Indian crowd scene, 2015. Flickr/Jon Connell. Some rights reserved.Facebook’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is to many a hero of the Information Age, and he has been at the forefront of a new era of philanthropy, joining the ranks of other multibillionaires who “give back and give big” such as Bill and Melinda Gates of the Gates Foundation and their collaborator Warren Buffet and his son Howard Buffett whose own philanthropy, as the world’s third richest person, has been touted by Bloomberg Markets magazine as having embarked on a “philanthropic mission to end global hunger.”[i]
This new grand-scale philanthropic movement is encapsulated perhaps nowhere more vividly than in the Gates’ moral commitment and foundation called “The Giving Pledge” whose aim is to inspire the world’s wealthiest to give away most of their net worth either at the time of their death or during their lifetime. By December 2015, over 141 individuals or couples had pledged to the initiative. Yet neither their philanthropy nor their considerable contributions to the world of big business – indeed to the business of the whole world – have managed to escape controversy, including, as noted recently in an article on openDemocracy, charges of (especially American) neo-colonialism. Oddly, some of these controversies have emerged as the inseparable obverse of their contributions to society.
Zuckerberg, in particular, has received praise but also criticism following his pledge to give away 99% of his Facebook shares, worth a mere $45 billion today (in a letter to his newborn daughter, Max). His largesse, whose grandly stated goal is to “enhance[e] human potential and promot[e] equality” has no match even among the philanthropic advance guard. But his plan to fund particular, personally approved institutions has been viewed with not a little suspicion. More recently Zuckerberg once again discovered that the relation between contribution and controversy is analogous to that between recto and verso in a book, during a town hall meeting at the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi, Oct. 28, 2015 where he was the chief guest. It must have caused some chagrin to this celebrity innovator and philanthropist that despite Facebook’s goals, in line with Zuckerberg’s avowedly philanthropic intentions to enhance human potential and promote equality, Free Basics has been permanently banned from India.
