This society has many problems and the recent media coverage of the "floating" of Facebook on the stock market highlighted one, the adoration of money and those who have it. What a screwed up society we live in when individuals becoming billionaires can create a frenzy with hours of media coverage, and sadly the frenzy was among those who will benefit nothing from the corporate event.
This is Charles P. Pierce's take on it:
Even given my status as an Old Guy Who Loves Facebook — a phenomenon of the modern age characterized by aggravated carpal-tunnel syndrome, a weirdly revived devotion to high-school chums, and a proclivity for throwing old Van Morrison videos out to a gaping world — I have to admit that the giddy national pageant attending Friday's Facebook IPO has left me awfully cold, and awfully pessimistic that this country ever is going to get its economic house in order in anything resembling a fair and just way. Entire news networks dedicating huge blocks of time, the way they once went live for hours covering the Mercury program, to the release of a stock onto the market. People waiting outside in Times Square for the magic moment, as though it were New Year's Eve or VJ Day, and everyone acting as though this whole thing is some kind of national triumph rather than a simple mechanism by which an incredibly wealthy recluse will become an unimaginably wealthy recluse. We get together to cheer for stock. We get together to cheer for money. We get together to cheer for zillionaires, and not a dime of it is ever going to filter down to any of those people waiting behind the barriers in New York, watching the price of the stock tick upwards as though they all had a personal stake in it.
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