Chandauli is a tiny town in rural India about a four-hour drive southwest of New Delhi. India's a big country, and there are several Chandaulis. This is the one that's not on Google Maps.
It's a dusty town, and the roads are narrow and unpaved. A third of the people here live below the poverty line, and the homes are mostly concrete blockhouses. Afternoons are hot and silent. There are goats. It is not ordinarily the focus of global media attention, but it is today, because today the 14th wealthiest man in the world, Mark Zuckerberg, has come to Chandauli.
Ostensibly, Zuckerberg is here to look at a new computer center and to have other people, like me, look at him looking at it. But he's also here in search of something less easily definable.
I've interviewed Zuckerberg before—I wrote about him in 2010, when he was TIME's Person of the Year—and as far as I can tell, he is not a man much given to quiet reflection. But this year he reached a point in his life when even someone as un-introspective as he is might reasonably pause and reflect. Facebook, the company of which he is chairman, CEO and co-founder, turned 10 this year. Zuckerberg himself turned 30. (If you're wondering, he didn't have a party. For his 30th birthday, on May 14, Zuckerberg flew back east to watch his younger sister defend her Ph.D. in classics at Princeton.) For years, Facebook has been the quintessential Silicon Valley startup, helmed by the global icon of brash, youthful success. But Facebook isn't a startup anymore, and Zuckerberg is no longer especially youthful. He's just brash and successful.
The story of Facebook's first decade was one of relentless, rapacious growth, from a dorm-room side project to a global service with 8,000 employees and 1.35 billion users, on whose unprotesting backs Zuckerberg has built an advertising engine that generated $7.87 billion last year, a billion and a half of it profit. Lately, Zuckerberg has been thinking about what the story of Facebook's second decade should be and what most becomes the leader of a social entity that, if it were a country, would be the second most populous in the world, only slightly smaller than China.
At 30, Zuckerberg still comes off as young for his age. He says "like" and "awesome" a lot. (The other word he overuses isfolks.) He dresses like an undergraduate: he's in a plain gray T-shirt today, presumably because it's too hot in Chandauli for a hoodie. When he speaks in public, he still has the air of an enthusiastic high school kid delivering an oral report. In social situations his gaze darts around erratically, only occasionally coming to rest on the face of the person he's talking to.
But he's not the angry, lonely introvert ofThe Social Network. That character may have been useful for dramatic purposes, but he never actually existed. In person, one-on-one, Zuckerberg is a warm presence, not a cold one. He hasn't been lonely for a long time: he met Priscilla Chan, the woman who would become his wife, in his sophomore year at Harvard. In October he stunned an audience in Beijing when he gave an interview in halting but still credible .
Zuckerberg can be extremely awkward in conversation, but that's not because he's nervous or insecure; nervous, insecure people rarely become the 14th richest person in the world. Zuckerberg is in fact supremely confident, almost to the point of being aggressive. But casual conversation is supposed to be playful, and he doesn't do playfulness well. He gets impatient with the slowness, the low bandwidth of ordinary speech, hence the darting gaze. He has too much the engineer's approach to conversation: it's less about social interaction than about swapping information as rapidly as possible. "Mark is one of the best listeners I've ever met," says Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's COO. "When you talk to Mark, he doesn't just listen to what you say. He listens to what you didn't say, what you emphasized. He digests the information, he comes back to you and asks five follow-up questions. He's incredibly inquisitive."
I have found this to be true—sometimes he gives the impression of having thought through what I'm saying better than I have—with the caveat that listening to me (unlike, I imagine, listening to Sandberg, or for that matter speaking Chinese) doesn't consume enough of his bandwidth to keep his attention from wandering off in search of more data. Probably it's not an accident that he invented an entirely new way to socialize: efficiently, remotely, in bulk.
Zuckerberg has been thinking about Facebook's long-term future at least since the site exceeded a billion users in 2012. "This was something that had been this rallying cry inside the company," he says. "And it was like, O.K., wow, so what do we do now?" (It's tempting to clean up Zuckerberg's quotes to give them more gravitas, but that's how he talks.) One answer was to put down bets on emerging platforms and distribution channels, in the form of some big-ticket acquisitions: the photo-sharing app Instagram for $1 billion (a head snapper at the time, but in hindsight a steal); the virtual-reality startup Oculus Rift for $2 billion; the messaging service Whats App for $22 billion (still a head snapper). But what about the bigger picture—the even bigger picture? "We were thinking about the first decade of the company, and what were the next set of big things that we wanted to take on, and we came to this realization that connecting a billion people is an awesome milestone, but there's nothing magical about the number 1 billion. If your mission is to connect the world, then a billion might just be bigger than any other service that had been built. But that doesn't mean that you're anywhere near fulfilling the actual mission."
