Vanity Fair’s December issue has a profile of the Winkelvosses, the twins who claim Mark Zuckerberg ripped off their idea for facebook and who were caricatured as WASPs who rule Harvard in the movie The Social Network.
The Vanity Fair piece by Dana Vachon goes on to the same social terrain, though amazingly it does not identify Zuckerberg as Jewish (or Larry Summers, Zuckerberg’s strenuous advocate, as Jewish). It does identify Zuckerberg as a “lifelong elite,” which is a worthy amendment to the Jewish image in America today.
The article repeatedly identifies the Winkelvosses as members of the old elite. Their story, Vachon writes, has touched on the American fascination with “Wasp culture.” Later there is a heading called “Late American Nobility.” They are an “object of cultural wonder.” Certainly they were to Mark Zuckerberg. Vachon:
They [the twins] made sure to show me the profile of “Cameron Winklevoss” on ConnectU—the name of their briefly also-ran Facebook competitor—which the undergraduate Mark Zuckerberg is reported to have created as a mockery after hacking his way into the site. (Zuckerberg declined to comment.) “Languages: WASP-y,” the profile read. “Ethnicity: Better than you,” “Hair color: Aryan Blond.”
“Where’s the outrage?” Cameron asked. “Can you imagine if we did this to him?”
It’s true—if the Winklevosses had done the equivalent to Zuckerberg, it would have been construed as a hate crime, not collegiate folly. Groups who have suffered historically get cultural protections not afforded those who have presided over historical suffering: A well-studied impression of an inbred British aristocrat may win you friends at a cocktail party. An equally evocative napalmed Cambodian peasant probably won’t. And yet the Winklevosses descend from technophobic Pennsylvania hunchbacks. And Mark Zuckerberg is a product of Westchester, Exeter, and Harvard, a lifelong elite.
“And you can go to, like, airport security?” interrupted Tyler. “People who are Muslim should be allowed to be security guards—right? There’s a difference between being a fundamentalist and being al-Qaeda and being Muslim. It’s absurd to think otherwise. But certain people have not even reached that standard of thinking with regards to us.”
But the Vanity Fair writer can make race-based jokes at the Winkelvosses’ expense: “a never-had and yet somehow-lost fortune which the Winklevosses’ chromosomes demanded they fight for.” Not sure what their chromosomes have to do with it.
A lot of people aren’t willing to call bias when they see it. People structure their criticism so that they themselves come out looking good, as opposed to being a fair, equal-opportunity critic.
For example, I recently read about how horribly Koreans suffered under Japanese occupation during the first half of the twentieth century. Yet South Korea (bracketing the north here–most of its problems stem from communism) is doing fantastic. Of course, whenever any countries or people groups who experienced western colonialism happen to do poorly (socioeconomically) despite lengthy periods of self rule, it’s still all Europeans’ fault. Western crimes committed in the past mean that from here on out all of their problems are all our fault.
I’d love to check the tax returns of left-liberals who play this game. I’d bet a lot they’re personally complete misers. But when it comes to collective giving (or blaming their own society), you won’t find a more “generous” group of people anywhere.
How many poor scholars have become tenured for just this reason? How many of them have padded 401-Ks all the while proclaiming their allegiance with the poverty-stricken people of the world?
Sacrifice.
To be fair, the the Winklevii mentioned giving up “not being a part of their DNA” – so I think that is where the author gets the “chromosone” flourish…..
I have to say, I just read the article, pretty carefully, and am disgusted/distressed at the tone, theme and general point of it.
For starters, I don’t have, and have never had a facebook page.
One reason is that I genuinely enjoy organic human interaction – i know, fucking radical idea- and facebook, no matter what it’s value in “keeping people connected,” is fundamentally inorganic.
The other reason, and I think this has mattered to me more than I have recognized, is the guy who created it. Or who stole the idea from the Winklevii etc. etc. …..
Zuckerberg, much like Gates, Jobs, Paul Allen etc., seems to be a deeply anti-social character. I think people focus on his arrogance, but I would say he is just socially inept. And I want to use this guy’s “social” software? It’s completely counter-intuitive. Facebook is a world where you can “be social” without being social. This is a HUGE WIN for guys like Zuckerberg – they have totally evened the playing field. A “cool” facebook page, with lots of interesting colorful “friends,” links to trendy websites or “cool happenings” in your area can turn a in-person social nightmare into a hip cat, without doing anything.
