Allison Kaplan Sommer in the new firewalled Haaretz wants to talk about Mark Zuckerberg's intermarriage to Priscilla Chan. Oh please, who cares any more! But Sommer makes an interesting point:
When the movie "The Social Network" came out, Zuckerberg reportedly took great offense with the way in which screenwriter Aaron Sorkin implied that he created Facebook in order to meet girls, specifically non-Jewish girls...
I tend to believe that Zuckerberg - who met Chan at [a Harvard fraternity party like one in the film] didn’t, in fact, intentionally set out in search of a non-Jewish girlfriend or wife. Religion and ethnic identity was and is simply irrelevant to him, and, like it or not, to most of his generation of American Jews. Sorkin - a generation ahead of him - was imposing a narrative on Zuckerberg and his friends that didn’t fit.
In the new online social order Zuckerberg has helped create, we are all friends and we are all networked.
Sommer's observation that Sorkin was anachronistic is well taken. I went to Harvard in the '70s; and the social stratification described in The Social Network could have been mine; but the Social Network is set in 2003-2004. A friend who went to Harvard in the '90s tells me that the era of Jewish outsiderdom at the school was well over even at that point.
Why is this important? Because there is a tendency in American Jewish life to hold on to the injustices of the past and fail to see the new reality. When we "impose a narrative," it tends to be a narrative of victimization. Mark Zuckerberg is one of the wealthiest men on earth, and his company, god bless it, played a significant role in the liberation of Egypt. He's a powerful guy, and I don't think he's as culturally bound as Aaron Sorkin. So get to work on Palestine, Mark.
Mark is has been quoted recently, saying one should “take note” of anti-Semitism incidents in the USA, and presumably, around Die Welt. In the context of his being a stickler not to interfere with Google’s current system of objectively pulling up all urls related to your search words, such as “Jew.” He’s OK, for now at least, with the Google notice that stuff you may read in your search results may alarm you.
Offensive search results: link to google.com
Speaking of Google, yesterday I wanted to read what the Naked Capitalism had to say on the JP Morgan losses, so I did a Google search on “naked capitalism”. Google rejected the word “naked”, and displayed the results of a search for “capitalism”.
Fortunately, Naked Capitalism’s URL is http://www.nakedcapitalism.com, so I could access the site without any help from Google.
Google only filters out words like naked if you have your safe search setting on strict.
How do I change the search setting?
yeah, phil, right. god bless facebook, and god bless tiny mark zuckerberg too. how could i not see the democratic potential of a website designed to reduce human interaction to easily digestible, commercially lucrative bits, all the while big brother trolls just below the surface, hunting for actionable information. omg! wtf was i (not) thinking? well, i’m not the visionary who came up with the idea of a site that allows people to write short notes to friends. and post pictures too? kind of like a bulletin board, but only on your computer. fucking brilliant! and how could i also fail to see the humanitarian potential of the great minds behind the pump and dump that just took place with facebook stock? billions bilked from the little guy by the facebook crew and a select few investers. why i just bet that ‘palestine’ is near the top of the pile in mark’s in-box. he’ll clean up that disaster lickety split right after he feeds his puppy. you did see his puppy, didn’t you?
marc b, hehheh–U nailed it!
phil is the proud parent of an entire tribe, citizen. he just has to say something positive about the most cretinous offspring. i’m sure he could find the bright side of madoff’s ambition.
Yikes, marc b! Maybe Phil would find the bright side of Madoff’s ambition in the fact that, although Madoff was willing to carry his MOTs a long way to share in the exploitation of investment ignorance, but in the end he applied universalism to all of mankind he was able to exploit due to their totally selfish greed?
The analogy would be to the former AIPAC honcho who turned tattle-tale on AIPAC and even filed a suit against it while the judge deep-sixed the plaintiffs anti-AIPAC case because he deemed it’s reach was a political question, one that reached into the reality of elite power in the USA? Disguised as “security question” of course.
I continue to believe that you’re unfair against Aaron Sorkin.
The Facebook movie he did was actually quite harsh and he more or less took the Winklevoss twins’ side in the dispute(then again, so did the court the other year, when it rules in their favour, so there is still a great question over just how much ‘his’ company it truly is, and not theirs, but the past is past).
If you look at Aaron Sorkin’s resume you see a broadway play he did in 2007. It’s called “The Farnsworth Invention”.
It’s about a sweet, bright and terribly naive Midwestern WASP kid who invests a lot of stuff regarding television, back when it was new.
