Time person of the year: Peoples choice Assange. Editors choice Zuckerberg
Time person of the year choice is interesting.
Peoples choice was Julian Assange, the notorious anti-corruption whistle blower. The editors choice however was Mark Zuckerberg, who is not without controversy himself.
We all know the story of wikileaks founder Assange by now, and his precarious legal situation. The governments of nearly every country in the world are divided into either casting him as devil or saint. It takes no stretch of the conspiratorial imagination to posit that every dirty trick in the book is being thrown into getting him incarcerated. Wikileaks say they're doing it for the public good. Regardless of your views on the veracity of that claim, it's hard to argue against the intention. Wikileaks appears to be fighting corruption, even if you don't agree with how they go about it.
Zuckerberg received early funding from CIA venture capital wing. More precisely, facebook received early startup money from a branch of In-Q-Tel. Though an independant company, in the words of the CIA director: "CIA identifies pressing problems, and In-Q-Tel provides the technology to address them." Though facebook isn't publicly identified as one of part of their investment portfolio, it's fairly easy to follow the money, and this is precisely what many journalists and conspiracy theorists have done.
Links to the CIA have a dark conspiracy stigma at the best of times. Some have gone as far as to posit that facebook is a gigantic profiling network designed to spy on the worlds citizens. In effect it is, though probably for self interest rather than for the spooks. It's naive to think everything with a CIA link is sinister - I even have a CIA published app on my ipod. (The world factbook - a great reference.)
Facebook has become a part of our lives now, and being ubiquitous, doesn't seem so sinister. Still, on a monthly basis the company finds itself in trouble over various privacy issues and resale of data. Given it's approach to private information as currency of business value, it stands in stark contrast to Wikileaks approach to revealing secret data for the public good.
Recently Zuckerberg has been throwing money around at the public good himself. Bailing out the New Jersey school system and pledging half his wealth to charity are significant acts altruism. Don't get me wrong here, Mark Zuckerberg is probably a nice guy at heart. Facebook is probably not entirely evil, though you can't be a billion dollar business without being a little bit evil - that's just statistics. Every bar of gold has it's impurities.
So this little rant isn't about if either Julian Assange or Mark Zuckerberg are either devils or saints. It's about Time Magazine's choice to choose Zuckerberg over the popular choice of Assange. Pundits are positing that the facebook founder would be a less controversial choice. Methinks they are mistaken.
Just as governments (and notably the Swedish legal system) are drawing criticism for how they react to Assange and Wikileaks, Time Magazine will too. The controversy and conspiracy over wikileaks is now so hot that one becomes a part of it even by omission. The alternate of Zuckerberg may be the worst choice, as it's virtually perfect troll bait for conspiracy buffs, and sure to cause old facebook controversy to resurface in public discourse.
Government censure pressures on the press have been dangerously close to tripping over first amendment rights. Conspiracy buffs are already twitchy, and even the conservative press becomes radicalized under such pressures.
How will it effect public perception of this editorial decision? Only time will tell. :)
