Inside Zuck's brain: From social scion to AGI Caesar

Part two of my series that uses the Meta chief's own words to plot his journey from a geeky kid to comptroller of human conversation - and what's next...

Hello and welcome to my special series from Future Media that peers into the brain of social media scion Mark Zuckerberg.

It’s prompted by a notable change in the Meta chief’s persona. Suddenly he’s on the front foot, publicly tough, and unrepentant.

Meta’s been showing these traits for some time, most clearly in its hyper-aggressive clashes with governments, lawmakers and publishers across Australia and Canada.

I’ll hear more about it in person next month when I meet publishers as a guest of the Canadian Governor General’s foundation. It’s a pivotal moment.

Quickly, before I dive in, please join me in welcome new subs from the exec team at Australia’s Nine (where the chase for the CEO seat is hotting up), from the Toronto Star (where the weather is freezing), from the Silicon Valley Innovation Center Network , from Rightmove (currently subject of a $6 billion takeover by Rupert Murdoch’s REA, who had a slew of new joiners to this newsletter last week), global programmatic giants MiQ , AI analytics Alteryx in London, the Cape Town office of leading ad agency Dentsu , video strategists Videodock in Amsterdam, VidCircle in the UK, global streaming app OTTRed , Swedish interactive ad network Swipefinder, digital marketers Trinityp3 in New York, and Digitalz in Poland, among others.

Great to have you, and please help my mate Wade Kingsley with his census, which ends in a few days…

Now back to the blood and Zucks of what’s coming from Meta…

My method has been to dive back into his brain in 2017 to compare what he’s saying today, with the 6,000-word manifesto he wrote then.

In the intro to this series, I warned that Zuck’s done with apologising and wants to tighten his fist .

Then, I plotted his path from a network for friends to artificial general intelligence and a machine-created Metaverse .

This week, Zuck went further, stepping on stage at his annual fanfest Meta Connect.

Thousands of devotees, developers, techies, wannabes, and a sprinkling of celebs, flocked to hear him outline his vision at 1601 Willow Road, Menlo Park.

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Casey Newton from the Platformer newsletter was there. Like me, he’s tracking Mark’s change. He wrote:

“The last time I saw Mark Zuckerberg take the stage , just a few weeks ago, the slogan on his chest struck a note of humility.

“Learning through suffering,” it read in Greek - a nod to the years Meta's CEO spent as a punching bag after building the company into one of the world’s most successful.

“On Wednesday, though, Zuckerberg was back on the offensive.

“Aut Zuck aut nihil his shirt read. The Latin phrase can be read as either Caesar or nothing, or all or nothing.

“But at Meta Connect it came across as Zuck or nothing - and over the course of the keynote, that’s just what we got.”

Zuck revealed augmented reality Ray-Bans and new artificial intelligence tweaks (see below) but what he revealed most was that the future should be all about him…

For a visionary who’s spent decades telling the world to build community, Zuck’s message struck me as cult-like. I specialised in cults as an investigative reporter .

A core message at Meta Connect was that GenAI content is coming to Facebook and Instagram.

The social networks won’t need you to create content to drive ads and revenue any more. The robots will do that. Synthetic social media is coming .

Think about that. Meta has sucked up your years of contributions to Facebook and Instagram, spun it through its AI, and will regurgitate it to you and your friends for ads.

Like? ?? ??

Oh, how lovely those baby pics you posted eight years ago will look reassembled by a power-sucking nuclear server somewhere into an ad to sell chipolatas.

Say cheese ?? ??

Zuck said: “We can start to see how the future of computing and the future of human connection are going to look. And it’s pretty awesome.”

He then sought to bridge the journey from past to his vision of the future.

“We’re trying to build a future that is more open, more natural, and more about human connection,” he said. “The continuation of ideas we have built over 20 years.”

And that’s the ideal segue way to rewind to what he said back then…

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It’s 2017, and Zuck is bruised after Cambridge Analytica data scandal and is engaged in a giant navel gazing exercise.

Energised by what he is learning about himself, he pens a 6,000-word manifesto to his execs, friends, and family.

This is all pure Zuck, in his own words.

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By Mark Zuckerberg.

Building a global community that works for everyone starts with the millions of smaller communities and intimate social structures we turn to for our personal, emotional and spiritual needs.

Whether they’re churches, sports teams, unions or other local groups, they all share important roles as social infrastructure for our communities.

• They provide all of us with a sense of purpose and hope.
• Moral validation that we are needed and part of something bigger than ourselves.
• Comfort that we are not alone and a community is looking out for us.
• Mentorship, guidance and personal development.
• A safety net.
• Values, cultural norms and accountability.
• Social gatherings, rituals and a way to meet new people, and
• A way to pass time.

