Inside Zuck's brain: His one-man mission to find a world of friends
In part one of a six-part manifesto, the mercurial founder explains how he sees Meta as the foundation for a better world - or else...
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Righto, a change of pace today. Who’s ready to dive into the brain of one of the world’s most influential people, Mark Zuckerberg, creator of Facebook, later Meta, and social media mega-mogul?
I’ve followed his rise for years.
At the exact same time he was working on his idea in a dorm, I was trying to persuade my then publisher News Corp to build its own social network, Myx.
Mine never happened. My bosses just couldn’t grasp the vision. But Zuck found his backers, and now three billion people a day march to his tune and swipe his alerts.
He can see inside the brains - and predict the behaviour - of a third of the world’s population.
But what makes him tick? How does he see the world? What does he want, and regret, and what legacy does he think he’s leaving?
Great questions, so I asked people who knew him for their insights. If you missed this, you might want to read in.
They led me to his manifesto. Six thousand words of his innermost thoughts, shared with colleagues and friends, written during the fallout of the Cambridge Analytica.
It’s fascinating, and even though it was written back in 2017, it’s a placeholder for how he has grown into his global role and hardened his positions.
It was prompted to review it by his rare appearance on a live podcast a few days ago. It was no more Mr Nice Mark. It was new, tough Mark. A hardened, I’m done with apologising Mark.
He was done with explaining his platform, and apologising for its ills. Fed up with criticism, and convinced collaboration is failing to turn his visions into reality.
My prediction is that we’re about to see a new Zuck on the block, one who’s dropping the meek-geek-persona for the tech-power-torch. Think Musk, only with Meta.
There are clues. Getting tough on Australian and Canadian publishers might be an inkling, but this signals something potentially more sinister.
How hard Zuck gets will depend on how much political appetite remains to break up Big Tech after the upcoming US election.
Whether Europe and the UK push on with schemes to target Big Tech’s multinational tax minimisation strategies.
And how the law settles on copyright and AI and the impact that will have on his fever dream to create Artificial General Intelligence and later, the Metaverse.
Last thing.
I have a million views about what he says here, but I’ve decided not to interrupt his chain of narrative. For once, I’ll be schtum.
Instead, I invite you to post your comments at the end, and we can have our discussions there.
…because Zuck has something to say. He has the ear of three billion people. We should probably hear him out.
By Mark Zuckerberg.
To our community,
On our journey to connect the world, we often discuss products we’re building and updates on our business.
Today I want to focus on the most important question of all: Are we building the world we all want?
History is the story of how we’ve learned to come together in ever greater numbers - from tribes to cities to nations.
At each step, we built social infrastructure like communities, media, and governments, to empower us to achieve things we couldn’t on our own.
Today we are close to taking our next step.
Our greatest opportunities are now global - like spreading prosperity and freedom, promoting peace and understanding, lifting people out of poverty, and accelerating science.
Our greatest challenges also need global responses - like ending terrorism, fighting climate change, and preventing pandemics.
Progress now requires humanity coming together not just as cities or nations, but also as a global community.
This is especially important right now.
Facebook stands for bringing us closer together and building a global community.
When we began, this idea was not controversial. Every year, the world got more connected, and this was seen as a positive trend.
Yet now, across the world there are people left behind by globalization, and movements for withdrawing from global connection.
There are questions about whether we can make a global community that works for everyone, and whether the path ahead is to connect more or reverse course.
This is a time when many of us around the world are reflecting on how we can have the most positive impact.
I am reminded of my favourite saying about technology: “We always overestimate what we can do in two years, and we underestimate what we can do in 10 years.”
We may not have the power to create the world we want immediately, but we can all start working on the long term today.
In times like these, the most important thing we at Facebook can do is develop the social infrastructure to give people the power to build a global community that works for all of us.
For the past decade, Facebook has focused on connecting friends and families.
With that foundation, our next focus will be developing the social infrastructure for community - for supporting us, for keeping us safe, for informing us, for civic engagement, and for inclusion of all.
Bringing us all together as a global community is a project bigger than any one organization or company, but Facebook can help contribute to answering these five important questions:
How do we help people build supportive communities that strengthen traditional institutions in a world where membership in these institutions is declining?
How do we help people build a safe community that prevents harm, helps during crises and rebuilds afterwards in a world where anyone across the world can affect us?
How do we help people build an informed community that exposes us to new ideas and builds common understanding in a world where every person has a voice?
How do we help people build a civically engaged community in a world where participation in voting sometimes includes less than half our population?
How do we help people build an inclusive community that reflects our collective values and common humanity from local to global levels, spanning cultures, nations and regions in a world with few examples of global communities?
My hope is that more of us will commit our energy to building the long-term social infrastructure to bring humanity together.
The answers to these questions won’t all come from Facebook, but I believe we can play a role.
Our job at Facebook is to help people make the greatest positive impact while mitigating areas where technology and social media can contribute to divisiveness and isolation.
Facebook is a work in progress, and we are dedicated to learning and improving. We take our responsibility seriously, and today I want to talk about how we plan to do our part to build this global community.
Mark
You can follow all my coverage on Meta here.
That’s chapter one, and there will be more over the coming weeks.
Next week, his vision for building a global support network, using social media to create social cohesion, comfort and something bigger than ourselves.
For now, how do you think Mark’s going with building safer, inclusive communities, supporting media, and enabling government through a civically engaged community?
For the record, I think it’s all self-serving horsh, and the highfalutin mission has long since given way to a mission for dollars over sense, but that’s just me.
Tell me what you think 👇