The most important thing Facebook can do

From the lips, or more likely the keyboard of Mark Zuckerberg:

“It’s easy to understand how we got here. Video and other public content have exploded on Facebook in the past couple of years. Since there’s more public content than posts from your friends and family, the balance of what’s in News Feed has shifted away from the most important thing Facebook can do — help us connect with each other.”

It triggered a flashback to the words of a late friend shared online in February 2008:

“The corporations involved in this almost fantastical deployment of the machines and communications infrastructure that we now rely on profited for themselves and their shareholders, and certainly produced social and economic benefit around the world. Those efforts were and are so profound in influence as to transform human civilization itself. That is the Information Revolution, and it is nothing short of astonishing.So it is safe to say that all these players in the Information Revolution — the enterprises that created it — have engendered almost immeasurable social benefit by way of connecting people of the world together and giving us opportunity to communicate with each other, begin to understand each other, and if we want, try to help each other.”

He goes on to explain the shortcomings, those excluded:

“The term “social enterprise” in the various but similar forms in which it is being used today — 2008 — refers to enterprises created specifically to help those people that traditional capitalism and for profit enterprise don’t address for the simple reason that poor or insufficiently affluent people haven’t enough money to be of concern or interest. Put another way, social enterprise aims specifically to help and assist people who fall through the cracks. Allowing that some people do not matter, as things are turning out, allows that other people do not matter and those cracks are widening to swallow up more and more people. Social enterprise is the first concerted effort in the Information Age to at least attempt to rectify that problem, if only because letting it get worse and worse threatens more and more of us. Growing numbers of people are coming to understand that “them” might equal “me.” Call it compassion, or call it enlightened and increasingly impassioned self-interest. Either way, we are all in this together, and we will each have to decide for ourselves what it means to ignore someone to death, or not.”

I guess you might say he was one of the excluded. In marked contrast with the elitism of Harvard, Terry had been a casualty of the student loans shambles and was never awarded his degree.

Would these two men saying the same thing about connecting with each other actually risk stepping across the social and economic divide and actually connect?

In February 2008 Terry was also writing to the US government appealing for support in his efforts to help economic orphans. He wrote to USAID and others, including the Senate Committee which funds them.

“Welcome to our brave new world. Except it’s not so new: learn to love and respect each other first, especially the weakest, most defenseless, most voiceless among us, then figure out the rest. There aren’t other more important things to do first. This message has been around for at least two thousand years. How difficult is it for us to understand?”

For my part, I was trying to gain support from the UK social enterprise community. I’d approached several prominent business leaders as well. These were as the BBC later put it ‘Ukraine’s Forgotten Children’

‘’Death Camps, for Children’ was published online in 2006, revealing the appalling state of childcare and the corruption which blighted it. It led to a development proposal, a ‘Marshall Plan’ for Ukraine.

“This is a long-term permanently sustainable program, the basis for “people-centered” economic development. Core focus is always on people and their needs, with neediest people having first priority — as contrasted with the eternal chase for financial profit and numbers where people, social benefit, and human well-being are often and routinely overlooked or ignored altogether. This is in keeping with the fundamental objectives of Marshall Plan: policy aimed at hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos. This is a bottom-up approach, starting with Ukraine’s poorest and most desperate citizens, rather than a “top-down” approach that might not ever benefit them. They cannot wait, particularly children. Impedance by anyone or any group of people constitutes precisely what the original Marshall Plan was dedicated to opposing. Those who suffer most, and those in greatest need, must be helped first — not secondarily, along the way or by the way. “

Terry died three years later and the civil rights leaders at Maidan knew of the risks he’d taken in speaking out against the extremely wealthy, Ukraine’s insanely greedy oligarchs rather than the American ones.

“On his death bed he was speaking only of his mission — rescuing of these unlucky kids. His dream was to get them new homes filled with care and love. His quest would be continued as he wished.”

Wasn’t Mark Zuckerberg going to do some sort of charity thing. Oh yes, a for profit company for social benefit.

Oddly enough, that was the subject of a position paper Terry wrote while a volunteer on Clinton’s re-election committee. It was the business model we’d used to fund the project in Ukraine. Today it would be more recognisable as a for profit social enterprise, a social purpose business.

Terry’s 1996 paper was about the purpose of business. Isn’t the real purpose of business to benefit people before delivering returns to shareholders?

The fleeting thought struck me — Imagine if Terry and Mark had connected. Those children might not have died, all would have loving family homes. Some of the conditions that led to violent unrest might have been resolved. There might not have been a proxy war. Terry was warning about that too, long before it happened.

Terry’s views don’t represent a ‘boomer’ generation any more than Mark’s represent all ‘millenials’. The message about human connection crosses this marketeer defined boundary:

I leave it to a member of the ‘Great Generation’ to relate what it means when a “push button order” prevails. His closing words — ‘We have to touch people’.

“Somewhere there is a place, where the heart meets face to face with the whole human race, before the last shadows fall”