Tech

Mark Zuckerberg’s Letter To His New Daughter Has A Not-So-Hidden Message

(Photo credit: RODRIGO BUENDIA/AFP/Getty Images)

Jena Greene Reporter
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Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan welcomed a new baby girl named August this month.

Right after her birth, Zuckerberg penned an open letter to his daughter and publicly posted it to Facebook.

In it, he details his hopes for her future. Some of those hopes are:

A world with better education, fewer diseases, stronger communities, and greater equality. We wrote that with all the advances in science and technology, your generation should live dramatically better lives than ours, and we have a responsibility to do our part to make that happen. Even though headlines often focus on what’s wrong, we still believe these positive trends will win out. We’re optimists about your generation and the future.

Correct me if I’m mistaken – wasn’t this kid just born? I highly doubt August Zuckerberg is going to spend her next few months worrying about building stronger communities and promoting equality.

I’ve been around long enough to call ulterior motives when I see them. This, ladies and gentleman, is not a letter to August Zuckerberg. This is a good old fashioned campaign outline.

Rumors that Mark Zuckerberg is a 2020 presidential hopeful pop up on a daily basis. He’s planned to tour all 50 states by the end of 2017 and recently hired a former Clinton pollster as an advisor.

It’s no secret that Zuckerberg wants power, given his past of allegedly weaseling Harvard classmates out of a billion dollar idea.

But the public forgives, and this letter is probably intended as a first stab at softening his image.

My best guess is that it’s aimed largely at the millennials who require naps and coloring books when life doesn’t go their way:

I hope you take a lot of naps. I hope you’re a great sleeper. And I hope even in your dreams you can feel how much we love you.

I have a lot of opinions about Mark Zuckerberg. Few of them are positive. But that line right there, that’s scary. That’s scarier than a lot of other campaign promises I’ve heard.

This is the kind of rhetoric that mobilizes those college kids who require teddy bears, Play-Doh and coloring books.

This letter to August Zuckerberg is nothing short of an attempt to grease the skids for Zuckerberg 2020. It’s an attempt to make America a safe space vacuum. His campaign message is basically right here in this letter: don’t worry about anything. Just take a nap and President Zuckerberg will take care of it.

Save it for yourself Zuckerberg. I’m not ready to make America nap again.