The play centers against the struggle on his idealism and the ruthless TV exec who uses his cynicism and power to wrestle the inventions from him and counter-sue him into poverty, and sure enough, the guy dies in alcoholism and neglect.
The TV exec is described as a ‘Russian immigrant’ but you only need to glance over his last name to know what group he comes from, even if he did indeed immigrate from Russia.
Sorkin has been cataloguing the rise of Jewish ascendancy but I think a fair criticism can be made that he has been too harsh, often playing with black/white cultural stereotypes, e.g. the innocent, morally upstanding protestant Anglo who believes in righteousness and the cynical, ruthless Jew who uses his childlike good-heartedness.
Sorkin was actually struggling a lot during the 80s as a playwright and it’s impossible to know what happened when he was young but judging from his career I don’t think he’s that ethnocentric in the sense that Larry Summers is. Summers’s the kind of Jew which fits the ‘Russian Immigrant’ code much better than Zuckerberg.
Zuck’s a pretty cynical guy, but he is not a wild-eye nationalist, to put it mildly.
Also, in terms of sociological botanizing; Zuckerberg mostly surrounded himself with Jews at the early stage, but within even just a few years, he went to a mostly mixed crowd to a firm that is now majority-WASP in it’s higher structure. He has oddly refused to surround himself with Asians, despite their stellar reputation in Silicon Valley, at the highest echelons. Even if he marries one. Just look at the board of directors. Sure, Sandberg’s the COO but if you look at the VP of engineering and many other important execute positions, Zuckerberg’s mostly phased out the Jews.
Moskowitz seemed like the only one he truly got along with.
And from all the VC’s he could choose, he chose Thiel, a German and a conservative Republican. Despite the knowledge of what we know that he is a die-hard liberal Jew.
So this underlines what we’ve previously discussed, the amount to which Jews and WASPs have melded together. True, there is much more Asian/White integration today than even 20 years ago(I’m discounting the lonely Asians who had no other choice), but there is still a long way to go on that front. And so far, at least as I can see, there is actually more WASP/Asian integration in terms of the top in tech. The co-founders of Youtube is a case in point and there are many others like them.
Another example of this weird Jewish/Asian distance, which actually doesn’t make any sense and the intercommunal relations are great from what I can tell, is TechStars NY. It’s a almost completely Jewish tech incubator based in NY, which is now the #2 top in technology, and I just went through the companies and it was just a sea of whiteness, mostly WASPs.
Now, NYC is home to the largest amount of Indian-Americans in the country, which is also the religious group which has the highest SAT score(and not Jews like some think). And as far as I know, Indians have a rep to be pretty tech savvy but it was zilch in that respect.
Another fact of the Jewish rise to “old money status” is this little NYT article. Notice the minority share of WASPs and how most people in the story are either Jewish or born-to-moguls-Asians.
link to dealbook.nytimes.com
I am interested in the tech scene for other reasons, but I’m also interested in the sociological aspects because tech is the most meritocratic sector, most of the successful people there are self-made middle class folks and as far as I know they are almost all very internationalist/progressive but the social patterns are there regardless.
“The Facebook movie he did was actually quite harsh and he more or less took the Winklevoss twins’ side in the dispute…”
I agree, but I also think that the criticism of Sorkin must be taken with a grain of salt, because the film really wasn’t about Facebook (that was plot), but was about friendship and what people are willing to do to friends. (I suspect that Sorkin knows that the anti-Jewish stuff was anachronistic, but put it in because it really, really worked well thematically [and the only question in telling a good story isn't "is it factually correct", but "does it work for the story." {Which is why Tarrentino was right to kill Hitler.}])
Krauss, big exception to the rules, regarding the new HiTech scene: anything that involves hardware. Jewish people are for the most part absent from either the funding channels, researchers in the universities or employees in the leading companies or start-ups. You can scan paper after paper on research and/or development that involves, say, new materials research (eg, nanotechnology) or device technology or new instrumentation and it’s all Chinese, Korean and occasionally Indian or East European/Russian (the latter may or may not be from jewish background). Once in a blue moon, there is an American sounding name, but it is becoming extremely rare to find a native American (ie. other than say, a Chinese or Japanese American) in the graduate schools of the land. The exception to this rule are Israelis. They are there on papers and as visiting researchers but in about the same numbers as, say, Germans, just in different areas.
