Lori Falce: A very meta chat with Mark Zuckerberg
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Oh, Mark Zuckerberg.
We haven’t met, but as you own all the pictures of my son since his birth and are responsible for a healthy percentage of the threatening communications I receive winding their way to me through tags and Messenger and comments on pieces I write, I feel like we’re old Friends. Just the same way that girl from high school who told me I was going to burn in hell because I’m a member of the media is my Friend. Thanks for changing the meaning of that word, by the way.
Anyway, Mark … can I call you Mark? I want to talk to you about your announcement today.
It’s good that you’ve taken all of the criticism and concerns about issues with the platform you created seriously over the past few years. I know it has to have been tough to balance all the competing problems of privacy and responsibility with the need to build as much wealth as humanly possible. Did it hurt when Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk passed you on the richest billionaires list? Have you talked to someone about it? I’m concerned, really.
But today, you took a stand, and that was important. You confronted these issues head-on. Did you do it by deciding not to loot your users’ data to feed them inaccurate and harmful information? Did you decide to turn the brainpower that built social media as an industry in your dorm room to finding a way to do it more ethically?
No. You addressed this in the most mustache-twirling, cartoon villain way possible. You grabbed a gallon of Acme high gloss and painted a tunnel through that mountain. You changed the company name.
Mark, I don’t know how to break this to you. The name was not the problem. The same way no one is buying Alphabet stock and saying, “thank God it’s not Google,” people aren’t going to be fooled into thinking the umbrella that covers Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and others is not still that plucky company that started in your dorm.
And can we talk about the name? Meta. I get it. The prefix is very digital. It brings to mind metadata like the info about the pictures stored on all those servers you have that warehouse the ins and outs of your billions of users. But you can’t have missed the obvious other meaning, right? Meta as an adjective just means self- referential, a kind of in-joke for people familiar with the source material.
It almost serves to say that you know this rebranding is just a prank. That you know it changes nothing. That the real purpose is just to keep the money flowing. Forbes tells me you made $4.2 billion Wednesday. Just on Wednesday. Congrats, really.
And that was after a whistleblower leaked internal documents. It was after people learned over the last few years about all of the ways your users have been your real commodity. Imagine how much money you will make after the rebranding tries to wipe that sticky slate clean.
Well, Mark, I’m glad we had this chance to talk. It’s not every day I get to voice my concerns to someone who makes twice as much money in one day as all of the businesses in Pennsylvania combined.
It just makes me wonder as a Friend — we’re Friends, right? — just how many days of your personal wealth growth it would take to enact real change in a company that has such massive and transformative reach instead of just painting mountains into molehills.
Good luck, Mark. This has been meta.