Mark Zuckerberg Changed the World: TIME's Person of the Year

TIME magazine's choice of Mark Zuckerberg as its 2010 Person of the Year landed on December 15 with the force of a verdict. The 26-year-old founder of Facebook — a company that had passed 500 million users that summer — was being placed in a lineage with presidents and popes, and a lot of people were not sure how to feel about it.

The skepticism was easy to voice. Zuckerberg was young, famously awkward in public, and the subject of a hit movie, The Social Network, that had just spent the autumn portraying him as brilliant and possibly ruthless. Honoring him felt, to some critics, like Obama's Nobel: perhaps merited, but premature.

But the case for the choice was stronger than the discomfort. By the end of 2010, Facebook had genuinely rewired how humans communicate — collapsing distance, merging social spheres, and giving half a billion people a single platform on which to perform their identities. No individual had done more, in a single decade, to change the texture of daily social life across the planet. TIME's criterion is not moral approval but impact, "for better or for worse," and by that measure Zuckerberg was the obvious pick.

The legitimate question that remained was not whether he deserved it but what it meant: that the most consequential institution-builder of the young century was a college dropout in a hoodie, and that the world had handed its social infrastructure to a private company before it had figured out what questions to ask. A decade of reckonings would follow. In 2010, the world was still in the honeymoon.