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Facebook has two billion users, two-thirds of whom use it everyday. That’s just one of the jaw-dropping statistics in a John Lanchester long-read for the London Review of Books.
The main focus of the essay is on just how much Facebook knows about it’s users – Lanchester calls it the “biggest surveillance-based enterprise in the history of mankind”. Also of interest is something he reveals about the first outsider to invest in Facebook – the Silicon Valley venture capitalist, Peter Thiel:
“Thiel’s $500,000 investment in 2004 was crucial to the success of the company. But there was a particular reason Facebook caught Thiel’s eye, rooted in a byway of intellectual history. In the course of his studies at Stanford – he majored in philosophy – Thiel became interested in the ideas of the US-based French philosopher René Girard, as advocated in his most influential book, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World. Girard’s big idea was something he called ‘mimetic desire’. Human beings are born with a need for food and shelter. Once these fundamental necessities of life have been acquired, we look around us at what other people are doing, and wanting, and we copy them. In Thiel’s summary, the idea is ‘that imitation is at the root of all behaviour’.”
“…The reason Thiel latched onto Facebook with such alacrity was that he saw in it for the first time a business that was Girardian to its core: built on people’s deep need to copy.”
Lanchester’s description of Girard’s philosophy as a “byway of intellectual history” is apt in that the intellectual establishment – especially in America – is immensely more impressed with Girard’s compatriot and contemporary, the post-modernist Jacques Derrida.
It’s typical of Thiel – an iconoclastic libertarian who dissents from Silicon’s Valley’s modish liberalism – to go against the flow. And yet the basic truth of Girard’s account of human nature and history should be obvious; anyone who has children can see that the “deep need to copy” is fundamental to who we are.
Perhaps the reason why Girard’s philosophy isn’t more widely taught is that it stems from a Biblical worldview:
“Girard was a Christian, and his view of human nature is that it is fallen. We don’t know what we want or who we are; we don’t really have values and beliefs of our own; what we have instead is an instinct to copy and compare. We are Homo mimeticus. ‘Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and who turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires.’ Look around, ye petty, and compare.”
Consider the Biblical account of the fall from Eden, in particular the third chapter of the book of Genesis in which Satan, in the form of a serpent, persuades Eve to eat the forbidden fruit. Crucially the snake’s clinching argument was an appeal to the ultimate in ‘mimetic desire’: “…and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
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