Try as you may, it’s near impossible to separate big business from politics. In neo-liberal capitalist societies, all major decisions are driven by huge amounts of money.
Try as you may, it’s near impossible to separate big business from politics. In neo-liberal capitalist societies, all major decisions are driven by huge amounts of money.
The news that Facebook founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Mark Zuckerberg has announced the formation of a new political party comes as little surprise.
Zuckerberg has teamed up with a host of Silicon Valley hotshots to form Fwd.us (pronounced Forward Us), a political party chiefly aimed at restructuring US immigration laws.
Founder of Causes.com (a social network for community organising) Joe Green is the party president, supported by core party members LinkedIn Corporation CEO Reid Hoffman, venture capitalists John Doerr and Jim Breyer and Ruchi Sanghvi of Dropbox.
According to The Telegraph newspaper, Zuckerberg recently said, “There must be a comprehensive immigration reform that begins with effective border security and allows a path to citizenship”.
The 28-year-old billionaire has previously donated $100 million (R917 million) of his $13 billion fortune to the state school system in New Jersey.
It has been reported that he is willing to use another $20 million (R183 million) on his new Fwd.us venture. Fwd.us has proposed education, immigration and the development of science and technology as their main concerns, looking to garner support from the large number of illegal foreign nationals currently living and working in the US.
Money buys power, and if you have several million dollars to throw around, why not start a political party with a slick new image?
By pandering to the thousands of dispossessed immigrants desperately looking to live their American dream, it seems as if the Fwd.us campaign is just an attempt at tapping into a new market.
If the founder of Facebook and a whole host of social networking gurus appear to be fighting for your rights, why not use their products, fall victim to the rampant advertising now clogging most of the popular social networking sites and in so doing increase their revenue?
Gobbledygeek is a local look at global technology trends. This week’s column was written by Hancu Louw, a fourth-year Journalism and Media Studies student at Rhodes University.
