The Nation — October 30, 2017

4 The Nation. October 30, 2017

Antitrust Facebook

The social-media giant’s power is unprecedented.

O

n June 27, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder

and CEO of Facebook, announced that

“the Facebook community is now officially

2 billion people!” It took the platform

a little more than eight years to reach 1

billion users, and then less than five years to reach the

second billion. Close to two-thirds of users visit the site

at least once a day. There is no other human entity on

earth as big as Facebook—no country, no business, no

single religious denomination.

Once it was said that poets are the unacknowledged

legislators of the world. In our digital age, coders are the

unacknowledged legislators, determining the rules and

pathways that we use to connect with one another. And

one coder, Zuckerberg, is the unacknowledged president

of the largest nation on earth, which I call Facebookistan.

Because Zuckerberg has hired two buckraking cam-

paign operatives, David Plouffe and Ken Mehlman,

to advise him, and because he’s been traveling around

America on a “listening tour,” many have speculated

that he is planning to run for president of the United

States. But this is using a 20th-century lens to look at a

21st-century phenomenon. As someone who zealously

protects his own privacy, Zuckerberg would never submit

to the rituals of an American presidential campaign. Be-

sides, with two-thirds of American adults on Facebook,

and with 43 percent saying that online social networks

are where they often get their news, Zuckerberg already

has all the power he needs. In Algeria, Argentina, Aus-

tralia, Bahrain, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia,

the European Union, Ecuador, Iceland, Indonesia, Is-

rael, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Malaysia, Mexico, New

Zealand, Norway, Peru, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia,

Taiwan, Thailand, Tunisia, and Vietnam, Facebook is the

dominant online social network, with anywhere from 40

to 90 percent of the local population using it. Like the

Lawnmower Man, a fictional character who defeats his

adversaries by uploading his consciousness to the world’s

live in a world where the risk of nuclear weapons being

used is greater than it has been for a long time.” All this

makes the task of repudiating such insanity and reinforc-

ing the taboo against their use that much more urgent.

This year’s awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize

to ICAN should be viewed, then, as a moment to

celebrate a genuine accomplishment on the road to

peace as well as a call for redoubled efforts to bolster

the taboo against the use of nuclear weapons. Among

other things, this means supporting ICAN in its drive

to press for worldwide ratification of the nuclear-ban

treaty while also pressuring our representatives to

eliminate Trump’s ability to launch a nuclear first strike

without congressional authorization—a measure intro-

duced by Senator Edward Markey and Representative

Ted Lieu—and to combat the president’s bellicose

stance on North Korea.

that the North “will be met with fire and fury and, frank-

ly, power the likes of which this world has never seen

before”—an unmistakable reference to nuclear weapons.

The hints of nuclear enthusiasm on both sides

have proliferated ever since. In his address to the

UN General Assembly on September 19, Trump be-

littled Kim and warned that if provoked, “we will have

no choice but to totally destroy North Korea.” Kim

responded three days later by describing Trump as

“mentally deranged” and said the North would prepare

the “highest level of hard-line countermeasure in his-

tory.” Since then, North Korea has advised Japan that

it will be “sunken into the sea by the nuclear bomb”

if it continued its support for US policies, and warned

that the United States itself will be reduced to “ashes

and darkness.”

The path to increased nuclear- weapons acceptance

will be further cleared by Trump’s expected decision to

“decertify” Iran’s compliance with the 2015 nuclear ac-

cord, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan

of Action (JCPOA). Under the plan, Iran agreed to curb

its uranium- enrichment program for 15 years and to take

other steps aimed at eradicating its capacity to produce

materials for nuclear weapons—all under international

inspection—in return for the suspension of economic

sanctions imposed by the United States and the Euro-

pean Union. In decertifying Iranian compliance, Trump

will claim that Tehran has violated the “spirit” of the

agreement by continuing its missile buildup and aiding

insurgent groups such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and the

Houthis in Yemen—activities not proscribed by the agree-

ment. Under US law, Congress will then have the author-

ity to reimpose sanctions, a step that would constitute de

facto annulment of the agreement. Congress could also

call upon the administration to renegotiate the agreement,

a step that is likely to go nowhere,

as the other signatories—Britain,

France, Germany, Russia, China,

and the European Union—have

expressed satisfaction with the

JCPOA and Iran’s compliance

with it.

The danger in all this is that

anti- Iranian hard- liners in Con-

gress—Democrats as well as

Republicans—will eventually

vote to reimpose sanctions on

Iran, leading Tehran to abandon

the JCPOA and, under pressure

from its own hard- liners, resume nuclear enrichment.

This could lead in two directions, both equally fright-

ening: Iran could eventually acquire nuclear weapons,

leading other nations in the area to do so as well; or the

United States and Israel, alone or together, could attack

Iranian nuclear and military facilities before they reach

full weapons capacity, sparking a regional conflagration.

There is no doubt that we have entered an era of

greater nuclear-weapons acceptance on the part of major

world leaders—and this, in a moment of crisis, could

make the difference between restraint and impulsiveness.

As Nobel Committee chair Reiss-Andersen stated: “We

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“Is there

anything

on this

planet more

political

than food?

No, there

is not. Who

eats? Who

doesn’t

eat?”


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chef, author,

TV host, and

producer of a new

documentary on the

world’s “shocking”

level of wasted food

We have

entered an

era of greater

nuclear-

weapons

acceptance by

major world

leaders.