Facebook's plans for world domination have been revealed.

In an interview in Portfolio.com, the company's chief financial officer Gideon Yu laid his cards on the table. ""There are these small bands of people who are trying to take over the world," Yu said. "This is so much more fun than working at a hedge fund or an investment bank."

It might have been flippant, a jocular throw away line but as Sigmund Freud pointed out, jokes are acceptable ways of speaking the unspeakable.

"Evil is deeply embedded in Facebook's corporate DNA," says strategy consultant Umair Haque in his blog Bubblegeneration.com.

"What makes revolutionaries - well, revolutionary - is the desire to change the world. For the better." Haque says. "Almost all of today's new market leaders, interestingly, share this trait: it is a deep genetic difference that underpins advantage. The deeply felt desire to change the world for the better is ultimately how radical innovators are able to explode value propositions, redesign value chains, etc. But that's not what Facebook wants to do. Facebook wants to take over the world. See the difference? One is about improving things radically, about innovation: the other is about capturing rents, about scarcity and control. We can put this a bit more formally. Facebook wants to play games of coercion and domination: I threaten, you obey."

Bursting with cash after Microsoft bought a slice of the company, Facebook is in a very strong position. Last week, it unveiled plans to turn its 50 million users into viral marketers. And strangely, or maybe not surprisingly, its founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg can't see any implications for privacy. "The social actions that users have are only going to be used to create social ads for their friends. This is just to make the information more relevant to the user and their friends," Zuckerberg told reporters.

But as Nicholas Carr points out in his blog, the strategy is clear. "It's a nifty system: First you get your users to entrust their personal data to you, and then you not only sell that data to advertisers but you get the users to be the vector for the ads. And what do the users get in return? An animated Sprite Sips character to interact with."