Success Quote by Mark Zuckerberg

The genius of this sentence is how insistently it frames Facebook as a humble appliance while quietly staking a claim to social infrastructure. Zuckerberg doesn’t say Facebook changes relationships; he says it “extends people’s capacity” to have them, borrowing the language of prosthetics and productivity. Connection becomes a feature upgrade. Loneliness, distance, awkwardness, time: all recast as solvable bottlenecks in an engineering pipeline.

The intent is clear: make the company’s ambitions sound benign, even altruistic. “Tools” is the key word, the corporate equivalent of a clean pair of gloves. Tools don’t manipulate; people use them. “The people they want” and “share what they want” places agency firmly with the user, a preemptive rebuttal to anxieties about surveillance, coercion, or the platform nudging behavior. The platform is merely the stagehand, never the director.

The subtext is that relationships are legible, measurable, and therefore optimizable. If you can build and “maintain” relationships with a product, then relationships are something you manage like inbox zero: add contacts, post updates, sustain engagement. That’s not a neutral worldview; it’s a business model. “Capacity” implies scale, and scale implies data, rankings, and growth loops that reward quantity as much as quality.

Context matters: this is Silicon Valley’s most successful moral argument for expansion. By casting connection as an unqualified good, Facebook’s reach becomes not just profitable but culturally necessary. The line reads like mission statement, but it functions like a license. If you’re “extending” human capability, who wants to be the one arguing for limits?