I have never seen interviews that have been so vacuous as those with
Mark Zuckerberg in recent days when promoting Facebook shares (on
sale tomorrow apparently). Zuckerberg is a smart and highly
articulate young man. There's no doubt about that. His Facebook
project has been the most widely publicised launch of anything during
the whole of the industrial revolution. There's also no doubt about
that. But whether Facebook will ever amount to being a profit-making
business remains to be seen.
Quite beside the fact that usage of Facebook in America, its place of
origin, is already falling away, its hoped-for customer base is
upside down. It has been a fashion that started among the
economically poorest segment of all in an advanced country, namely
teenagers. This is quite unlike any other successful product or
service that has motivated economic growth during the last 300 years.
These have always started by being sold only to the very rich
initially, their possession signifying the highest levels of status.
They only made their way downwards if they were capable of longer
production runs and higher profits (available for subsequent wider
investment) among the lower social markets . This applied whether we
are talking of Rolls Royce motor cars, porcelain vases, colourful
cotton or silk clothing or artificial hips. Even sports and the arts
as we know them today started only among the rich who had the money
and the leisure to indulge in them initially.
Apart from banner advertisements (those that are consolidating brand
images of major firms rather than selling individual products),
Facebook has no income. (Facebook's banner advertisement are probably
close to their maximum already.) But herein lies Zuckerberg's
cleverest ploy in selling the loss-making Facebook. In its early
years, Google didn't have an income either! Until Google happened
upon classified advertisements linked to search topics, it would
still be a plain vanilla search engine (albeit exceptionally
versatile when it started). But the search engine was only an
intellectual byproduct of the world wide web and then of the personal
computer which was, in turn, the mass produced version of quite the
most expensive individual product ever invented, the main frame
computer. Even the first true personal computers, the IBM PC and the
Apple II, were much too expensive for the mass of the consumer market
and had to be rapidly mass produced and down-priced before they were
widely bought.
And, of course, the latest and cheapest version of the personal
computer, is the mobile phone. This, at present, is affordable by
most teenagers in the advanced world -- hence the Facebook craze.
Unfortunately, however, teenagers are not only the economically
poorest segment in the advanced countries already but they are going
to be even poorer in the years to come as adults increasingly shut
them out of the world of work by working for many more years
themselves. The older age groups are having to do this in order to
afford some sort of income for when they are infirm. Almost all
private pension funds, except a few exceptional ones, are already
bankrupt (occasionally admitted as having "black holes"). Almost all
advanced countries, except a few exceptional ones, will never be able
to afford more than a token welfare benefit because they have no
income-producing investments at all and can only rely on -- in theory
-- a vastly growing personal taxation base..
(Of course, let us remind ourselves, those working adults who are
situated between the adolescents and the old have intuited this for
the last two or three decades. They have noticed the growing
automation of jobs around them and the reduction in their own real
incomes as opposed to nominal incomes as expressed with
governmentally manipulated money. They have been reducing their
number of children because the replacement number of two per woman
can't be afforded any longer.).
If we assume that the mobile phone will become so cheap that even the
growing millions of jobless teenagers and young people will continue
to afford them by one means or another, then what use will 100, 200,
300 or 1,000 "friends" on Facebook be to them? What they will need
is what teenagers have always needed. They will need just two or
three friends, or two or three friends of relatives, or two or three
relatives of friends who know of a job opportunity. This has always
been by far the largest job selection agency and will continue to be.
Unfortunately these real friends are going to be in increasingly short supply.
No, Facebook hasn't a chance of success. Even if Facebook tries out
an Amazon Books strategy and has a vast catalogue of goods that are
suitable for teenagers, the growing joblessness and lack of money
will bang that idea on the head. Instead of being a future consumer
market, the jobless young are more likely to use their mobile phones
to gather 100, 200, 300 or 1,000 rioters instead when provoked by one
incident or another.
Mark Zuckerburg has committed the sin which most Harvard-educated
personnel (and those from similar elite universities) are wont to do.
This is to project their own ideas -- and confidence about future
jobs -- into the minds of everybody else of their age group.
But herein also lies possibilities that conventional politicians
ought to realize (if only they had time to read more widely or have
neuroscientists to dinner). Ninety-five per cent of all seminal ideas
take place in the brains of young people up to the age of about
30. Up until then, their frontal lobes are still growing and
developing. That's when the original work of almost all Nobel science
prizewinners was actually done (and the greatest books, works of art
and music created). After the age of about 30, creativity dies off
quite steeply. Among the millions (billions?) of jobless teenagers
around the world it is almost inevitable that small groups of them
are going to tutor themselves on the Internet to the highest levels
of future skills and break their way into the protective 20-class of
specializations. It is almost inevitable also that small groups are
going to start different sort of self-governmental schemes that will
gradually develope and (in a century or two) replace the increasingly
inept top-down nation-states of today. But for both purposes, they'll
be using Google, not Facebook.
Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com
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