“Without doing anything” is EXACTLY what the author of this article, and guys like Zuckerberg, along with the real powers who are enthralled with him, want reinforced. The Winklevii’s real crime here is that they ARE DOING SOMETHING. That is so uncool. So 20th century. Even in the face of public scorn, they carry on. They actually believe in shit. This is just radically opposed to the world view of Zuckerberg and many other “techno giants.”
By mocking the Winklevii – the author conversely makes Zuckerberg the ideal. So, on the one hand, we have two physically and mentally strong young men, who think and use their bodies daily. They seem to be against special or protected classes of people. They seem to be capable of introspection and are comfortable in out of the ordinary social settings. And, on the other, we have the quintessential anti-social computer whiz. A relative shut in with little to no social grace, who spent his formative years on a computer, detached from society and apparently hateful of blue bloods – though I would say what Zuckerberg hated was society based on social ability. This is what the Winklevii represent. In this “either/or” scenario, who you gonna pick? I gotta take the Winklevii, all day. I know it sounds stupid, but they have humanity on their side, whereas I think Zuckerberg has a disdainful view of humanity, and would be happy for it to exist only electronically, in isolation.
I have so much more to say on this….but, I’ll stop for now.
This was an interesting case and the biggest thing anyone can learn from it is even if you are a college student, don’t depend on gentlemen’s agreements as WASP tend to do, and get it in writting. If you have an idea and hire others to help you, have employment contracts or witten agreements even you are operating out of a college dorm room.
The facts of the case were the twins and another student, Divya Narendra, started a social networking project. Thru the course of developing it, they had several people come and go and Zuckerman came in on the later stage when he was hired or brought in to help finish the source code for the site. Zuckerman then took the source code and the social network idea and promoted it as Facebook.
They claim they would have gotten the whole ball of wax if an e mail message Zucherman sent to a friend while working with the twins on the code had been avavilable. But the e mail leaked to Business Insider wasn’t known at the time.
““Yea i’m going to fuck them,” the undergraduate Zuckerberg had I.M.’d a friend while ostensibly working with the Winklevosses, explaining his intention to delay their planned social network and so benefit his own pre-natal Facebook. “Probably in the ear.”
If I were the twins I’d take the 200 million I got and sell off the portion received in stock and go at Zuckerman and facebook a different way…he’s a guy with severe ‘I love to screw people” social problems and is bound to screw himself and Facebook…it has muptiple dozen lawsuits filed against every month. With that many complaints some new version is gonna replace sooner or later. And with Zuckerman’s attitude of telling his users to go fuck themselves and fighting them instead of correcting Facebook’s privacy faults, among others, means one of those lawsuit is gonna hit the lottery eventually.
I have to say Vachon’s writing style gives me a headache.
It’s like he puts Dominick Dunne, Tom Wolfe, Capote and Fitzgerald all in a blender and spews it out as some kind of new style.
Reminded me of someone swatting flies…in no particular order.
the ‘facebook’ phenomenon is just revolting; it is literally, physically nauseating. human interaction reduced to its most reductive bits, bits useful only for compiling commercially lucrative data. ‘social’ my ass.
the winkelvoss vs. zuckerberg dichotomy is equally disingenuous. zuckerberg as the outsider, the mensch, playing david to the winkelvoss dinosaur goliath is laughable. in the ‘social network’ who does goliath petition for assistance? larry summers. zuckerberg isn’t fauned over as a member of the crew team? big f#cking deal: that’s a question of style, not substance. the president of harvard is in his corner. and the boys from brazil with lipgloss treatment of the twins is cartoonish, any semblance of an ethical code being ground to dust as anachronistic, 19th century frivolity, or even worse, femininity. (is this code of misconduct part of bellows’ call to jewish manliness? screw them all and let god sort it out?) is there any question that that weasel zuckerberg liberally stole from anyone within his reach? yet the theft is buried underneath visions of his civilizing mission, complete with poor mark staring wistfully out of the window of the attorney’s office during his deposition. his people ‘need’ him, or some such horseshit, is his response to one of the shyster attorneys wasting his valuable time.