"People are going to think Mark's odd for doing this - that it's weird or unusual - but I think everyone should hold a knife at least once."
This is farmer Bruce King of Everett, Wash., commenting on Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's decision, announced this week in an e-mail to Fortune, only to eat animals he has killed himself this year.
"I just killed a pig and a goat," Zuckerberg announced, as a sort of teaser, on his personal Facebook page last week. He cut their throats with a knife, believed by some to be the most humane method of slaughter: Prior to this, he began his new diet by boiling a live lobster and intends to hunt bigger game.
His rationale? "Every year in recent memory," he remarks, "I've taken on a personal challenge - something to learn about the world, expand my interests and teach myself greater discipline." One year, he elucidates, he spent an hour a day learning Chinese. One year, he wore a tie every day. Just to clarify: Even on casual Fridays, or walking through the dunes by his $7-million Palo Alto home, he wore a tie.
Such highly disciplined forward-thinking has inspired others to attend such glorious events as Farmer Bruce's erudite-in-name event "Primal to Plate," wherein one chooses and kills the animal of one's choice. "Wear runner boots, rain pants and don't faint," quips the avant-garde farmer, one of many attempting to radicalize the meat-eating experience.
When Zuckerberg announced his "personal challenge," support arrived, all across the board. Anthony Caturano, the posh chef of Boston's Prezza restaurant, has stated that killing what you eat "gives you respect for the animal it came from."
Tantalizingly, he continued his discourse on humility: "I've shot just about everything in North America, and I'm working my way through Africa right now."
Even People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), usually available for violent, partisan execration, kittenishly sent Zuckerberg a basket of tasty vegan food.
This show of support is sycophantic, in part. Zuckerberg's e-mail also contained the following rationale: "This year, my personal challenge is being thankful for the food I have to eat. I think many people forget that a living being has to die for you to eat meat, so my goal revolves around not letting myself forget that and being thankful for what I have."
This reasoning is comparable to that of an arch-satirist and is hardly worth dignifying, except to note that if most carnivores did have to kill their food, if meat were not packaged and sold as to look like fleshy abstractions, their ranks would thin immediately.
But the parlous lack of empathy Zuckerberg exhibits in his logic is chilling. Here's a thought: What if we truly respected animals; what if we were thankful for them - so much so that we did not kill them?
Zuckerberg's badass posturing is just creepy, because his argument could be used to frame so many other modest proposals that are even worse, and still more venal and specious capitalist rationales.
The CEOs and politicians and investors responsible for gross eco-crimes could "personally" clear-cut boreal forests, spike dolphins and chuck oil into the seas.
The purveyors of human trafficking could be the first to assault their victims, out of sheer gratitude, and so on.
If you think this is gross extrapolation, think how an elitist social-networking platform became a billion-dollar baby while being accused from all corners of gross privacy violations.
This week, a sweaty Zuckerberg (and reps from Google and other heavy-hitters) addressed the G8 summit of world leaders, asking for free, open worldwide Internet access. Zuckerberg is excited about this move: "I'm happy to play any role they ask me to play," he said.
"Internet is really a powerful force giving people a voice." (He was referring to reports of Syria and Iran mulling attempts to block their citizens' Web access.) When he makes fatuous remarks about killing chickens or speaking Chinese (the latter allegedly not a whim, but a move last year in preparation for a visit to investigate Facebook opportunities in China), is he simply deflecting our attention away from his actual personal goals?
Zuckerberg is in the news daily. The stories appear incongruent (on Sunday, Facebook was cited in helping to skip trace Kiwis), but they do form a portrait, ultimately - of a strange little creature with no charisma or charm, who, like Rapunzel in reverse, is forever spinning good ideas (social agency, law and order, self-reflexivity) into awful, furtive messes we still can only smell and not yet see.
George Orwell could not have invented Zuckerberg. He could only dream of what kind of "voice" people might have, when corralled together, unwittingly, by the fantasy of one infinitely corruptible world.