The Zuck
cover art: Zoe Gigis
In 2005, I was in my first year of life, learning how to clutch food during mealtime, say words like "mama" and "dada," while my brain doubled in size. At this same time, Mark Zuckerberg was heading for a completely different stage of development: becoming the world's youngest self-made billionaire. He wouldn't reach this stage until three years later, at age 23. Nonetheless, Zuckerberg was jumping hurdles when I was just starting to put my feet on the ground. Now I am fifteen, and I have roughly eight years to become a billionaire like him. I have no desire to create the next big social network, however, nor do I (or anyone for that matter) need such an enormous amount of wealth. By 23, I want to become a better author, travel to London (while bumping into the next Hugh Grant), and have a decent apartment. Someone else can take the responsibility of revolutionizing tech.
Though my and Zuckerberg's livelihoods are incredibly different, I couldn't seem to escape him for the last month. Unlike zucchini, the "Zuck" is everywhere. It was as if I was walking through Central Park in the summertime. Zuckerberg was the squirrel following my every move for a piece of my turkey sandwich.
Other middle-aged capitalists, like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, also garner quite the attention on social media. From afar, most of these posts seem weird, even I'll admit that, but we all know Gen Z's way of making sense of life is by using comedy. As a socialist, Zuckerberg stands against nearly everything I believe. However, I am intrigued by his unusual ways. Rather than shoo him off, I decided to become friends with my stalker squirrel. He does own practically every social media app on my phone.
This article isn't about whether Zuckerberg is a good or bad man. There are enough pieces on that. Instead, who is the man who created Facebook, the app that changed the world? And why does everyone call him a robot?
Surrounded by the white pine trees of Westchester, New York, Mark Zuckerberg was born on May 14, 1984. At an early age, Zuckerberg showed an interest in technology, and his mother, father, and three sisters were always alert to his lively projects. At 13, he invented ZuckNet, a network that allowed computers in his home to communicate to the ones in his father's dental office. His dad hired software developer David Newman to give his son private lessons, and Newman later told reporters that it was hard to stay ahead of the prodigy.
As a sophomore, Zuckerberg left his hometown's public high school for the prestigious boarding school Phillips Exeter Academy. For his senior project at Exeter, Zuckerberg created a music player called the Synapse Media Player, which used artificial intelligence to understand user's listening habits and recommend similar music. He posted it online, and thousands of positive reviews rolled in. Microsoft and AOL offered to buy Synapse for $1 million and hire Mark Zuckerberg as a developer. He declined their offers and moved onto the next big thing: Harvard University.
In the crisp fall of 2002, Zuckerberg rode up to Cambridge, Massachusetts to study psychology and computer science. "My dad, funny enough, right before each of us went to college offered us the options of going to college or like investing in a franchise and running it," his sister told CNN. Mark may have chosen books instead of Big Macs, but instantaneously, he ignored all the things you were supposed to do at Harvard. Zuckerberg spent most of his time in the common room creating software products, only attending his classes when he felt like it.
Then came Facemash. The "Hot-or-Not" program asked users to look at two pictures of people of the same sex and pick the "hottest." Then the software compiled and ranked the results. Because college students are obsessed with judging their peers, obviously Facemash was a huge success. However, Harvard was not so pleased. To populate the picture database, Zuckerberg hacked into numerous university housing websites, which led to his investigation by Harvard's Administration Board. He was reportedly one decision away from suspension.
Nevertheless, according to his close friends, Zuck was as cool as a cucumber. There was even a "Goodbye, Mark" party, where the 19-year-old wore party glasses with a message that made a coding pun about beer consumption. That was also where the potential suspendee met his future wife and mother of his children, Priscilla Chan! Zuckerberg eventually avoided suspension, and it was back to business.
On February 4, 2004, it was another below-freezing day in Cambridge when Zuckerberg sat at his dorm room desk. At 6 pm, with co-founders Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin by his side, he published their creation, TheFacebook, onto the world. Eventually, the "The" would be dropped for the crisp "Facebook" we all know. Still, in that mid-winter moment, TheFacebook only existed in one place on Earth: Harvard University. Instantly it was a hit.
In instant messages leaked by technology site Silicon Alley Insider, Zuckerberg explained to a friend that his control of Facebook gave him access to any information he wanted on any Harvard student:
Zuck: yea so if you ever need info about anyone at harvard
Zuck: just ask
Zuck: i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns
Friend: what!? how’d you manage that one?
Zuck: people just submitted it
Zuck: i don’t know why
Zuck: they “trust me”
Zuck: dumb fucks
The Atlantic staff-writer and former Harvard Student, Alexis Madrigal, discussed the gravity of Facebook's takeoff, "There was no photo sharing, no News Feed, no apps, no games, no events. TheFacebook, in those first few months, was merely a database of profile pages of other people at Harvard. It combined the insularity and intimacy of an elite college with the user-generated network-effect frenzy of what was just beginning to be called Web 2.0."
