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BY GARTH SHELDON-COULSON

In print | November 4, 2004

First, suppose you were a college student. Easy? Good.

Now suppose you wanted to make a lot of money. A whole lot. But that’s not all. Suppose that, in addition to wanting to make exorbitant, disgusting amounts of easy money, you also wanted to be famous. Very famous. More famous than Yanni.

But not only famous. Suppose that fame and riches were but trinkets. Suppose you wanted power. Power to shape the lives of the American elite, the ruling class, the professionals in society. Power to make them jump and stir at your every beck and call, to force them to depend on you to impress their acquaintances, their business contacts.

In all likelihood, the first thing you would do is establish a society. To adorn it with all the trappings of a highly coveted club, you would inaugurate it in the most elite setting possible. Perhaps Princeton or Yale, but probably Harvard. You could always expand it later.

Next, you would make membership in your society pay social dividends. Large dividends. Members would network with members, the society itself keeping track of who owed debts of acquaintance and gratitude to whom. If a member wanted a contact for business or pleasure, the society would arrange a meeting. Sex or romance, the same. Members would begin to rely on the society for self-affirmation, seeing that success within the society reflected one’s social standing in the outside world. The larger the society grew — and grow it would — the more profound the benefits it would confer.

In exchange, members would willingly give back to the society. They would each submit a file containing deep personal secrets, from the mundane to the penetrating, under the impression that the society would keep them under wraps.

Suppose that whenever a member had joined the society, you had forced him or her to accept an agreement. But not an agreement articulating a strong commitment not to sell members’ files. No, an agreement more along these lines: “[Members] grant … an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, fully paid, worldwide license to use, copy, perform, display, and distribute their information and content and to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such information and content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.” And suppose that, unlike all other societies similar to yours, your agreement applied this language to personal information like names and phone numbers and mailing addresses.

Now suppose, because it’s true, that direct-marketing lists of 1,000 names, sold just once, go for $350. Yours would go for even more because they would be accompanied not only by a guarantee of containing only the most educated individuals in the country, but also by their interests, favorite books, favorite movies and political leanings. That’s 180,000 names at over $350 per thousand, per sale. You could do the math yourself, but having raked in millions of dollars you would probably just buy someone to do it for you.

And so your society would chug happily along, until one day you would come to an astonishing realization. You would realize that you had been divinely inspired.

What other explanation would there be, after all, for your having arrived at this most brilliant of schemes? A scheme so perfect that you, the founder of the world’s newest great opiate for the masses, now ranked up there with Moses, with Mohammad, with Joseph Smith — that, in fact, you probably had them all beat.

So, yes, you were going to be famous, and powerful, and very, very rich, having already received a number of very generous buyout offers. You had also been divinely inspired — not too shabby. But despite all that, suppose you were modest. Suppose you were content to lay low.

You might settle upon a tag line. A simple tag line, but pregnant with understatement of the profound extent to which you had just conned an entire generation of college students. Understatement, indeed, of the positively theatrical grace with which you had pulled it off.

And so you would let the world know, ever so subtly, that yes, this had indeed been a Mark Zuckerberg production.

Garth Sheldon-Coulson is a sophomore. You can reach him at gsheldo1@swarthmore.edu.

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