The Four

respectively, rule offline and online retail. And it certainly doesn’t hurt
that when Google reaches into our pockets, it’s mostly for pennies,
nickels, and dimes. It’s the antithesis of a luxury company—it’s
available to everyone, anywhere, whether they are rich or poor, genius
or slow. We don’t care how big and dominant Google has become,
because our experience of it is small, intimate, and personal. And if it
turns those pennies into tens of billions of revenue, and hundreds of
billions in shareholder value, we aren’t resentful—as long as it gives us
answers and makes our brains seem smarter. It is the winner, and its
shareholder benefit stems from the brain’s winner-take-all economy.
Google gives the consumer the best answer, for less, more quickly than
any organization in history. The brain can’t help but love Google.
If Google represents the brain, Amazon is a link between the brain
and our acquisitive fingers—our hunter-gatherer instinct to acquire
more stuff. At the dawn of history, better tools meant an improved and
longer life. Historically, the more stuff we had, the more secure and
successful we felt. We felt safer from our enemies and superior to our
friends and neighbors. And who could ask for more? People dismiss
Starbucks’ success as simply “delivering caffeine to addicts.” But
caffeine is Nicorette compared to the heroin of shopping.
Facebook, by contrast, appeals to our hearts. Not in the manner
that the Tide brand appeals to your maternal instincts of love, but in
that it connects us with friends and family. Facebook is the world’s
connective tissue: a combination of our behavioral data and ad
revenue that underwrites a Google-like behemoth. However, unlike
Google, Facebook is all about emotion. Human beings are social
creatures; we aren’t built to be alone. Take us away from family and
friends and, research has shown, we’ll have a greater chance of
depression and mental illness, and a shorter life.
Facebook’s genius was not just in giving us yet another place on
the web to establish our identities, but also the tools to enable us to
enrich that presentation—and to reach out to others in our circle. It
has long been known that people exist in groups of a finite and specific
size. The numbers repeat themselves throughout human history, from
the size of a Roman legion to the population of a medieval village...
to our number of friends on Facebook. These numbers have a very
human source: we typically have one mate (2 people), the people we