Fulfilling the actual mission, connecting the entire world, wouldn't actually, literally be possible unless everybody in the world were on the Internet. So Zuckerberg has decided to make sure everybody is. This sounds like the kind of thing you say you're going to do but never actually do, but Zuckerberg is doing it. He is in Chandauli today on a campaign to make sure that actually, literally every single human being on earth has an Internet connection. As Sandberg puts it (she's better at sound bites than Zuckerberg): "If the first decade was starting the process of connecting the world, the next decade is helping connect the people who are not yet connected and watching what happens."
The Ambassador Zuckerberg spoke at an Internet.org conference in Delhi in October; later he met with the Indian Prime Minister
Part of Zuckerberg's problem-solving methodology appears to be to start from the position that all problems are solvable, and moreover solvable by him. As a first step, he crunched some numbers. They were big numbers, but he's comfortable with those: if he does nothing else, Zuckerberg scales. The population of the earth is currently about 7.2 billion. There are about 2.9 billion people on the Internet, give or take a hundred million. That leaves roughly 4.3 billion people who are offline and need to be put online. "What we figured out was that in order to get everyone in the world to have basic access to the Internet, that's a problem that's probably billions of dollars," he says. "Or maybe low tens of billions. With the right innovation, that's actually within the range of affordability."
Zuckerberg made some calls, and the result was the formation last year of a coalition of technology companies that includes Ericsson, Qualcomm, Nokia and Samsung. The name of this group is Internet.org, and it describes itself as "a global partnership between technology leaders, nonprofits, local communities and experts who are working together to bring the Internet to the two-thirds of the world's population that doesn't have it."
Based on that, you might think that -Internet.org will be setting up free wi-fi in the Sahara and things like that, but as it turns out, the insight that makes the whole thing feasible is that it's not about building new infrastructure. Using maps and data from Ericsson and NASA—-including a fascinating data set called the Gridded Population of the World, which maps the geographical distribution of the human species—plus information mined from Facebook's colossal user base, the -Internet.org team at Facebook figured out that most of their work was already done. Most humans, or about 85% of them, already have Internet access, at least in the minimal sense that they live within range of a cell tower with at least a 2G data network. They're just not using it.
Facebook has a plan for the other 15%, a blue-sky wi-fi-in-the-Sahara-type scheme involving drones and satellites and lasers, which we'll get to later, but that's a long-term project. The subset of that 85% of people who could be online but aren't: they're the low-hanging fruit.
But why aren't they online already? To not be on the Internet when you could be: from the vantage point of Silicon Valley, that is an alien state of being. The issues aren't just technical; they're also social and economic and cultural. Maybe these are people who don't have the money for a phone and data plan. Maybe they don't know enough about the Internet. Or maybe they do know enough about it and just don't care, because it's totally irrelevant to their day-to-day lives.
( Interactive: How Much Time Have You Wasted on Facebook?)
You'd think Zuckerberg the arch-hacker wouldn't sully his hands with this kind of soft-science stuff, but in fact he doesn't blink at it. He attacks social/economic/cultural problems the same way he attacks technical ones; in fact it's not clear that he makes much of a distinction between them. Human nature is just more code to hack—never forget that before he dropped out, Zuckerberg was a psych major. "If you grew up and you never had a computer," he says, "and you've never had access to the Internet, and somebody asked you if you wanted a data plan, your answer would probably be, 'What's a data plan?' Right? Or, 'Why would I want that?' So the problems are different from what people think, but they actually end up being very tractable."
Zuckerberg is a great one for breaking down messy, wonky problems into manageable chunks, and when you break this one down it falls into three buckets. Business: making the data cheap enough that people in developing countries can pay for it. Technology: simplifying the content and/or services on offer so that they work in ultra-low-bandwidth situations and on a gallimaufry of old, low-end hardware. And content: coming up with content and/or services compelling enough to somebody in the third world that they would go through the trouble of going online to get them. Basically the challenge is to imagine what it would be like to be a poor person—the kind of person who lives somewhere like Chandauli.
Engineering Empathy
The Facebook campus in Menlo Park, Calif., isn't especially conducive to this. It's about as far from Chandauli, geographically, aesthetically and socioeconomically, as you can get on this planet. When you walk into Facebook's headquarters for the first time, the overwhelming impression you get is of raw, unbridled plenitude. There are bowls overflowing with free candy and fridges crammed with free Diet Coke and bins full of free Kind bars. They don't have horns with fruits and vegetables spilling out of them, but they might as well. next
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