Many of the biggest social media platforms share this one thing in common, they were products designed to connect younger people to parties and facilitate sex. Maybe it is laudable that Jack and Zuckerberg have made an effort to reconceptualize the purpose of their products on such socially conscious terms, but I for one am suspicious of their self-narratives, I am suspicious that it isn’t really all about one thing for them: riding the hype-train into a golden sunset of unlimited wealth. The ambition, certainly, has always been there for the entrepreneur, but the justification of that ambition, the story, that comes after the fact; the story is something designed to conceal the emptiness of the ambition that drives the entrepreneur, the empty ambition of wealth, celebrity and success.

Rather than simply connect us to what our friends are doing, or helping college kids find a party to go to, social media platforms today have conceived of a much grander product to sell: existence. By means of their platforms we obtain existence in the new public sphere, we become observable. Facebook and Twitter don’t just allow us to share moments or memories, they allow us to become, they stream our data to the world so that we might suggest our social existence to others. This is the true dream of the Facebergian global community, a new social dimension into which we project and become, a phantom world of dream bodies peering through the brush of a jungle of data in order to observe one another as we engage in the intimate act of becoming.

We are all always engaged in some kind of self-narratization, not only do we use Zuckerberg’s platform to weave that tale of becoming, but our doing so is in turn predicated on our acceptance of the entrepreneurial bildungsroman of Faceberg and Dorsey, that they give us existence within the global community they benevolently foster. [...]