giving them endless hours of uncontested fainenance out of some groundless and boundless sense of magananimity was bloody brilliant. You convinced them they were being encouraged to invite family members, friends, acquaintances, and complete strangers to play because Facebook was the world’s biggest believer in the more, the merrier.

The thing I admire most is that it never dawned on one of those hapless schnooks that you were using those games as grease for much bigger skids. And now they’re pissed at you — at you! — because you and your buddies at Cambridge Anlytica played them like a Stradivarius. You can’t make that kind of gullibility up. You can only accept it as staggering fact and marvel at it.

Yeah. I know. Your stock value took a hit. But really, Dude: who needs shareholders anymore? Once you get your personal net worth pumped up beyond $50 billion, you don’t have all that much to worry about … unless the wife takes the credit card for a weekend with the girls. Yeesh! But we’ve all been there, right?

I’m tellin’ ya. Don’t change a thing, pal. It was highly unlikely you’d have gotten this far with the whole Facebook thing in the first place, wasn’t it? Ride the wave. Keep doing what you’re doing. And the sheep will keep lining up to be fleeced. We got ’em right where we want ‘em.

Good luck.

Your humble admirer,

Mel

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