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What makes Facebook's gambit unique is its global scope, its corporate backing, and its deep faith in technology. Zuckerberg sounds convinced that the new Facebook AI can not only identify 'meaningful communities', but also 'strengthen our social fabric and bring the world closer together'. That is far more ambitious than using AI to drive a car or diagnose cancer.

By October, 14 percent of the company's ad revenue came from mobile ads, making it into a small but nicely profitable piece of Mark Zuckerberg's growing empire."12 Then it took off. By the spring of 2014, Facebook reported that 62 percent of its revenue came from mobile, leading the technology website The Verge to declare: "Facebook is a mobile company now.13 This statement has continued to prove accurate: by 2017, mobile ad revenue rose to 88 percent of their earnings, and is still climbing.

Far from the organic free-roaming paradise the early internet pioneers imagined, there is a growing sense that we are living in a world of participation farms, where a small number of big platforms have fenced, and harvest for their own gain, the daily activities of billions.