Mark Steyn: "only in America" confuses Zuckerberg

...If you're inventing Facebook in a dorm room, it helps if the dorm room is at Harvard, which most Americans will never get anywhere near. In that sense, Zuckerberg might be more emblematic of a calcifying class system and diminishing social mobility. As the middle class shrinks, we're moving toward a Latin-American social structure, with a rich, corrupt, self-reinforcing elite, and a great dysfunctional mass underneath, and ever less in the middle, and not much by way of a viable path for anyone at the bottom to advance toward the top.

"Only in America"? Why would Zuckerberg see it that way? His company's bigger than most countries, and he's a bigger global player than most presidents or prime ministers. I assume he still travels on a US passport, but, if you fly in and out on a private plane, you don't really have to get your papers out and show them to anyone terribly often: Your jet lands in Paris or London, Moscow or Beijing, and the immigration official boards the plane and your assistant hands over the passports of the handful of passengers and the flunky looks them over and returns them and the assistant tucks yours away and follows you down to the limo at the foot of the steps. I would doubt Zuckerberg has physically held his passport in many a year. In that sense, his citizenship is not a significant data point.

"Only in America"? Zuckerberg's way beyond that. This is the Latin-American class system applied worldwide: an elite beyond borders, and the masses under 24-hour surveillance by the NSAe, or Facebook, or a malign alliance of both. Mark Zuckerberg's territory is the planet; for most law-abiding persons of western nations, the horizons will be ever more circumscribed.