The following essay is an excerpt adapted from Sen. Josh Hawley’s new book, The Tyranny of Big Tech, out now from Regnery.
When Facebook went public in May of 2012 in what was billed as the initial public offering of the decade—the century!—the company dutifully filed a dutifully boring piece of paperwork known as the Form S-1 registration statement, a compendium of facts and figures, summaries and disclosures, a “risk factors” analysis, “selected consolidated financial data,” “description of capital stock” and so on and so forth. Except this Form S-1 wasn’t boring in the least. This Form S-1 was positively fascinating. This Form S-1 included a thesis statement direct from Big Tech on the new world the technologists hoped to create. It included a letter from Mark Zuckerberg.
Zuckerberg had put pen to paper (so to speak) and in the span of four brief pages, attempted to explain to the vast public just what was before them in this dawning Age of Tech. For the world stood again on the precipice of transformation, Zuckerberg wrote, a transformation as profound as the one occasioned by the arrival of the printing press centuries before. That earlier technology “led to a complete transformation of many important parts of society,” Zuckerberg said. And now “our society has reached another tipping point.” That’s where Facebook came in. “Facebook was not originally created to be a company” at all. Rather: “It was built to accomplish a social mission…”
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