Even as our attention is gripped by a crumbling eurozone, another huge economic entity is emerging in the marketplace — Facebook, which has just upsized its number of IPO shares by a quarter before its $100 billion flotation tomorrow. Providing the crisis in Europe does not blow out into a huge political standoff (and just stays the gigantic economic mess it currently is), which entity would future historians regard as the defining business model of our age?
Both the eurozone and Facebook, in a way, try to deal with the problems of geography — how to connect people from different places and cultures. But they do it in radically different ways, and I think it’s clear that — whatever our feelings about Facebook itself — it’s the social network that sums up our zeitgeist.
The eurozone is a throwback, created with an eye on history’s terrible wars; it is defensive, formed to avoid political conflict and as an economic bulwark against the US and rising Asian nations; it’s never fully embraced the global economy, with some European politicians even at this late hour thinking of enlarging the socialist apparatus when the EU has already fallen behind in so many areas of international competition.
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