The most common reason for using the site was to update or check other's relationship status. Before you tuned to tissues, you turned to your computer on the downfalls of your love life. Students could also check who was in their classes and find communities of people who liked the same bands, books, and films.
That year Zuckerberg dropped out of college and moved the company to Palo Alto, California. By the end of 2004, Facebook had 1 million users. Throughout 2005, Zuckerberg pulled off millions in financing—his early mentor Sean Parker got the ball rolling with an introduction to Facebook's first prominent investor, Peter Thiel. High schoolers arrived on the site that year, then international college students, and by September 2006 anyone over 13 years old could join.
Facebook's origins were contested by many — most famously Divya Narendra and the Winklevoss twins. Other competing systems existed at numerous universities; blogging, local bulletin-board systems (BBSs), and AOL Instant Messenger buddy lists, already fostered a fashionable online community in the late '90s and early '00s.
The idea of a social network is not what made Facebook unique. What mattered was how Facebook made people feel. It made them feel involved in something bigger than themselves. The 2.08 billion users on Facebook today would undoubtedly agree.
Now to answer the second question: Why do people call Mark Zuckerberg a robot?
Well, if you couldn't tell already, Zuck is no average person. Besides the fact that the man is a genius, he has always been pretty awkward.
"He's been overprogrammed," one of his closest friends told The New Yorker. "He sometimes talks like an Instant Message—brusque, flat as a dial tone—and he can come off as flip and condescending, as if he always knew something that you didn't."
In 2010, David Fincher released The Social Network, a film about the rise of Facebook with Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg. From the first scene of the film, viewers see Zuckerberg as a rapid-talking, gawky and quick-witted nerd who is also arrogant, aloof, and kind of an asshole. He doesn't consider other people's feelings, and his best friend Eduardo is the only person who cracks into his sentimentality. Even then, it takes Eduardo breaking the brash genius's laptop for him to wake up and smell the roses.
Aaron Sorkin, the movie's writer, described Zuckerberg as a "brilliant guy who's socially awkward and who's got his nose up against the window of social life. It would seem he badly wanted to get into one of these final clubs"—one of the exclusive party clubs at Harvard.
Of course, Zuckerberg has never watched the film.
Fast forward eight years and Zuck’s brash texts in college seemed to foreshadow Facebook’s carelessness in protecting user privacy. In 2018, Zuckerberg appeared in front of Congress when it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica, a data firm with ties to President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign, used private information from approximately 87 million Facebook profiles without the social network alerting its owners.
All over Twitter, people concluded that the CEO couldn't be human — maybe a lizard, alien, or a robot, but not human. "Don't forget to drink the water, humans like water," one user joked. Someone else curated a compare and contrast format of what ordinary people saw in the courtroom vs. Zuckerberg's technical overview of each lawyer's "threat level." The Daily Show's Trevor Noah commented, "I'm not going to lie I don't know if it's just because I've never seen him with other humans before but it genuinely looks like Zuckerberg sends a robot version of himself [to these hearings]."
Social media clowns other wealthy CEOs too. Bezos, ex-CEO of Amazon, is known as a "power-hungry bald-headed lizard." CEO of Tesla, Musk, is no stranger to hate for his manipulative ways. Ten years after his death, people still bring up that the founder of Apple, the late Steve Jobs, was a known jerk. In a generation where "eat the rich" has become such a popular slogan that people have it as a bumper sticker on their cars, it's no surprise that Zuck falls into the CEO sinkhole too.
I've concluded that I'll never know if these jokes are warranted because I'll never really know Zuck. He and his capitalist buddies represent everything Gen Z can't have and everything this world wants us to be. As my friend Rebekah told me, "Every day our generation retains so much information. We might not be able to survive in the wild, but it's crazy how much we actually know." Born into the internet, we adapted to a world of comparison at ten years old. Yet, we also embraced a world of freedom, vibrant creativity, and wicked memes. Good and evil have never been so transparent in the age of social media.
On that chilly February day all those years ago, Zuckerberg didn't know he would change the world as we know it. Facebook's story started as a path to connect us all. But the site's aftermath begs the question, "No matter how hard you try to unite people, will we ever be able to truly understand each other?" This article started as just that. To understand Zuck — boy king of Silicon Valley, and the guy whose original business cards said: "I'm CEO, Bitch."
Suppose there's anything I've learned going through Zuck's livelihood for the last month. In that case, it is to take risks; being socially awkward comes with its perks, and the greatest gift of being human (94% of my Instagram followers wouldn't include Zuck in this category) is understanding one another. It is a tremendous disservice to yourself to stay within the realms of your mind.
Who knows, if I ever met Zuckerberg, the guy might not be that bad. He is a Taurus, and as my Taurus BFFs know, that is my second favorite zodiac sign.
While I don't plan to become a CEO eight years from now, as an ode to Zuck on the first page of my best-selling novel in print, there it will be:
"I'm an AUTHOR, Bitch."