I saw it Tuesday morning, scrolling through Facebook with my coffee already going cold next to the laptop, the way it does basically every day now. Mark Zuckerberg had a baby. Her name is Max. And instead of doing the normal thing, posting a blurry hospital photo like the rest of us mortals, he and Priscilla Chan published an actual letter to her. On Facebook. Addressed to an infant who cannot read and will not be able to read for a couple years at minimum. In it they announced theyre giving away 99% of their Facebook shares over their lifetimes, something like $45 billion depending on the stock price that day, to a new thing called the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
I want to be cynical about this and Im only about sixty percent successful at it. The number is genuinely enormous, more money than I will see in fifty lifetimes, and the letter itself reads less like a corporate press release and more like something a new parent actually writes at 3am when theyre thinking too hard about the future. Which, fine, I get that impulse. I wrote something similar in the notes app on my phone the week my nephew was born, except mine didnt come with a pledge to restructure global education and it definitely wasnt read by two hundred million people by lunchtime.
Heres the part that actually bugs me though, and its not the money. Its that this letter, this deeply personal document about his kid, got slotted into my News Feed between an ad for a mattress company and a photo my cousin posted of her dog in a sweater, all ranked by the same algorithm that decides I probably dont need to see my actual friends posts anymore because Ive apparently "engaged" more with pages than people this month. Facebook has spent years tuning that feed to show me what keeps me scrolling, and this week what kept me scrolling was its own founder being vulnerable in public. Theres something a little strange about that loop, a billionaire using the machine he built to distribute a message about generosity, and the machine doing exactly what its designed to do regardless of the message.
The other thing eating up everyones bandwidth this week is Adele, which has nothing and also everything to do with the same story. 25 came out back on November 20th and by the end of that first week shed sold something like 3.4 million copies in the US alone, physical and digital, and shes still refusing to put it on Spotify. Not delayed, not windowed, just not there. Apple Music doesnt have it either as of right now. Ive read three different think pieces this week about what this "means" for streaming and Im not sure it means anything except that Adele sells a lot of records and her label figured out that scarcity still works when the artist is big enough. I bought the CD. An actual CD, from an actual store, because I wanted the liner notes and I am apparently one of maybe four people under 40 who still cares about liner notes.
And underneath both of those is a third thing nobody's really talking about yet but everyone can feel: Star Wars tickets. The Force Awakens doesnt come out until the 18th but Fandangos been breaking its own presale records since October and the ticket lines for the actual opening weekend are already turning into a whole logistics project for people I know. My coworker Dave has a spreadsheet. An actual spreadsheet, with tabs, for which theater and which showtime and who's bringing snacks. Ive never seen a grown man take a movie release this seriously and I say that as someone who once drove forty minutes to a midnight release of a video game in 2009.
None of these three things are related except that they all happened in the same week and they all involve some version of the same question, which is what happens when something enormous, a fortune, an album, a movie fans have waited a decade for, gets funneled through the exact same feeds and platforms as everything else, sitting one scroll away from a mattress ad. I dont have a tidy answer for that. Im just noticing it, mostly because Im avoiding actual work today and this is the closest thing Ive got to a coherent thought before 11am. My coffee is cold again. Im going to go microwave it, which never actually works, the texture gets weird, and I do it anyway every single time.