Jason Calacanis on The Conspiracy To Give Facebook The Universe

Very strange email newsletter from Jason Calacanis this week, in which he tells a story about being emailed by some shadowy power broker, ‘he could buy and sell me many times over,’ who demanded that Jason get in line and publicly forgive Mark Zuckerberg now that MZ has held his “we can do better” press conference. Calacanis believes that a large number of the tech elite are holding a lot of Facebook stock (courtesy of SecondMarket) and want it to be worth boatloads.

But then Calacanis says that he’d retire before going along with Zuckerberg’s plans to dominate the web:

He insisted that Facebook is the future of the internet, and remembering the “Mark Cuban” rule I volleyed back that if Facebook’s closed ecosystem—that is pissing in the pool of internet users—is the future I don’t want any part of it. He wouldn’t have to get me fired—I would retire before seeing Facebook become the internet.

We built the internet on open standards and caring for users. Zuckerberg and Facebook are trying to reverse open standards, is stealing every startup idea to put into his closed ecosystem and screwing our collective users. He’s screwing all businesses by screwing over the entire userbase.

I think Jason is dead on, and I support his position. In fact, I think Jason should run for Senate, honestly.

[Update: Part of Jason’s email where he makes recommendations to Zuckerberg has been posted here.]