YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio — One person who seems to have clearly learned the lessons of the presidential election is Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Late Tuesday, Zuckerberg announced his New Year’s resolution for 2017 is to visit all 50 states: “After a tumultuous last year, my hope for this challenge is to get out and talk to more people about how they’re living, working and thinking about the future,” he wrote — where else? — on his Facebook page.
Previous challenges Zuckerberg completed are learning Mandarin, reading 25 books a year and only eating meat that he has killed personally.
The Harvard-educated Silicon Valley resident, who grew up in Westchester County and attended the exclusive Exeter Academy in New Hampshire for his junior and senior year of high school, admits to only setting foot in 20 states in his 32 years.
Zuckerberg also wants the whole world to join in with him, which makes his visit sound even more like a sideshow study of Main Street America rather than what people around here call visiting.
Here in Youngstown, Zuckerberg will have some explaining to do: Workers displaced by globalization or undercut by immigration don’t exactly share Zuckerberg’s vision of the future as a techno-utopia.
He acknowledged as much in his Facebook post: “This has contributed to a greater sense of division than I have felt in my lifetime. We need to find a way to change the game so it works for everyone.”
“Sounds like he is doing a political listening tour,” said Youngstown Mayor John McNally.
He added: “Here is some of the advice I would give Zuckerberg. Don’t just show up in a town for a couple of hours, wherever it is, especially not with an entourage. Spend a couple of days, visit with people in their living rooms, go to a church service, visit their schools. Get into the heart of a city or town. That is how you know them, that is how you hear them and that is how you connect,” he said.
McNally’s a Democrat, but he wasn’t surprised by Ohio’s support for Donald Trump. “I kept stressing to reporters that folks around here were going to vote for something else. They have heard empty promises since 1977, when all of the mills closed down,” he said.
Hillary Clinton won this county — Mahoning — but only by 3 percentage points. That’s a 27-point swing from the 2012 election results, when President Obama won the county 63-35.
McNally said one of the things that really irked him in the coverage of Mahoning County was the constant insistence that people should just move to where the jobs are. “That is just a bunch of baloney, and that shows they really didn’t understand who they were reporting on,” he said.
Wherever Zuckerberg visits, he’ll find a shocking lack of broadband connection in rural America, a disconnection that has impacted them economically and contributed to the sense they’ve been left behind by the kind of progress Zuckerberg’s success represents.
Last year’s FCC report showed that 4 in 10 rural Americans lacked access to fixed-line broadband service. That means about 40 percent of the US rural population didn’t even have the option of calling up a cable or phone company and ordering high-speed service.
In contrast, only 4 percent of urban Americans lack such access.
If Zuckerberg is armed with those kinds of facts, and if he’s really listening to Main Street voters — not just using them for a series of perfectly timed photo-ops — he might understand that the urban/rural gap isn’t just cultural; it’s digital.
And once you understand that they have no access to the digital economy, it becomes that much easier to get why it’s so hypocritical for coastal elites to mock them for wanting the economic base they once had to come back.
It will be interesting to see where this journey takes Zuckerberg. Does he treat the American people like a prop? Does he learn something? Or is he just like the countless reporters who trampled through this town, got it wrong and still continue to misread them?