Zuck you all. Meta’s boss is back in steal mode

This year marks 20 years since Mark Zuckberg launched Facebook, having kicked it off as The Facebook in 2004.

He was already notorious for Facemash, the “hot or not” site that ranked Harvard students by their attractiveness, which he created in late 2003.

Zuckerberg hacked into house face book websites at the university to get the photos and was accused of breaching security and privacy, as well as violating copyright. The student newspaper Harvard Crimson covered the incident, which saw him avoid expulsion, at the time.

“I understood that some parts were still a little sketchy,” Zuckerberg said.

Many will recall – primarily via the film, The Social Network – Facebook’s origin story is also “a little sketchy”.

While the movie is a Hollywood fantasy version of what happened, around the time it came out 15 years ago, Business Insider did its best to unpack the truthiness with more forensic detail having obtained communications by Zuckberberg.

It includes an exchange on instant messaging between Facebook’s founder and a friend about his next steps dealing with a trio behind a similar idea, including the Winklevoss twins of Gemini crypto exchange fame. They sought out Zuckerberg to help build their idea, ConnectU. He said yes, but then stalled as he put TheFacebook into play.

The Facebook CEO and his friend chatted on instant message (IM) about the next steps.

Friend: “So have you decided what you’re going to do about the websites?”

Zuckerberg: “Yeah, I’m going to f*ck them.”

And that’s been his business model ever since. F*ck everyone.

Some would argue he was inspired by the Winklevoss idea. Others might view his actions as a combination of stealth mode and steal mode.

But ever since Zuckerberg’s built a two-decade career based on avoiding accountability and liability. Zuckerberg believes he is untouchable.

He’s currently trying it on with Australian mining billionaire Andrew Forrest, but not having as much luck in US courts.

Successful, valuable, profound, transformative, lucrative – yes, all of those things, but just as Sydney used to put sh*t into a blender then pump it into the sea at Bondi and Manly beaches because it was convenient, at what cost to the rest of us?

Why I am going back into history? Because it gets too easily and quickly forgotten in an era when we lose sight of patterns and cycles, like Crocs now making a comeback from that era.

As Vanity Fair recounted another IM from the Facebook founder, he said: “You can be unethical and still be legal that’s the way I live my life.”

He demonstrated that hacking into ConnectU to create another Cameron Winklevoss account.

Here’s how Vanity Fair recounts it:

“We copied his account like his profile and everything,” he wrote to a friend, “except I made his answers all like white supremacist.”

Two decades later, Zuckerberg is Winklevossing us and more recently, writers.

If you’re old enough to remember the Australian file-sharing platform Kazaa – and there are VC partners in Australia who know it well – you’ll know that copyright fights didn’t end well back in the 2000s.

Fast forward to now and the artificial intelligentsia, such as OpenAI’s Sam Altman, are arguing that they cannot become the world’s richest men without embezzling the work of others to build their business.

Let’s be clear here. They are mugging some of the most poorly remunerated people in the world, writers, artists and other creative people, to become multi-billionaires.

And Zuckerberg is once again bringing his masculine energy to the heist. And he’s happiest stealing from thieves.

AI-based larceny

LibGen, aka Library Genesis, is an online warehouse of stolen intellectual property – from books to academic papers, and other works by writers.

And Zuckerberg, who, when given a choice between the high ground and rolling around in the sewer if it means he’ll make more money, once again chose the turds.

To train Meta’s AI model, Llama 3, he authorised using LibGen – industrial scale larceny of more than 7 million books and 81m research papers – for his smash and grab purloining of IP, along with Anna’s Archive, another pirate site.

The breathtaking audacity from a company worth around US$1.5 trillion, with a US$64 billion profit last year, is that when given a choice, the preference of Zuckerberg, worth US$200 billion is to behave like a street rioter and smash the display window and steal it rather than walk into the store and buy a TV.

This, as the US president wants to jail his citizen for 20 years and deport them for destroying a US$30k Tesla.

We know about Zuckerberg’s penurious mindset because there are already class actions underway over what happened, including one involving novelists Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey and comedian Sarah Silverman.

But the issue came to a head this week when The Atlantic created a LibGen search for people who’d had their work stolen by the site and now Meta. Yes, this writer is among themand it’s financially immaterial from my perspective. But a novelist friend has more than 70 citations for his books.

As he responded when I told him: “It will be my pleasure to join each and every class action arising from this”.

Atlantic writer Alex Reisner laid out the case against Zuckerberg and Meta in a story titled The Unbelievable Scale of AI’s Pirated-Books Problem.

As he wrote: “Meta and OpenAI have both argued in court that it’s ‘fair use’ to train their generative-AI models on copyrighted work without a license, because LLMs ‘transform’ the original material into new work”.

The very billionaires who love to portray themselves as giants of tech love to stand on the shoulders of giants without acknowledging how morally, ethically and intellectually puny they are.

But they’ll become petty thieves to try and prove otherwise.