The DU Lounge

So here’s what I know about Mark Zuckerberg. During those first few weeks of Facebook’s existence, while he was assuring his fellow college students that we could trust him with our identities, he had a private conversation on instant messenger with a friend. That conversation was subsequently leaked, and published by Silicon Valley Insider. It is as follows:

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

In the intervening years, I’ve learned that Zuckerberg values his own privacy so much that he has security guards watching his trash, that he bought four houses surrounding his own house to avoid having neighbors, that he sued hundreds of Hawaiians to sever their claim to tiny plots of land within his massive Kauai estate, and that he secretly built tools to prevent further private messages from coming back to haunt him.

What I haven’t learned, or seen any sign of, is that he has changed his opinion of the intelligence of his users. It’s Zuckerberg’s world, and we’re all just a bunch of dumb fucks living in it.