Zuckerberg defends $1bn Instagram grab to IPO investors … Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has defended his $1bn acquisition of Instagram, telling skeptical investors at the social site's IPO roadshow that there's still huge growth potential in the camera app. The site founder told a New York investor gathering that Facebook had spotted a "tipping point" in Instagram's user data, The Telegraph reports, with Zuckerberg showing up for presentation duty wearing his traditional hoodie and jeans as he tried to justify what's believed to be a purchase he approved with little to no input from the company's board. The buy, Zuckerberg insisted, had to be fast because other heavyweights in the web 2.0 market were also circling. Twitter is believed to have attempted to buy the photo app several months before the Facebook deal was closed, though Zuckerberg did not specifically name rivals. – Slashgear

Dominant Social Theme: Together, Facebook and Instagram are as mighty an industrial duo as US Steel and General Motors once were.

Free-Market Analysis: We've been clear about our disbelief regarding Facebook and its US$ 90 billion valuation, which is apparently about to go up to US$ 100 billion or so based on the company's acquisition of Instagram, a photo-fiddling utility. You can see an article here: "Facebook IPO is US Intel Operation?"

Our incredulity regarding Facebook has to do with the company's initial funding – which has the fingerprints of American Intel on it – and the way the company has been nurtured by a Who's Who of the US's military-corporate-industrial complex.

Google, Facebook and numerous other companies in this era of electronic communications have seemingly been turned into virtual fiefdoms of the US – and Western Intel agencies. In our view, this is an ominous development because it shows just how much Western "free societies" have degraded in the past century or so.

The top elements of Western society, whether media, educational, religious, corporate, military or political, all seem to work for a small power elite dedicated to creating world government.

This makes for societal dysfunction. The mass of people go about their businesses and utilize the tools of civil society while the people at the top use the same tools to create results that are antithetical to most of the rest.

The elites surely use ruin to get what they want. The tool kit includes economic depressions, war and authoritarianism. They also use dominant social themes – fear-based memes designed to persuade people to give up power and wealth to globalist facilities.

Greed motivates memes, as well. In the case of Facebook, the elites and their bought-and-paid-for media are trumpeting this gray-ops file-sharing facility as if it were the next breakthrough of cold fusion.

In fact, there is increasing evidence that some sort of "cold fusion" DOES exist, but Western media is too engrossed in trumpeting Facebook to seriously investigate something of that magnitude.

The reason Facebook gets the juice is probably because it is a long-nurtured facility that allows the West's top Intel agencies to collect huge amounts of free data about individuals who might provide pushback to elite plans to further globalize Western governance.

The top Western Intel shops apparently work for a tiny handful of dynastic elites. The struggle pits these elites – who control the world's central banking – against the mass of some six billion people who merely want to live their lives as best they can surrounded by friends and families while likely contributing meaningfully to the local community.

This is not enough for a tiny handful of elites that evidently and obviously want to run the world. Working diligently for a century or more, this group has hollowed out the West's productive capacity and de-industrialized nation-states to benefit the developing world.

The Facebook IPO – at some US$ 100 billion when combined with the US$ 1 billion Instagram purchase by Facebook – marks probably a new low in the elite manipulation of capital-raising markets.

Facebook, as we have pointed out previously, has no real business model. Its reason-to-be is basically (so far as we can tell) to aggregate data on young Western citizens so that the elites can more thoroughly and predictably weed out troublemakers.

It is not coincidence that huge data shops are being built to aggregate the information that facilities like Facebook make available.

The whole thing seems like a gigantic confidence game run by a kind of international mafia. Within this paradigm, the head of Facebook, Zuckerberg – with his famous hoodie and jeans – becomes a front man who is mythically built into a kind of junior Howard Hughes.

The "business model" basically consists of milking Facebook clients of as much private data as possible, either through "accidents" or via incentives and better and more tempting "sharing" facilities.

The recently introduced "history of friends" is apparently a typical law-enforcement methodology that is intended to monitor Facebook as it builds up elaborate histories of people's "groups." This is a pure surveillance-style approach toward technological abundance.

And now there is Instagram … " a free photo sharing program launched in October 2010 that allows users to take a photo, apply a digital filter to it, and then share it on a variety of social networking services, including Instagram's own," according to Wikipedia.

What hooey is this? These fancied-up digital frames were so ubiquitous in the 2000s that they were given away as part of larger Adobe Photoshop packages. They are the technological equivalent of cartoon scrawls – some more clever than others.

But the idea that such rudimentary, long-in-the-tooth technology could suddenly be worth US$ 1 billion is truly surprising. Together, Facebook and Instagram provide us with a metaphor for what is happening in the world today.

The faux-capitalism that the elites have propounded for the past 100 years as an alternative to real free markets at last stands exposed. In place of mighty airplanes, trains and tunnels, the West produces Facebook and Instagram to better spy on its people.

Is the Rise and Fall complete? The best the current market can do is dress up the weapons of the West's own self-destruction as a profit-making opportunity? It is even worse …

The elites evidently control the capital raising facilities of the West. They have used their dominant position, finally, to fully reveal the cynical nature of the social environment they have put in place, one that is purposefully unstable.

The current system is designed to promote world government at the expense of lives, passion, happiness and even survival of the masses of people. Long gone are the reality of a free-market place and the grandeur of meaningful creation and production.

The West's productive capacities have surely been purposefully manipulated in such a way as to benefit the schemes of a rapacious few while hollowing out the actual mechanisms of civil good. Facebook and its "IPO" currently plumb the nadir of this evolution.