1. Facebook is executing a cunning strategy brilliantly; and
2. The power this centralizes in Zuckerberg is concerning; although
3. I'm not as worried as I might otherwise be because I trust him with that power.
It's less hedging than expressing a nuanced point.
> my discomfort arises from my strong belief that centralized power is both inefficient and dangerous: no one person, or company, can figure out optimal solutions for everyone on their own, and history is riddled with examples of central planners ostensibly acting with the best of intentions — at least in their own minds — resulting in the most horrific of consequences; those consequences sometimes take the form of overt costs, both economic and humanitarian, and sometimes those costs are foregone opportunities and innovations. Usually it’s both.
> You think MZ's vision of replacing democratic institutions with facebook is a bad idea? Me too!
becomes
> Let me point out to you all the ways that MZ's intentions are good. I guess he's really a nice guy and we should trust him to provide a replacement for a failing democracy.
Personally, I can't get behind it, no matter how nuanced the rhetorical strategy used to persuade me.
It seems to me that this battle was really lost several years ago when Google unsuccessfully tried to maintain the ability to "export your social graph" from FB. What's your feeling on how things would have played out differently if at that time FB lost its control over people's social graphs?
It seems to me that if you have to legislate a solution here, writing a law that guaranteed you could export your personal data from any company would be a good place to start. What do you think?
I'm sure other people really like it.