Now I do happen to know a few Jewish Americans involved in fields that require engineering and/or Physics background. But they are older and all their kiddies went either into computers, communications or something vague having to do with Liberal Arts (only to emerge some years down the road as newly minted MBAs). Most of these “kids” were top performers in school – it’s just they didn’t find a career in hard core science or engineering to be an attractive option (perhaps for good reasons, but more on this another time). I do know other Jewish Americans who were in law and their kids often do end up in law as well (or at least some do). The intermarriage with Asians (she usually a doctor or a technical person) is also becoming a bit of a trend, always with the girl being the Asian. The parents, somewhat still jewish (or with a soft spot left for judaism) are at first mortified at the prospect of Chinese in-laws but then adapt and even get a kick out of (especially after they master a new hobby – something to do with expertise on the fortunes and misfortunes of the Ming dynasty).
Full disclosure on the latter “trend”: my personal sample consists of exactly three, with perhaps another three I heard about.
And Krauss, my experience shows you to be right about the non-mingling of Asians and Jewish Americans in the software/computer areas. Part of this I think is because of the innate conservatism among Asian run VCs and Angel investors. They flock to the lower risk areas, and/or to start-up firms run by other Asians (with indians and Chinese observing a strict non-mingling of fortunes). But that, IMO, is just comfort zone stuff, rather than any deep tribalism.
One more opinion (since we are opinionating here): I believe that, given the huge cohort of Chinese and Indian researchers/technologists, it is the conservatism of the monied Asians (including the many who made good on IPOs) that prevents the emergence of many more Asian-run and Asian-in-top-management firms. In the end, those who give the early seed money are the ones that set the pace and composition of management. But all of this will change. And China has big plans for their many many American science graduates, who are starting to return home where opportunities await.
Great reply, Danaa.
I agree with a lot of points you made, but first, I stumbled across this puffpiece on Asana, co-founded by Moskowitz and Rosenstein(both of Facebook fame).
The article itself was not very informative(and I’m slightly pessimistic on Asana, I think it will grow but I don’t think it will dominate), but with a grin on my face I immediatedly went to Asana’s homepage and checked their employees to see if my theories held up alright or not.
And sure enough. After Justin and Dustin(love how those two names mix and match), you had 20 other employees. As far as I can tell, not a single Jew. 19 of those were working at the company product and there was a single Asian(woman) but she was a chef in the kitchen.
link to asana.com
As for your points about hardware, I think you are right to some extent.
However, here’s a blogpost from LinkedIn where they took the data from 240,000 engineers to try to see which companies were most sought after for employment:
link to blog.linkedin.com
The top two are cloud-computing companies but they also dabble quite deeply into hardware territory, and they got Stanford profs on their team. And they’re mostly the kind of predictable WASP/Jewish mix we’ve come to expect, with a few Asians on the side.
This in turn goes to another point.
Take a look at Cal Tech, probably the most technical university in America, if not the world. Stanford has great computer science departments, but computer science has a more mathematical/theoretical side – which fewer people know about – which is to some extent separated from the more flashy hands-on application of the science that is used in start-ups. Linguistics is just one of those aspect, theory of mathematical theorems, even philosophy to some extent. And these areas are considered to be more intellectually challenging.
And Cal Tech leads in these areas, the theoretical side(even if Stanford do trump them in individual fields). So what’s my long, drawn-out point?
Look at Cal Tech’s undergraduate share of Asians, and compare it to whites. Then look at graduate students and see how Whites to Asian ratio moves from 1:1(with slight advantage to Asians) to 4:1 advantage to whites. The latter two are a much better predictor of who gets to do the research.
I’m more in tune with the start-up/tech scene in general and have only begun recently to dabble in the more theoretical/academic aspects, so I concede that you may be right on the research points. But the pattern between undergraduate/graduate/PhD for most top schools are the same across the nation.
Finally, about VC’s. Yes, that may be right. However, if you look at a company like Spotify they actually went to Li-Ka Shing, China’s wealthiest(?) man and got funding from him – twice. So even if Chinese investors are starting to get into the game, how their money will be distributed and who it will go it still remains to be seen.
Another problem is that for all the propaganda of how “capitalistic” China’s economy is, it’s still mired in the kind of bloodbased aristocracy that the West has mostly abolished, if not completely.
The rise of the Princelings have greatly suppressed the creative drive of the Chinese entrepreneurs who truly deserve to be successful but come from poorer/unknown families as compared to the corrupted halfwits who happen to have loaded fathers and drive Ferrari’s.
This kind of system, to put it mildly, isn’t ideal. The reason why Weibo(China’s Twitter) or Baidu(China’s Google) have prospered is simply because the government have made both Twitter/Google so slow/faulted that it simply cannot compete. Larry Page openly admitted last week that YouTube is so slow, and sometimes even shuts down, in China that it simply cannot complete. So this isn’t capitalism, nor is it Soviet-style economy. But while China can continue to do well simply by virtue of outperforming other countries in the “middle income trap” at some point it has to face the rest of the world on their terms. Baidu has to compete with Google on a global scale and being as sheltered as they are makes them weak – and gives Google the edge.