In our society, we have personal relationships with friends and family, and then we have institutional relationships with the governments that set the rules.

A healthy society also has many layers of communities between us and government that take care of our needs.

When we refer to our “social fabric”, we usually mean the many mediating groups that bring us together and reinforce our values.

However, there has been a striking decline in the important social infrastructure of local communities over the past few decades.

Since the 1970s, membership in some local groups has declined by as much as one-quarter, cutting across all segments of the population.

The decline raises deeper questions alongside surveys showing large percentages of our population lack a sense of hope for the future.

It is possible many of our challenges are at least as much social as they are economic - related to a lack of community and connection to something greater than ourselves.

As one pastor told me: “People feel unsettled. A lot of what was settling in the past doesn’t exist any more.”

Online communities are a bright spot, and we can strengthen existing physical communities by helping people come together online as well as offline.

In the same way connecting with friends online strengthens real relationships, developing this infrastructure will strengthen these communities, as well as enable completely new ones to form.

A woman named Christina was diagnosed with a rare disorder called Epidermolysis Bullosa - and now she’s a member of a group that connects 2,400 people around the world so none of them have to suffer alone.

A man named Matt was raising his two sons by himself and he started the Black Fathers group to help men share advice and encouragement as they raise their families.

In San Diego, more than 4,000 military family members are part of a group that helps them make friends with other spouses.

These communities don’t just interact online. They hold get-togethers, organize dinners, and support each other in their daily lives.

We recently found that more than 100 million people on Facebook are members of what we call “very meaningful” groups.

These are groups that upon joining, quickly become the most important part of our social network experience and an important part of our physical support structure.

For example, many new parents tell us that joining a parenting group after having a child fits this purpose.

There is a real opportunity to connect more of us with groups that will be meaningful social infrastructure in our lives.

More than one billion people are active members of Facebook groups, but most don’t seek out groups on their own - friends send invites or Facebook suggests them.

If we can improve our suggestions and help connect one billion people with meaningful communities, that can strengthen our social fabric.

Going forward, we will measure Facebook’s progress with groups based on meaningful groups, not groups overall.

This will require not only helping people connect with existing meaningful groups, but also enabling community leaders to create more meaningful groups for people to connect with.

The most successful physical communities have engaged leaders, and we’ve seen the same with online groups as well.

In Berlin, a man named Monis Bukhari runs a group where he personally helps refugees find homes and jobs.

Today, Facebook’s tools for group admins are relatively simple. We plan to build more tools to empower community leaders like Monis to run and grow their groups the way they’d like, similar to what we’ve done with Pages.

Most communities are made of many sub-communities, and this is another clear area for developing new tools.

A school, for example, is not a single community, but many smaller groups among its classes, dorms and student groups.

Just as the social fabric of society is made up of many communities, each community is made of many groups of personal connections. We plan to expand groups to support sub-communities.

We can look at many activities through the lens of building community.

Watching video of our favorite sports team or TV show, reading our favorite newspaper, or playing our favorite game are not just entertainment or information but a shared experience and opportunity to bring together people who care about the same things.

We can design these experiences not for passive consumption but for strengthening social connections.

Our goal is to strengthen existing communities by helping us come together online as well as offline, as well as enabling us to form completely new communities, transcending physical location.

When we do this, beyond connecting online, we reinforce our physical communities by bringing us together in person to support each other.

A healthy society needs these communities to support our personal, emotional and spiritual needs.

In a world where this physical social infrastructure has been declining, we have a real opportunity to help strengthen these communities and the social fabric of our society.

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For me, what cries out is he’s on a journey from human connection that’s unplottable, and unreliable, to machine control over human connection that’s entirely predictable.

Tomes will be written and spoken about his influence on the world’s information in the centuries to come. He will get his dream to live on as a Caesar of sorts.

But it’s hard not to feel that the kid with a keyboard is emerging with a kill-crush-destroy crusade to force his Metaverse on the world.

It’s a mid-life crisis of epic, global proportions, that will impact three billion people. The cage-fighting, the slogan tees, the messy new hairdo. It’s all there in the open.

And it’s not just me who spotting his tonal change.

Newton concluded in Platformer : “Zuckerberg intends to crush his rivals into a fine pulp.

“Zuckerberg has never seemed more intent on claiming for himself the mantle of innovator. He will be a Caesar or nothing. And woe to anyone who stands in his way.”

Still wanna post your cutesy baby pics to Insta to feed his fiefdom?

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Chapter three next week will focus on Zuck’s moment of truth, when he realised that it was his responsibility to keep his community safe…

Let’s see…

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