Facebook Billionaire Sean Parker Hates The World He Helped Create

This summer, tech billionaire Sean Parker, better known as Justin Timberlake in The Social Network, got married. It was a lavish affair that involved outfitting himself, his bride, and all of the 300+ guests in Lord of the Rings-inspired attire and transforming a Big Sur hotel’s redwood-filled backyard into a fantastical forest sanctuary for the ceremony. People like to criticize weddings. People especially like to criticize costume-party weddings that involve famous people that result in the newlyweds paying a $2.5 million fine to Mother Earth/California regulators. So there’s been a lot written about the Parker nuptials in the weeks since the June 1 affair. And Parker is not happy about it.

Not content to let the story be pushed out of the news cycle by the NSA, Parker penned a 9,000+ word piece — that’s 20 pages single-spaced in Microsoft Word — for TechCrunch, defending his wedding, explaining his deep love of Tolkien and the redwoods, criticizing the press for mis-characterizing the damage done to the forest, and generally lamenting the state of journalism and privacy in the age of social media. The last bit is worth parsing for readers of these pages.

[B]logs attack you, do their damage, and then move on to their next target. Now, because of the permanence of the Internet and the ease of Google, these vicious online attacks leave behind a reputational stain that is very difficult to wash out.

This is true. If you do try to wash it, you may make it worse. This guy, for example. After being named (but not ultimately prosecuted) in a reputation-tarnishing criminal case, Phineas Upham spent thousands of dollars on a company that promised to fix his online footprint with fake glowing news articles and websites, but the money was wasted because those articles and websites resulted in Upham’s becoming the focus of a long New York Magazine piece on “black ops reputation management.” It led a writer at Techdirt to admonish famous people who try to scrub their reputations; trying to push the delete button on the Internet is a lot like trying to wash a silk stain with water — it makes it spread more.

Back to Parker:

We chose a setting for our wedding that was a literal expression of our search for sanctuary: a place that was safe, private, and intimate. We chose a remote location (Big Sur), invited no press, and did our best to conceal that location from the press. We didn’t court attention – quite the opposite, we asked guests to check their cell phones and cameras at the door and we didn’t sell our photos to tabloids.

If they wanted a really private wedding, Parker should have looked to his Facebook partner-in-crime, Mark Zuckerberg, who held his wedding in his backyard and kept it a secret from the guests until they arrived. Once you invite tailors to hand-craft elven costumes for your guests, it becomes difficult to control those privacy settings.

Parker says he is not oblivious. He realizes that, as an early force behind Facebook, he helped lead the way into a less-private world, and that he friended many a Ben Franklin as a result.

Economically speaking I came out on top. I have been one of the greatest individual beneficiaries of this seismic shift in media. I have made, quite literally, “a billion dollars,” which, as I’m constantly reminded by the media, is “cool.” But I’m the first to admit that this shift away from a centralized, top-down media towards a decentralized bottom-up media, did not come without a cost. At some point in time everyone, whether they engage actively with these new mediums or not, will experience a violation of their privacy, will find their reputation besmirched publicly, and may even find their sanity challenged by some combination of these factors.

Yes, one of those Facebook photos will come back to haunt you one day…. And unlike Parker, you won’t necessarily be able to tell yourself that at least you made a gazillion dollars as a result.

Regardless, I can’t escape the feeling that there is a kind of cosmic irony at work here. Readers of this publication are likely familiar with my career in the technology sector. I have spent more than a decade creating products built on the premise that the democratization of media was a good thing, that self-publishing, the free sharing of information, and the removal of the media “gatekeepers,” would all lead to a freer, more open media—with the implied assumption that this was a “better” media. I practiced what I preached, both talking about and designing systems around the core belief that empowering people with the tools to more freely access and share information – be it music, links, photos, text, or any other form of media – could only make the world a better place.

It certainly makes the world a less-private place. Transparency has been a virtue espoused by the social networking set for years. ‘Sunlight is the best disinfectant’ is an oft-cited motto. The new transparent world order makes it much harder to control information, which is great, until it happens to you.

Read More Here: Forbes

Credits: Forbes