CBS This Morning took a strange turn during its interview with Chaos Monkeys author Antonio Martinez. Martinez, who publically compared Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to "Fidel Castro", led co-host Gayle King to ask Martinez "is that a compliment?"
CHARLIE ROSE: We reached out to Facebook for comment on the book and they declined comment. Your top dedication is “to my enemies, I could not have done it without you.” Having said that, what's interesting, you describe Mark Zuckerberg, one of the richest men in the world. Facebook having unlimited potential because of the number of people connected to it. You describe him as somehow between Napoleon and Fidel Castro. What did you mean by that?
GAYLE KING: Is that a compliment?
ANTONIO MARTINEZ: I think it is, if you take it as one. To run parallel -- there's a thing in the book on February 1st, 2012 when Facebook announced it was going public. He put us in a big tent in a parking lot of what was then the unfinished campus and he gave a rousing speech and it reminded me my parents are exiles of Cuba from the late '50s and I was imagining what my cousins probably went through in Cuba as well, and I know it had to be a weird comparison- Facebook and communism- but at their extremes capitalism and communism sort of meet, and this sort of personality cult, we had slogans on the wall, they’re all wearing uniforms, it all felt very North Korean or Cuban almost. So in that moment, I just realized the motor force of history which is ego maniac’s sort of twitchy drive and then the common man’s desire to be part of a compelling story which is what we were, and we were just bit players in Zuckerberg's story, is really what brings both of those systems of production together.
The odd comparison didn’t seem to fluster the CBS cast at all, and instead allowed Martinez to continue to explain his odd, distorted monologue on how communism and capitalism “sort of meet” at the same existential conclusion.
NORAH O’DONNELL: What's bad about that? What’s bad about the Zuckerberg does it?
ANTONIO MARTINEZ: No it isn’t- I mean look in Communism, they wait in line for bread and in capitalism, we wait in line for Iphones, right? The point is we’re waiting in lines. But yah there is nothing necessarily wrong with it at all actually.
I don’t know about you, but the last time I checked the U.S. government was not controlling the means of production and distribution of Apple products. Rather than call out and put into question how Martinez came to these conclusions, they just let this rambling continue for the rest of the segment.
*This blog’s author has no relation to Antonio Martinez
