\n<\/p>\n
I<\/span>f you put it in a novel \u2013 a ham-fisted satire of tech overlord hypocrisy, say \u2013 it would look too contrived to fly. But here we are, absorbing a story from the New York Times this week in which Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, are discovered to have been running a private school out of their compound in Palo Alto, California, in violation of city zoning laws. More pertinently, the school of 14 kids, which includes two of the couple\u2019s three daughters, is less than a mile from the school for low-income families that the couple founded in 2016. Guess which school the world\u2019s second-richest man and his wife are shutting down?<\/p>\n Say the word \u201czoning infraction\u201d to a certain stripe of American and the effect is equal to using \u201cqueue jumper\u201d on a Briton, but of course the broader point here isn\u2019t one about permits. (A spokesperson for Zuckerberg and Chan told the newspaper that the family was unaware about the zoning laws and that the private school, or \u201cpod of home schoolers\u201d as they put it, is now moving to another location.) It is, rather, about Zuckerberg\u2019s perceived retreat from progressive social causes, starting with the shuttering of the school and ending with the announcement in May this year that the pair\u2019s charitable foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), will be pulling funding from almost all the affordable housing and homeless charities it supports in the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as slashing diversity programmes.<\/p>\n Officially, the reason for these changes is that after a decade spent learning the ropes of effective philanthropy, CZI has decided that its money is best allocated to science and medical funding. Unofficially, of course, the switch from a mission statement about \u201cadvancing human potential and promoting equality\u201d to a foundation that now calls itself a \u201cscience-first philanthropy\u201d seems in keeping with more localised changes in the Zuckerberg household. Namely: the Meta head\u2019s swing from the kind of guy who, during the Biden administration, might have worn a This Is What A Feminist Looks Like T-shirt, to his Trump-era guise as someone who goes on Joe Rogan to argue for more \u201cmasculine energy\u201d in the workplace and appoints a Trump ally to the Meta board.<\/p>\n Zuckerberg\u2019s politics are clearly as flexible as the next tech leader\u2019s, but I suspect there are other things in play here, too. Unlike science research, the specimens in philanthropy-funded social experiments have a nasty habit of talking back. In 2010, when Zuckerberg gave $100m to overhaul the Newark public school system, some educators called him out for what they saw as the application of startup values and glib quick fixes \u2013 charter schools, anyone? More \u201cparental choice\u201d? \u2013 to the vast, interlinked challenges of the US\u2019s struggling public school system. You can imagine how this might have gone down at HQ. We\u2019re trying to help them; why are they giving us shit? Why aren\u2019t these nobodies tugging their forelocks like a billionaire at an autocrat\u2019s inauguration?<\/p>\n Another thing about billionaires: they get bored very quickly. One of the alleged reasons that Zuckerberg and Chan are shutting their charitable school in East Palo Alto, is that, reportedly, Chan was frustrated by the slow pace of progress. It is baffling, isn\u2019t it, given the geniuses involved; and yet these kids seem determined to stay poor and not get into Harvard. The rock-solid certainty among certain tech leaders that their skills are infinitely transferable is, however, a hard one to unseat. Consider the Bezos Day 1 Academies Fund, in which the world\u2019s third-richest man promises to \u201coperate a network of tuition-free, Montessori-inspired preschools in under-resourced communities\u201d, rather than, say, compel his $2.36tn company to pay its <\/strong>fair share of taxes to fund state education coffers.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, back in the Zuckerbergs\u2019 Crescent Park community, things are getting a bit tense. In an area popular with Stanford professors, the Zuckerbergs bought 11 properties, turned them into a compound, and like low-rent oligarchs in Holland Park, west London, promptly put in a pickleball court and dug out the basement. Years of noise, construction and traffic from the school \u2013 oh, boy, were neighbours ready when the New York Times reporter came calling. \u201cNo neighbourhood wants to be occupied,\u201d said one, whose home is surrounded on three sides by Zuckerberg properties. \u201cBut that\u2019s exactly what they\u2019ve done. They\u2019ve occupied our neighbourhood.\u201d Substitute \u201cneighbourhood\u201d for \u201cworld\u201d and he\u2019s summed it up nicely.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If you put it in a novel \u2013 a ham-fisted satire of tech overlord hypocrisy, say \u2013 it would look too contrived to fly. But here we are, absorbing a story from the New York Times this week in which Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, are discovered to have been running a private<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15555,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[9106,6138,6034,1547,1025,876,9105,6321,4365],"class_list":{"0":"post-15554","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-brockes","9":"tag-definition","10":"tag-emma","11":"tag-good","12":"tag-hes","13":"tag-mark","14":"tag-switched","15":"tag-works","16":"tag-zuckerberg"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15554","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15554"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15554\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/15555"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}