Fucklear Physics of Facebook

Western IT-newspapers are shitting bricks – a “mysterious Russian” Yuri Milner, CEO and Founding Partner of DST, addressed a meeting at Techcrunch Disrupt conference. Yuri Milner has already impressed the world with his investments in Facebook, Zynga, ICQ and Groupon. He also promised to spend his next billion on buying a pack of leading projects, probably including Twitter.

In his speech at the conference Yuri drew a really fantastic picture of the future Facebook domination: “Facebook is next step of creating a huge human brain to embrace hundreds of million, possibly billions of people. Facilitate exchange of information never seen in history of civilization... it’s going to be one social graph that is unifying all civilization"

Yet, Yuri Miller revealed an amazing scientific discovery called “Zuckerberg’s law”, similar to Moore’s law: "Every 12-18 months the amount of information being shared between people is doubling".

I am not going to write here about the limits that have shoot down Moore’s Law, but if we are offered to play analogies to physics – here we go.

Physicists in Disguise Plot

Having come back to Russia from the US in the mid 90s, I found out that most of my ex-classmates from physical-mathematical school and University had gone into business. Someone began with vouchers, someone with kiosks; as long as there was a number of great physicists and mathematicians among them, they soon found most effective models. At that point science helped them a lot.

For instance, what is a nuclear bomb explosion about? First of all, it is an exothermic nuclear reaction, in other words a nuclear atom transformation which comes along with great release of energy. Secondly, it is an intense chain reaction that involves other atoms to fission.

And what is a financial pyramid? - The same thing. Money is "energy" that has to be taken away from an "atom" - a human being; and preferably from many of them. To accomplish it, we need to start a chain reaction where everyone who gets “fissioned” automatically drags other candidates in the process. Here I am saying “hi” to those who established MMM (the most famous Ponzi scheme fraud in Russia's 90s).

It were nuclear physicists who, being bored without money after the end of Cold War, made “Uranium fuel” for the first nuclear internet-explosion. Before that the Internet had been different. It had naturally developed with mail lists, news groups and conferences. And only in 1991 in CERN, the main European Organization for Nuclear Research, the guy named Timothy Berners-Lee created an infernal machine called WWW (reminds of MMM, doesn’t it?). Links to and from everywhere and everything, crazy cohesion. Later Stanislaw Lem called it a “The Megabit Bomb”.

Not only old man Lee was in it. It took a couple of more physicists to truly develop a new weapon against humankind.

You surely know about the “Long Tail Theory”. It says that earlier only giant corporations could use media influence. And now Google context advertisement lets even a granny with 20$ reach her consumer. Chris Anderson, Senior Editor of Wired magazine, became the main popularizer of this theory. In the past Chris Anderson used to be a physicist in a Los-Alamos National laboratory (the place where Manhattan Project was being brought into life, in other words where first nuclear bombs were made).

As a matter of practice, the “Long Tail Theory” turns out to be the “Dirty Tail Theory” – just another pyramid, letting one giant to rob all the grannies even more than several corporations did (with clickbots, "auto match" and some other web-trafficing tricks that the poor grannies from Long Tail have no idea about).

The next wonderful concept of a boisterous physicist Chris Anderson is "Freeconomics" which turned into common stealing. Praising the future of free products and services, Anderson simply stole texts from Wikipedia and began selling the other's free work under the guise of his book called “Free”. Being an idol of an IT-generation, he personally showed how it is easy to become rich from the User Generated Content pyramid: they give it for free, you sell in for money.

Finally, let's come back to our, so to say, shoed-over-again colleagues. Yuri Milner, graduated from Moscow State University physics department, has a degree in theoretical physics, he conducted research at the Institute of physics in the Russian Academy of Sciences, then quote as saying “is out of conceit with myself as a physicist”. Come on, why being that modest? “Menatep” CEO, an author of the first Russian open tender offer for a public company in post Soviet times – that’s the real physics of a fission chain reaction.

On the Internet, Yuri Milner is known as a buyer of projects based on the latest “nuclear model” version. Timothy Berners-Lee and Chris Anderson have taught how to fission some content (as profitable "energy") from people; Milner deals with so-called "social" services where people give in their personal data (as a new type of profitable "energy") and involve friends to do the same (chain reaction). For the last two years the biggest amount of spam I have received, was from Facebook. And it’s impossible to get rid of it with common filters, because it works as “personal invitations”.

Chernobyl Ghosts

At the beginning of 2008 crises, when Americans started to cry about a “nuclear winter” waiting for their startups, we at Webplanet.ru made a forecast - Russian Oligarchs would get down to buying overblown western Internet projects. By the way, what a good expression they Americans found - “nuclear winter” - for it precisely describes the crises blow-up mechanism on financial markets; as it has been aforementioned, atomic bombs and financial pyramids work the same way. However, two years later, as if nothing had happened, these Yankees praise a new Internet bomb with the same mechanism (Last year Facebook went down on Hiroshima Day. Just another nuclear coincidence, huh?)

Yet I think this social nets euphoria will pass off soon. It is possible that “nuclear” analogies won’t be needed. DST Fund staff mainly consists of Goldman Sachs analysts, and this financial institution has already become the center of several scandals because of its “progressive” ways of earnings. Don’t know whether they promised to make a “global financial brain of the entire civilization”, but lately there have been some clear signs of problems with this brain. To be brief, it doesn’t have the best reputation.

As for the DST social networks themselves, a knock-down might happen pretty soon, too. Russian forums are full of complaints about viruses blackmailing the users of “Vkontakte” (a Russian Facebook clone invested by DST, too).

As for Facebook, it has been overwhelmed with so many things lately, such as legal claims about unfair games, new viruses and this story about user profiles that Mr Zuckerberg is to sell to advertisers. Facebook advertisement model itself is being described as a Ponzi scheme. For those who don’t know yet, 31 May is expected to be "Quit Facebook Day".

And one more thing, Yuri – stop sending me your spam under the veil of “Facebook invitations”. In my opinion, it’s a shameful technique, both for the "whole civilization super-brain" and for a graduate of a decent physics department.