Facebook angst for the millions

By JOANNA WEISS

New York Times News Service

You remember the Winklevi: Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the large-chinned, well-bred, Harvard-educated twins who sued Mark Zuckerberg over Facebook, on the grounds that he had kind-of-sort-of stolen their idea. Well, OK, we’re not completely like them — not in the sense that, when Facebook stock goes public, the court settlement they won could be worth $300 million.

But we are Winklevi in the sense that we’re on the outside of Facebook, looking in, with a tiny, nagging feeling that the balance isn’t right. Hype about the company’s impending IPO was everywhere last week: Analysis of proper valuation, laundry lists of who will reap the most, from Zuckerberg to his early investors to the guy who took stock as payment for painting murals at Facebook headquarters. And with it, among a lot of people I know, has come a related phenomenon of Facebook angst, consisting of several concurrent realizations:

1) Some people are about to get extraordinarily rich.

2) This group does not include me.

3) Why didn’t I see how much the world was going to change?

Plenty of folks, it turns out, have reason to feel left behind when a company like Facebook hits the stratosphere. There are analog people who didn’t anticipate the speed and breadth of the digital world. (As a newspaper-industry exile reminded me, the papers once did what Facebook does, just more slowly: People clipped stories, sent them to friends, discussed them in the coffeeshop. Old school!)

There are mid-career people facing the standard humanities-profession realization. (You love your job and work hard at it, but you don’t make much money. Does this make you noble, or a chump? Discuss.)

There are digital people who had good ideas, but not perfect ones — or perfect ideas with imperfect execution. (This was the plight of the Winklevi: Their idea for a Harvard dating website was Facebookish, but it wasn’t Facebook.)

And then there is pretty much everyone: Facebook’s 845 million users, who give the website our time and our personal data and our preferences and our attempts at clever prose, based on which Facebook has figured out how to make billions of dollars selling ads. It’s a stunningly-effective business model, which is why Zuckerberg and his employees are about to get so rich. And it’s not that Facebook users give away so much for nothing. For no money upfront, we get a powerful tool that we can use however we want: mobilizing world-changing movements, reconnecting with old friends, stalking ex-boyfriends to see if they’ve gone bald.

Our willingness to accept this particular tradeoff says something deep about the state of the modern world. In recent years, we’ve grown accustomed to giving away vast amounts of information in exchange for relatively small benefits. We hand over our shopping lists to the supermarket checker, via those little “rewards cards,” in order to save a few pennies on grapes. We send our TV-viewing patterns to the cable companies, so we can watch shows at our leisure on our DVRs. We let Google compile vast reserves of data from our searches and our e-mails, in exchange for getting free e-mails and searches. This convenience has, arguably, made us more connected, more able to mobilize world-changing movements. But it has also made us passive and willingly powerless. Every time Facebook makes a change people howl in protest for a day or two, blog ferociously, and basically relent. It’s our data, but it’s not our platform, after all.

The few Facebook holdouts I know have an old-fashioned, independent sensibility about the whole enterprise. They don’t have time for it, they say. And there are still a few things they wouldn’t mind keeping private.

The rest of us have made a different calculation, and, like the Winklevi, we might come away with precisely the payoff we deserve. The world was changing around us, and we knew. We let it happen. We just didn’t figure out how to profit from it.