The Zuckerberg android is looking a little dated
Imagine the scenario. Facebook releases a new video to mark its next big announcement. Mark Zuckerberg walks into frame. He’s in an expensive office space so clean that it’s even devoid of people.
“Here at Facebook,” he begins, awkwardly waving his hands as if to convince us that he is already on his latest firmware update, “we’ve been developing something exciting. We’ve been pushing back the boundaries of what the human mind can imagine. It’s cutting edge. It’s innovative. It connects people in ways that have never been done before. Because that’s what Facebook does. That’s what Facebook believes. We look to provide a different vision. It might offend those in power and those that believe in the orthodoxy, but we believe in disrupting the status quo to propel humanity into the future. So, now, I’m proud to present the next leap forward from Facebook. It’s the…”
And then we cut to an old bike wheel spinning unevenly on a stick.
And it squeaks.
Squeak. Squeak. Squeak.
Ridiculous, right?
Well, so was the launch of Meta, the new name/vision for Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg took over an hour attempting to convince us that he’s about “connecting people” in new and innovative ways. He promised us a glimpse of the future. It was impressive. It was exciting. It was just a little bit frightening.
But let’s pull back a little. Let us provide a bit of context. Let us, for want of a better word, get meta.
Facebook is an awful product.
No, really. It is an awful product. It is successful, certainly, but that’s on account of the one brilliant idea that Zuckerberg had over 17 years ago, creating a largely self-regulated medium that puts algorithms in the roles of the traditional gatekeepers of content. Yet its success has increasingly come to rest upon a generation of people who didn’t necessarily understand the opportunities afforded by technology and certainly aren’t aware of the dangers. The underlying story of Facebook is a company that got lucky once, rode that luck as far as it could, but continued to struggle to build upon its success. Its design remains clunky and unappealing. Its ethos traps users in their ecosystem and demands that they yield personal information, which is then used to mine and manipulate. More problematic from a business point of view: it has also struggled to expand its demographic and has only done so by buying up other more youthful products such as WhatsApp and Oculus VR, designed and made successful by third parties.
Ask yourself: what is Mark Zuckerberg’s last great achievement? Popularising the grey t-shirt? Proving himself adept at hydrofoiling? Ensuring that generations of people grow up with the belief that tech billionaires lack personality and hide sinister motives?
Not to disparage Zuckerberg’s success but perhaps he isn’t the tech pioneer that people seem to think he is. If he can’t even use his considerable billions to fix his public image, then how can he be such an arch manipulator of public tastes?
Consider: Apple under Steve Jobs changed the nature of personal computing not once but several times over three decades. It then brought us the portable MP3 player in the form of the iPod. Then came the iPhone, the mobile phone that went on to radically change multiple industries. It then created the iPad. Jobs oversaw multiple products that profoundly changed the ways we interact with the world.
Consider too: if this was Elon Musk proposing to change the world through Meta, we might have reason to take notice. Musk proposes radical solutions to difficult problems. He made his fortune with PayPal (a properly disruptive technology) but he then did it again, taking electric cars from niche to aspirational products. He’s now innovating in other fields: electric storage, neurotechnology, robotics, tunnelling, as well as changing the space industry with the success of SpaceX’s Falcon 9. If he makes a success of his next-generation spacecraft called “Starship” – and thus far it’s looking impressive – he will be the name people will remember from the 21st century in the same way as the 1900s were about Henry Ford.
Zuckerberg, meanwhile, has what Zuckerberg has had for much of his career: the myth and personality of the computer prodigy who changed the world… once.
The big question raised by Meta is if the prodigy can repeat that trick. The evidence, thus far, isn’t compelling. If he could, then he’d have already introduced some ground-breaking tech to the world and Meta wouldn’t exist. It certainly wouldn’t be what it appears to be from the outset: a mega-budget rebrand meant to detoxify an increasingly toxic product. Oculus, owned by Facebook, might well be an industry leader in VR but there was nothing in the Meta presentation to suggest that the next technological leap will come from them. That, however, is the nature of technology. The next profoundly effective innovation might well be around the corner but it’s probably being built by the next generation of coders working from bedroom offices in China or America’s mid-West. Perhaps the only Mark Zuckerberg we should be keeping an eye out for is the next Mark Zuckerberg. The current model is looking just a little bit “last-gen”.