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Attenborough, Neill, and Dern all play their characters as good actors should.But Jeff Goldblum simply plays Jeff Goldblum, as he always does.He gets around, from inserting a virus from a very old Mac into an invading alien spaceship , to running his own garbage planet , to commenting on chaos theory at a dinosaur-themed amusement park .But no matter what role he plays, he’s always Jeff Goldblum.
Mark Zuckerberg is like that.
Whether he plays the founder of Facebook, Internet activist , or cryptocurrency banker, he always plays Mark Zuckerberg.No matter what role he’s playing in public, he’s always claiming support for privacy .Yet he consistently behaves in a way that reduces his credibility .
So Goldblum is always Goldblum, and Zuckerberg is always Zuckerberg.Zuckerberg’s most recent nascent crime against humanity is Libra, a cryptocurrency not entirely backed by Facebook (wink-wink).
Also: Big bad Libra: Do we really need (or want) Facebook to reinvent money?
We talked about Libra extensively in June .
Beyond the loosely coupled Facebook connection, what made Libra so newsworthy was the herd of partners and backers of this new form of money.
Backers were supposed to pay a cool $10 million in real dollars to join the Libra Association , whose members were to be the primary operators and beneficiaries of Zuckerbuck transaction fees and value increases.
While many of the founding members read like a list of wannabe VC-funded cryptocurrency speculators, the big names were Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, Stripe, and eBay.It’s important to note that while these entities are among the primary movers of money among consumers, they are not banks.No banks joined the Libra Association, a fact I found quite telling in my initial, skeptical analysis .
To understand why Libra, in Zuckerberg’s hands, is so disturbing, it’s helpful to understand Facebook’s full scope and influence.
Based on last January’s Q4 report , Facebook has more than 1.5 billion daily active users and 2.32 billion monthly active users.In other words, a population greater than China uses Facebook daily.A population roughly the size of China plus India (the world’s two most populous countries) uses Facebook monthly.
In the US and Canada, as of last December, 186 million citizens use Facebook daily.That’s a population larger than the count of every single working American and Canadian .
But when it comes to Facebook’s influence, it’s important to pay attention to how folks get their news.
According to a recent Pew study , 55% of Americans sometimes or often get their news from social media.And the social media platform with the most influence? Of course, that’s Facebook.
About 52% of Americans get their news from Facebook.
So not only does Facebook know your family and friends, your interests, your likes and dislikes, Facebook also has an outsized influence on the news you use to form judgements about the world around you.Worse, as we reported back in 2017 , nine out of ten Americans don’t fact check information they read on social media.Pretty much anything can be prioritized on Facebook based on individual biases, and most Americans will believe it as if it floated directly down from the sky on clay tablets.
None of this is news.But when Facebook decided to use that influence to create its own currency, hairs rose on the backs of necks worldwide.
I described it as, “Don’t worry.
That slightly nauseous feeling is normal.It’s just a side effect of the rational response to yet something else in our world beginning to go terribly, terribly wrong.”
Governments , as I predicted, were less than thrilled about Libra.Less than thrilled is an understatement.France is wary of it.Singapore wants to regulate it.When Donald Trump and Congresswoman Maxine Waters (the California Democrat who has demanded that the President be placed in “solitary confinement”) agree on anything, you know it’s got to be bad.
Even so, the plans for Facebook’s Libra kept lumbering along throughout the summer months, despite the many concerns.
But now, it appears that an extinction-level event may kill off Libra.Over the past week, all the principle money-moving partners in Libra backed out.
PayPal , Mastercard, Visa, Stripe, and eBay all pulled out of the Libra project.
Also: Mastercard, Visa, eBay, Stripe drop out of Facebook’s Libra project
It makes sense.When a currency play is deemed a “serious concern” by the US Federal Reserve , the serious money players are likely to scatter across the field as if they were being chased by a T-Rex.
The fact is, though, Libra is not dead yet.Facebook, notorious for its privacy and data security scandals , should not be allowed to create a currency that might be used by the majority of the population.Like the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park , we all know it’s a very bad idea.executive guide.