Last year, in the pages of New York, Max Read wondered whether Facebook’s founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, really had any idea what his platform actually is. “Facebook has grown so big, and become so totalizing, that we can’t really grasp it all at once,” Read wrote. “Like a four-dimensional object, we catch slices of it when it passes through the three-dimensional world we recognize.”

At the time, Zuckerberg had embarked upon a cross-country tour — the latest in a series of ambitious annual side projects he assigns to himself (previous projects include eating meat only from animals he’s “killed himself”) — that led many to speculate about whether he was planning a run at politics. Watching Zuckerberg interact with laypeople in every state, Read tried to come to grips with what he was seeing.

“If Facebook is bigger, newer, and weirder than a mere company, surely [Zuckerberg’s] trip is bigger, newer, and weirder than a mere presidential run,” he wrote, before running down a long list of possibilities — including, of course, that “Facebook is a surveillance state” and Zuckerberg is filling the role of a “dictator undertaking a propaganda tour.”

But all Mark Zuckerberg was really doing was extending the purpose of his website. He was gathering information. For all the ways that Facebook might now resemble a tool of a surveillance state — if not a surveillance state itself — this one similarity seems most striking: the shared philosophy of data collection.

Facebook wants to unite the people of Earth — if not ideologically or politically, at least technologically. How…? By finding out as much as possible about you and using that information to connect you to other parts of its network.

As Alex Bridle writes in New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future, the NSA believes that “there is some secret at the heart of the world that, if only it can be known, will make everything better.” To arrive at this secret, it collects as much information as it can, from as many sources as possible, under the impression that, at some point, it will all fit together to make the world clearer and more knowable. Disasters might be averted, terrorist plots foiled. Total knowledge equals total protection.

Facebook believes the same thing, with a twist. As Zuckerberg wrote in his manifesto last year, and highlighted in bold, Facebook wants to “develop the social infrastructure to give people the power to build a global community that works for all of us.” Zuckerberg, and by extension, Facebook, want to unite the people of Earth — if not ideologically or politically, at least technologically.

How does Facebook do that? By finding out as much as possible about you and using that information to connect you to other parts of its network. Facebook appears to believe there is a secret at the heart of the world that, if discovered, could make all of our lives immeasurably better. It collects our data, searching obsessively and trying to solve the riddle. If only Facebook could know everything about everyone, the theory goes, it could unite us all.

Ultimately, whether it’s the NSA or Facebook, the logic of the system dictates that at some point these entities — government and corporate — will know us better than we know ourselves. Only then will some form of a perfect society be achieved. The question now, as in 2013, is whether we believe such a goal is achievable. And whether the tradeoffs — like last week’s monumental data breach — are worth enduring as we wait for that vision to become reality.

One assumes the easy answer is “no.” Recent history might suggest otherwise.