I thought putting the phrase”from Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg” on the cover of Wired last month seemed especially very salient. Is Zuckerberg the new Bill Gates? The leak about how he doesn’t care about privacy raced across the internet like wildfire. Personally I’m not too concerned about an “off-the-record” comment made by single employee about his boss. (Since when did “off the record” become “print what I say, but keep it anonymous?”).
But the tone of all the twitter responses follow a very familiar story that geeks love to retell: Big Evil Corporation with a monopolistic product – bent on controlling the everything. Sound familiar?
The parallels between Gates and Zuckerberg are legitimate. Zuckerburg’s rise to billionaire-hood seems to exactly follow Malcolm Gladwell’s fantastic explanation of Bill Gates’s success: a semi-decent technologists who lucked out at being in the exact right place, with the right skills and background, at the right moment in history.
Facebook is already exerting tremendous control over the direction of the internet, similar to the way Microsoft did with the PC and Windows. I’m expect plenty of Gates-like love/hate media attention for little Mark Z for years to come.
The Wired article itself is “ok”. Steven Levy’s prose reads too much like a fluff piece. He makes some huge errors of omission, and makes too many attempt to invoke the very kind of myths that Gladwell debunks so well, then do a balanced history of the “rise of the geek”.
But the Cover Photo itself says so much more.
Gate’s known smile as he sits next to Zuckerberg, like a battle worn and weary general of the last war, sitting next to his heir-apparent. Gates has no more skin in this battle anymore. He’s moved on to spending his money on a legacy. The site of Zuckerberg’s youthful optimism seated behind Gate’s smugness, speak volumes about this moment in history, than Levy’s attempt at mythologize the past.
Kudos to the photographer Carlos Serrao.
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