The good news is that Mark Zuckerberg has become bored of looking like an answer to the AI prompt “efit of a teen villain”. The bad? While the Meta overlord has grown out the Caesar hairstyle that has sustained him since 2016, he is now leaning in to open imperial monomania. This week’s Meta Connect conference saw Mark take the stage in a T-shirt reading Aut Zuck Aut Nihil. Either Zuck Or Nothing. The original was Aut Caesar Aut Nihil and was enthusiastically adopted as a motto by one of the worst Borgias (tough field) … but look, I’m sure it’s ironic. Mark’s such a gifted ironist.
We’ll get to the magic glasses and AI feedspam he was pushing at this week’s event in a minute – but before we do, let’s recap. Easily the most significant thing Mark Zuckerberg has said this year was that he isn’t sorry any more – in fact, that he wished he’d never said sorry for most of what he’d ever said sorry for. I paraphrase only slightly. A couple of weeks ago, Zuckerberg appeared on stage for a podcast and called Facebook’s willingness to offer stakes-free apologies for things he wasn’t to blame for – like election manipulation or the effect of social media on teen mental health – “a 20-year mistake”.
“And I think it’s going to take another 10 years or so for us to fully work through that cycle,” he reflected, “before our brand is back to the place that it maybe could have been if I hadn’t messed that up in the first place.” Please: imagine the force Meta could be if only it hadn’t been held back by extremely intermittent synthetic contrition.
The upshot is that we might never again hear Mark drone all those Facebook phrases for sorry – “we will learn from this”, “we know we have more work to do”. That said, the counterpoint to his soz-regret is that they’ve played quite well for him. Sure, every now and then he’s had to pitch up to Congress for hearings that are always described as “tense”, heated”, “fiery” and even “stunning”. But these have repeatedly proved themselves nothing more than the theatre of futility. Not one federal law has ever been passed to regulate Meta, or the other big tech firms. So the occasional few hours in Washington for a besuited “my bad” has been the price you pay for being the world’s most powerful oligarch, selling the lives of 3 billion monthly users via a platform that has incentivised hate, then … can you not just pay it? Apparently not any more.
Of course, you may be one of those who feel trepidation at the idea of living in a world where Mark Zuckerberg is no longer minded to take responsibility for things. In which case, he has another world to sell you: the metaverse. Like so many of the tech titans, Mark really does offer an end-to-end service: they make the world worse, then they claim to be leading the escape. Elon Musk with his Mars aspiration, Jeff Bezos with his space programme, Zuckerberg with his virtual knock-off of the real world whose landmark upgrade is that he controls it absolutely.
That would certainly appear to be its sole advantage. For a man seemingly without a cultural hinterland, perhaps it’s no surprise that the fantasy world Zuckerberg’s firm has come up with is a place of such utter conceptual dreariness. We are forever being told that the metaverse is a place where you can shop, have meetings, do real estate deals, attend conferences … I mean, honestly. Just add “answer infinite email” and you really have simulated paradise.
We aren’t quite there yet, Mark admitted this week – honestly, it’s just round the next corner – but in the meantime he’d love to show you some augmented reality glasses and a cheaper VR headset then the one he asked you to buy last time. Also, now people don’t post so much on Facebook and Instagram any more, he is going to start gradually pumping their feeds with personalised AI images that have been created by Meta AI. Mm. Ideally, we will eventually eliminate the need for any human posters at all.
Or as the Meta founder prefers it: “We are trying to build a future that is more open, more accessible, more natural, and more about human connection.” Go on. “Feeling truly present with another person is the ultimate dream of social technology.” Historically, of course, there has always been another way to feel truly present with another person, which is to be truly present with another person. But this is not what the emperor would wish for his citizens. He prefers the world atomised, mediated via his machines. One of the most lunatic moments at his event saw Zuckerberg call an affiliated creator on stage, but then proceed to have a conversation with an AI chatbot version of the creator on a giant screen, while the genuine article stood like a lemon on stage just watching.
Watching this eerie spectacle, I was reminded of what Mark once said to a Facebook employee whose job eventually became functioning as his ghostwriter. Kind of a flesh-and-bones AI (very 1.0). She had asked him what he meant by the three-word essay prompt he’d given her – “companies not countries”. “I think we are moving to a world in which we all become cells in a single organism,” Zuckerberg replied, “where we can communicate automatically and can all work together seamlessly.” Oof. Well, there you go. Who could fail to be happy that a guy who thinks this is now only sorry that he was ever sorry.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
A year in Westminster: John Crace, Marina Hyde and Pippa Crerar. On Tuesday 3 December, join Crace, Hyde and Crerar as they look back at a political year like no other, live at the Barbican in London and livestreamed globally. Book tickets here or at guardian.live
