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Mark Zuckerberg, Harvard's most famous dropout, returned to the leafy college campus he left behind nearly 12 years ago for Facebook to make an urgent appeal to his generation, millennial to millennial: Don't just seek out your own sense of purpose. Create a world in which everyone can.
"To keep our society moving forward, we have a generational challenge — to not only create new jobs, but create a renewed sense of purpose," Zuckerberg told Harvard graduates on Thursday. "It's not enough to have purpose yourself. You also have to create a sense of purpose for others."
The commencement address, for which he prepared for weeks, was delivered in the pouring rain. It nodded to growing disillusionment by everyday Americans who have watched the gains of the economic recovery pass them by.
"When our parents graduated, purpose reliably came from your job, your church, your community," Zuckerberg said. "But today, technology and automation are eliminating many jobs. Membership in communities is declining. Many people feel disconnected and depressed and are trying to fill a void.
"As I've traveled around, I've sat with children in juvenile detention and opioid addicts, who told me their lives could have turned out differently if they just had something to do, an after school program or somewhere to go. I've met factory workers who know their old jobs aren't coming back and are trying to find their place."
The remarks, delivered in suit and tie, not his customary gray T-shirt and jeans and at a podium without a teleprompter, focused heavily on harnessing this generation's entrepreneurial spirit to push for big ideas and big projects, equal economic opportunity for all and a global community that crosses borders and ideologies.
That's an idea, the power of entrepreneurship and innovation to change lives, that's deeply personal for the 33-year-old Facebook founder and chief executive who has pledged to give away most of his wealth in his lifetime to address some of the most pressing problems of the planet, from climate change and curing diseases to income inequality and criminal justice reform, while running the multibillion-dollar corporation he started in his college dorm room.
Global voice
While he denies he's aiming for a stint in politics or for the West Wing, and he takes great pains to avoid the appearance of partisanship, Zuckerberg was clearly sending a political message, not just to the sea of graduates gathered in cap and gown in Cambridge, Mass., but to the much larger audience that tuned into the livestream on his Facebook page. And that message, which included a call for affordable health care and childcare, immigrant rights, personalized education, sharing our genomes to advance scientific research, allowing everyone to vote online and testing out new concepts such as universal basic income, will undoubtedly again raise questions about his political ambitions.
The commencement address is the latest illustration of the hybrid role Zuckerberg is carving out for himself in public life, not just as a leader of a global company but as a global voice whose influence is being felt beyond Silicon Valley in the spheres of politics and the economy. That's much like the political entrepreneurs and philanthropic chieftains from the tech world who came before him such as Dave Packard and Bill Gates, says Margaret O'Mara, professor of history at the University of Washington.
Zuckerberg this year has embarked on a multi-state tour to put him back in touch with Americans and Facebook users at the farm dinner table, NASCAR track and on the factory floor, worlds from which he's been isolated since moving to Silicon Valley, if not before.
"Mark Zuckerberg is a face and voice of the millennial generation that expresses and acts upon a very strong sense of social consciousness," O'Mara said. "He's both a product of history and someone who's reflecting a current moment."
There were moments of levity in his commencement address. Zuckerberg joked: "If i get through this speech today, it will be the first time I actually finish something at Harvard."
And the delivery did not come without a couple of pratfalls. That morning the student newspaper's website was hacked to troll the Facebook CEO. Then when Facebook streamed the commencement address live, the captions provided by Harvard were gibberish.
Time for a new social contract
But the bulk of the address revolved around three challenges Zuckerberg threw down to Harvard graduates:
—Give everyone "the cushion" they need to try new things.
"Today we have a level of wealth inequality that hurts everyone. When you don't have the freedom to take your idea and turn it into a historic enterprise, we all lose," he said. "Let's face it. There is something wrong with our system when I can leave here and make billions of dollars in 10 years when millions of students can't even afford to pay off their loans, let alone start a business."
Zuckerberg also owned up to his privilege as a white, upwardly mobile suburban kid who could drop out of Harvard to pursue a start-up idea in Silicon Valley. That lesson hit home when he taught a middle-school program on entrepreneurship at the Boys and Girls Club in East Palo Alto. He says he taught the kids product development and marketing. They taught him what it was like to be targeted for your race and having a family member in prison.
"If I had to support my family growing up instead of having the time to learn how to code, if I didn't know I'd be fine if Facebook didn't work out, then I wouldn't be standing up here today. If we're honest, we all know how much luck we've had to get to this point in our lives," he said. "Every generation expand its definition of equality previous generations fought for the vote and civil rights. They had the New Deal and Great Society, and now it's time for our generation to define a new social contract."
"And yes, giving everyone the freedom to pursue purpose isn't going to be free. People like me should pay for it. A lot of you are going to do well and you should, too."
—Take on "generating defining" projects, the millennial version of putting a man on the moon, eradicating polio or building the Hoover Dam.
"These projects didn't just provide purpose for the people doing those jobs, they gave our whole country a sense of pride that we could do great things," he said.
—Build a global community. "When our generation says 'everyone,' we mean everyone in the world," Zuckerberg said, returning to his theme of the forces of freedom, openness and community fighting the forces of authoritarianism, isolationism and nationalism without naming President Trump.
"In a survey asking millennials around the world what defines our identity, the most popular answer wasn't nationality, religion or ethnicity, it was 'citizen of the world.' That's a big deal."
"This is not a battle of nations, it's a battle of ideas," he said. "It's going to happen at the local level, when enough of us feel a sense of purpose and stability in our own lives that we can open up and start caring about everyone. The best way to do that is to start building local communities right now."
Zuckerberg's mission
Like Apple's Steve Jobs before him, who famously evangelized the age of the personal computer and told Stanford graduates in 2005 to "stay hungry, stay foolish," Zuckerberg is evangelizing connecting the world, draping himself in the "change the world" rhetoric that's earnest and common in Silicon Valley, but which of course is also very good for Facebook's business, O'Mara said. The positioning comes as Facebook is taking flack for acting as an accelerant for extremist ideology, hate speech, violence and fabricated news.
One of the world's richest men at the helm of one of the world's largest market values, Zuckerberg did not allude to the vast fortunes of Facebook, instead insisting his hope was never to build a company "but to make an impact."
Yet Facebook, which makes billions from getting people to open up about their lives, stands to directly benefit from hooking the world to the Internet, not to mention its other mobile apps Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp.
And its success has played a role in the feelings of loss and dislocation that were expressed at the polls in November.
Like the industrial revolution before it, the Internet revolution is at the root of many economic struggles today, generating "huge fortunes and huge inequality on the scale of the late 19th and early 20th centuries," says Michael McGerr, professor of history at Indiana University in Bloomington.
"We are starting to see now how much social unrest it may generate," McGerr said. "In the circumstances, we might expect to see the Silicon Valley rich start to worry more about inequality and to move to improve or reform society."
At the close of his commencement address, Zuckerberg zeroed in on a subject that is close to his heart: immigration. Fighting back tears, he recalled a young man he mentored who feared he could not attend college because he was undocumented. Zuckerberg treated the young man to breakfast on his birthday and asked what he wanted as a gift. The young man responded: "a book on social justice."
"I was blown away. Here's a young man who has every reason to be cynical. He didn't know if the country he calls home — the only one he's known — would deny him his dream of going to college. But he wasn't feeling sorry for himself. He wasn't even thinking about himself," Zuckerberg said. "He has a greater sense of purpose and he's going to bring people along with him."
(USA TODAY)
