WHEN FACEBOOK TURNED ten in 2014, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and nerdish face of the social network, announced that its motto would cease to be ‘Move fast and break things’, and become ‘Move fast with stable infra[structure]’. For the company that had debuted on the Fortune 500 list at 482 the previous year, speed was still of the essence, but so was reliability.

This year, Facebook turns fifteen, sits at seventy-six on the Fortune 500, and resembles a ‘clumsy teenager…[who] gets into yelling matches with Dad’ and sulks ‘when caught doing something it shouldn’t’.[i] Its motto now embodies the awkward aspirations of a conscientious adolescent to ‘Bring the world closer together’. With well over two billion regular monthly users and revenue of more than US$40 billion last year, it has the capacity to do this in a way that has been unimaginable for most of human history.