I established a Facebook account in 2008. My motivation was ignoble: I wanted to distribute my journalism more widely. I have acquired since then just over four thousand “friends”—in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, the Middle East, and of course, closer to home. I have discovered the appeal of Facebook’s community—for example, the extraordinary emotional support that swells in virtual space when people come together online around a friend’s illness or life celebrations. Through its bedrock appeals to friendship, community, public identity, and activism—and its commercial exploitation of these values—Facebook is an unprecedented synthesis of corporate and public spaces. The corporation’s social contract with users is ambitious, yet neither its governance system nor its young ruler seem trustworthy. Then came this month’s initial public offering of stock—a ... Continue reading →
The United States is facing intense competition from foreign countries, especially China, that are seeking to persuade highly skilled citizens who have settled in this country to return home to start businesses there, according to a report released Tuesday by an immigration group led by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York. “China is proving the most aggressive and ambitious” among the United States’ economic competitors in seeking to reverse a brain drain and lure back their scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs, the report by Mr. Bloomberg’s group, the Partnership for a New American Economy, found. The report was broadly critical of the American immigration system, which it said is slow, inflexible and not synchronized with the nation’s labor needs. “Self-inflicted economic wounds” caused by the ... Continue reading →
