"I feel like the thing we can do is celebrate people doing great work and create more cultural momentum and awareness that this is an important thing in the world. So when the next economic crisis hits and people are talking about where to cut from the budget, science isn't the thing"
About this Quote
Zuckerberg is selling science the way Silicon Valley sells everything: as a product that needs branding, narrative, and user growth before it can survive a downturn. The line about "celebrate people doing great work" sounds warm, almost civic-minded, but it also reveals a very modern assumption: that public funding and political will are downstream from attention. If you can manufacture "cultural momentum", the budgets will follow.
The subtext is defensive. He’s not imagining a world where science is self-evidently worth protecting; he’s imagining the next recession, the inevitable austerity round, and the familiar hunt for "nice-to-have" spending. By specifying that moment, he frames science as perpetually one crisis away from being treated like an indulgence. His rhetorical move is to get ahead of the scissors by making science feel popular, prestigious, and socially mandatory.
There’s also a platform logic embedded here. "Awareness" is a term of art in the attention economy: you don’t just fund institutions, you cultivate audiences. Coming from the guy who helped build the dominant awareness machine, it reads less like a plea and more like a strategy. Keep science from being cut by making it culturally costly to cut.
Context matters: Zuckerberg’s philanthropy and public positioning have long leaned on scientific optimism, even as his core business has been criticized for weakening the information ecosystem science depends on. That tension gives the quote its bite. He’s advocating for scientific resilience through cultural hype, in an era when hype is both the currency and the risk.
The subtext is defensive. He’s not imagining a world where science is self-evidently worth protecting; he’s imagining the next recession, the inevitable austerity round, and the familiar hunt for "nice-to-have" spending. By specifying that moment, he frames science as perpetually one crisis away from being treated like an indulgence. His rhetorical move is to get ahead of the scissors by making science feel popular, prestigious, and socially mandatory.
There’s also a platform logic embedded here. "Awareness" is a term of art in the attention economy: you don’t just fund institutions, you cultivate audiences. Coming from the guy who helped build the dominant awareness machine, it reads less like a plea and more like a strategy. Keep science from being cut by making it culturally costly to cut.
Context matters: Zuckerberg’s philanthropy and public positioning have long leaned on scientific optimism, even as his core business has been criticized for weakening the information ecosystem science depends on. That tension gives the quote its bite. He’s advocating for scientific resilience through cultural hype, in an era when hype is both the currency and the risk.
Quote Details
| Topic | Science |
|---|
More Quotes by Mark
Add to List