I’m unsure if a few American immigrants with Chinese heritage can flip this around, and even if they could, they have to battle with the sclerotic corruption and rampant cronyism. And think of the Princelings in charge of many IT companies who probably will be outclassed by these people, they will lose face, the worst thing you can do. And another area where the more “vulgar”(I would say vital) culture in the West is an edge.
Another example of this: Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates all dropped out of college to start their companies. In China many people try to get PhD’s and sometimes end up in their 30s before they take the plunge – the conservative culture you mentioned. And often by that time, their “risk minimizing” behaviour has made them soft and afraid that they are too old.
Neither of these symptoms are inherited nor incurable, but they are cultural rifts that go deep. The reason why New York is going up so strongly now as a tech center is because the hardware side is slowly losing importance. It was much more important in Sillicone Valley 20 years ago.
Today, it’s about taking the more creative sides of life. Fab.com, Facebook, Instagram, Foursquare, Amazon, Apple. All these companies have technical talent but the most shining light, Apple, is up there because of creativity. If you look at only the past year, the two of the most striking companies, Instragram or Pinterest, is the same story.
And Fab.com is amazing because of their profitability for such a hard sector to digitalize and monetize. And in these creative areas, finance, arts, fashion Jews have always outshone everyone. So in this sense, Jews may actually be positioned to the future. And since New York is now quickly catching up because of it’s creative potential, is it a surprise that 2 million Jews live there?
*phew* that was a long post!
Krauss, sorry to cause you to fall into the long post trap. As you can see, I am in it as a permanent fixure.
Will reply more substansively later (or not, hopefully), but I’ll just note that we seem to be speaking from across an interesting divide – which is BTW quite common when it comes to anything that involves “hardware”. So, by way of introduction, here is the kind of hardware I am speaking about: robotics (which involves enormous challenges in mechanical, electrical and optical engineering), fiber optics (communications and sensing), biotechnology (mostly measurement/instrumentation), oil/gas drilling equipment innovations, space vehicles and semiconductors (including lighting applications). As you no doubt know, semiconductor manufacturing and foundries – just one example – have moved largely outside the country, which makes it next to impossible to start a company in the US that requires foundry support. The enormous investment needed is discouraging to any VC so the field – other than specialty equipment for aerospace – has become extremely conservative.
Couple more points for my “introduction” : 1. I do not know a single jewish person living in the NY area with involvement in any of the above-listed fields (informatics BTW is a sub-specialty of biotech and is mostly software). I do know a few at MIT but they are researchers. 2. you mentioned Apple. It’s a good example – not too many jewish names involved in the actual device design aspects of the company (though there are quite a few no doubt in the software/interface areas).
I know robotics is a coming field and there are huge challenges regarding the human/machine interfaces. But ultimately the biggest challenges are mechanical and materials related. The software is, to some extent. already there (the virtual interface). There was a [stillborn] sequel to Battlestar Galactica, called Caprica. Had the seeds of a few good ideas (like teenagers leading the way in crossing the real/virtual divide – a highly likely scenario, IMO). But I felt like they stumbled big time on the robotics aspect, and couldn’t come up with a credible solution, so they veered off into social silliness, flailing badly on the “science” part of the fiction.
And one more thing – don’t be so quick to count out the Chinese. They are plenty adaptable, and their princeling management culture may eventually go the way of the cultural revolution. But their social model is not like the West’s so their innovation model may not follow the same pattern either. And therein lies trouble. But more on that some other time.
Big issue here is not whether there is discrimination against Jews (any more, or at Harvard, or whatever) but that some old-timers have a passionate (but incomprehensible to me) desire to keep the “Jewish People” going. As someone who married out (and who was not brought up in a Jewish community in the first place), I don’t share the fear of a race dying away. (Hey, the world is overpopulated anyway and we should ALL be thinking about not having more than 1 (or more than zero) kids).
When I look at Israel’s crimes (yup, that’s what I see when I look at Israel, not all the clever technologists and lofty poets possibly promoted by “brand Israel”), and consider how much USA’s Jews have switched religion from “Judaism” (in some flavor or other) to (non-religious, as I see it) pro-Israelism, I am glad whenever I hear of Jews marrying out.
Oh come on….Mark Zuckerberg started out as a sleeze and you can’t white wash that out.
Some of us do care more about “how” people get their money…..than how ‘much’ they have…call it old fashioned ethics.
