“This stuff matters,” Cox says.

Cox — Stanford ‘04 who joined Facebook the following year — is one of CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s closest confidantes. He’s prone to impassioned Marshall McLuhanesque speeches that put Facebook pretty close to the forefront of human evolution.

When he spoke in August at the unveiling of Facebook’s check-in service Places Cox seemed on the verge of tears as he described how Facebook would let children visit the place where their parents shared their first kiss.

“Technology does not need to estrange us from one another,” Cox said. “The physical reality comes alive with the human stories we have told there.”

While Cox clearly believes, not everyone feels the same about the online service — including many of its 500 million users. It’s easy and common to dismiss Facebook as a narcissitic waste of time and to scoff at its $35 billion valuation.

In fact, Newsweek columnist Dan Lyons used just that argument to troll the tech journalism world last week, lamenting that Silicon Valley isn’t solving hard engineering problems anymore and the country is falling behind in important technology.

“[T]he Valley has become a casino, a place where smart kids arrive hoping to make an easy fortune building companies that seem, if not pointless, at least not as serious as, say, old-guard companies like HP, Intel, Cisco, and Apple,” Lyons wrote. “Facebook lets you keep in touch with your friends; for this profound service to mankind it will generate about $1.5 billion in revenue this year by bombarding its 500 million members with ads.”

In an interview with Wired.com Wednesday after Facebook’s announcement of new ways to talk with groups of friends, Cox immediately and passionately attacked Lyon’s thesis when asked about it (noting that he hadn’t actually read the piece).

“The most important innovations in the history of technology have been mediums that accelerate the velocity or make cheaper or make faster the ability for one human being to share something with another human being, starting with language and going all the way up to email, the internet and mobile phones,” Cox said.

Yes, he speaks that way off the cuff.

“Think about how people make decisions, big decisions, like who should I vote for, what do I think of the health care bill, what’s going on in Afghanistan, what should I think of all this news about Thailand, and small decisions like what shoes should I wear or what album should I listen to, should I take this job, and where should I eat tonight?” he asked. “We make those decisions by talking to people we trust.”

“I think Facebook has changed in a non-continuous way the ability for one person in the world to say, ‘I exist. Here is my story.’ That’s why people are now finding their birth mothers, guys in Columbia are organizing millions of people to march together that have no money, no access to media, no anything.

“This stuff matters,” Cox said. “It’s as simple as letting people share more easily. That may not sound like building the next 10Ghz processor, but in the grand scheme of things, communicating with each other changes everything.”

Sitting in a small conference room with Facebook product manager Carl Sjogreen and Wired.com, Cox paused after his monologue, and turned to look out the window looking out onto the greeen campus, perhaps bored with the topic.

Sjogreen, formerly of Google and his own startup called Nextstop, adds that while he’s new to the company, he thinks that the seeds of what Facebook’s vision is “profound” and the company is just at the “beginning of being able to deliver that.”

As Sjogreen finishes, Cox turns back from the window, and we discover he hasn’t not been distracted, but was just marshaling his argument.

“Here’s what I would write: When the mobile phone came out, we made fun of it. The movie Clueless is a gigantic joke about the mobile phone. Why would anyone need a mobile phone? It’s Alicia Silverstone gossiping on a big black box in her car. Now all we write about are these frickin’ things [picking up his iPhone] And it only takes 15 years from where we are all laughing at something to ‘This is the foundation of how technology works’.

“We get this wrong every time. We laughed at FM radio; we laughed at every new technology because we are grounded in the perspective of the media we use today.

“But somebody’s got to be thinking about tomorrow,” Cox finishes.

He doesn’t name the somebody, but it’s not hard to guess who he’s thinking about.

Follow us for disruptive tech news: Ryan Singel and Epicenter on Twitter.

See Also:

• Today Facebook, Tomorrow the World
• Facebook Embraces Group Chat and Lets You Export, Too
• Facebook Launches ‘Check-In’ Service
• Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative
• Love Google. Hate Facebook. Here’s Why
• Great Wall of Facebook: The Social Network’s Plan to Dominate the Net

Authors: Ryan Singel

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