“If anything, turning ourselves into miniature entrepreneurs only allows commercial values to infiltrate spaces that were previously free of them. All of a sudden, people I thought were my friends are trying to sell me shit. In any case, the rhetoric of authenticity is just a more insidious form of commercialism. David Foster Wallace saw this long before there was a Web: how, in an age when everybody’s hip to the pitch, the pitch simply disguises itself as an anti-pitch. Authenticity my ass; the pitch abides.

“When you buy a new phone, it’s in your pocket, but this, you’re wearing something on your face. Anyone that cares what they look like is not gonna wear Google glasses. That’s my opinion,” Madonna said. “If you are super nerdy and you like to show off that you’re in tech and smart and all those things, I can see you probably wearing Google Glasses, but you are probably in a bubble or … new. We’ve all heard all this stuff. Like, this guy moved to SF and he comes to the bar. He’s from Scottsdale and he’s using all these [tech] words. I had to stop him. I said, ‘You sound interesting and different in Phoenix, but you sound boring here. You are cliche.’

“Yet the filmmakers are more interested in showing Jobs going about the work of being a genius. Over and over again, minor characters explain to him why something can’t be done; Kutcher-as-Jobs smiles enigmatically and waves away their concerns. (It is left to someone else, far off screen, to turn his visions into reality.) We watch Jobs out-negotiate a computer parts store owner, lecture the team making the Lisa, and ride to the rescue of the Macintosh. Each time, he speaks of how the technology Apple is building will improve the lives of average people. Co-workers argue with him, but they never get anywhere, because their parts are poorly written and the filmmakers have no interest in showing their subject being wrong about his work. The film mentions Lisa’s failure but has no interest in what part Jobs played in that failure; all Apple failures in “jOBS” are portrayed as the result of conservative, backward-thinking executives beholden only to their shareholders. The result is that the viewer spends two hours watching cardboard cutouts lose arguments to Ashton Kutcher.

“Facebook is taking a different tack. It’s starting with a signal—Likes—that is already corrupted, that in fact has always been corrupted. People routinely Like a thing not because they actually like it, not because they have (to use a favorite Facebook word) any real affiliation with it, but because they’ve been, in one way or another, bribed to Like it.

Like us on Facebook to download our new single! Like us on Facebook to get 10% off your next purchase! Like us on Facebook to get a chapter of our new e-book for free! Like us on Facebook to enter our sweepstakes! Like us on Facebook so our dad will give us a puppy!…

…It might seem kind of strange for a company to build a search engine — a pretty costly undertaking — using criteria that it knows to be debased, to be anything but objective. But to Facebook, it’s business-as-usual. Here’s the difference between Google and Facebook: Larry Page recognized that commercial corruption was a threat to his ideal. For Mark Zuckerberg, commercial corruption is the ideal.