Zuckerberg and the Facebook operation started to smell a lot like a Enron to me some time ago.
Let’s see what comes out in the lawsuits and senate investigation into his IPO.
I have a pretty good idea what they’re going to find.
And also a pretty good idea none of the “new’ ethic-less Elite is going to be made to be made to pay for their malfeasance.
Is Facebook just a Trojan horse to allow government and corporations to access all sorts of data about people?
I don’t know about that. ..government and corps already have numerous ways to capture our data and track users activity.
No one in my family is on Facebook, I discouraged it. Not because of fear of invasion of privacy but because it’s just tacky to me to spread yourself out there like some public billboard. Guess I am old school.
I have some friends that are on it and they use to send me emails saying go ‘friend me’ at Facebook. ..seems so ridiculous. ..more like what teenagers would spend time on.
As big and wide-spread as it is, Facebook activity I see is very small-townish in its gossip, interests generally, digital board gaming, inane and sentimental thoughts, photo sharing, flirting, etc. Seems there’s a real need for that by an awful lot of people, including one strain in my own extended family. To me, it’s boring, very boring. Yet it’s a way to keep up on a daily basis when your loved ones live far away, etc. Lots of it too is very high-schoolish.
LYSIAS- “Is Facebook just a Trojan horse to allow government and corporations to access all sorts of data about people?”
I’m guessing it is. Also, both Zuckerberg and Bill Gates went to Harvard which, as far as I know, is not an IT powerhouse. But it is a CIA recruitment powerhouse. I think that the men in the shadows are more involved in the American economy than we realize.
Sorkin is a good writer with the occasional observational zinger, such as “social networking is to socializing as reality television is to reality”
All of us who decry the surveillance society being imposed upon us can take easy small steps to thwart it – for example, don’t use Google to search, use Duck-Duck Go
DuckDuckGo … it does not track or store your data and other search engines don’t either … they all essentially return the same results anyway (or used to until Google started to manipulate its results for commercial purposes)
Also, create a Faraday cage for your smart phone – it can be as simple as wrapping a piece of aluminum foil around it (or get a metal case for it that snaps open and closed … this will block its signals until you uncover it
Also startpage.com and for Mac users, download DEVONagent and learn how to use it. Steep learning curve for the heavy-duty stuff, but you can run detailed queries that take all night but will search every research database in the world, if you want. A scientist’s dream.
Welcome back, MRW. It’s good to see you :-)
Eben Moglen. Eben Moglen. Eben Moglen. Eben Moglen. Eben Moglen.
If you are sitting around burnishing Jewish pedestals to put your modern idols on, at least use a real one and one truly emblematic of the 21st C.
Eben Moglen fits the bill. Zuckerberg only decided on an IPO in the weeks after Moglen’s famous Feb 5 2010 talk in which Moglen sneered at Zuckerberg’s 1910-level AT&T switchboard hub techno-not (he called them “doodads”) and declared Zuckerberg “richly deserves bankruptcy” for his damage to individual freedom, privacy, and the human soul.
Zuckerberg didn’t grow that company. His panoply of experienced adult venture-capital investors did, like Thiel, starting from day one, and there is lots of tech press on that.
Moglen, on the other hand, changed the world of technology. In addition to being a lawyer, a PhD historian (both Yale, I think), he brought PGP encryption to the world with Paul Zimmerman in the 90s, open source (free as in freedom) software to the world with Richard Stallman and still manages the GNU license, and Moglen INVENTED NETWORKED EMAIL WHEN HE WAS 16 in the 1970s.
*HISTORY CORRECTION* — Facebook did NOT figure prominently in the liberation of Egypt. That has been debunked, soundly. Only 2% of the country had computers at the time; people were using Internet cafes that Mubarak disabled (and you should recall how they cut off the net). The Arab Spring was sparked by a 20-year-old girl on YouTube. People used their cellphones and SMS, even though Google tried to take credit…yeah, only if you were rich and living behind walled compounds.
Phil Zimmerman, not Paul Zimmerman.
PHIL- “…and his company, god bless it, played a significant role in the liberation of Egypt.”
Egypt has been liberated? Why wasn’t I informed? All this time I thought that the generals were still running things for their US paymasters. Also, Egypt is in an extremely weak position to seek real independence in the financially controlled, globally integrated economy. Cut off the funding and the people will starve. Financial coercion is an extremely effective means of control.
My heart bleeds for poor Mark Zuckerberg.
And I still don’t know what Facebook is for.
“So get to work on Palestine, Mark.”
Amen.