Something goes wrong in every life. The longer it takes, the more mistakes a person makes and knows that turning back is tedious and sometimes impossible. Not everyone can take it. Mark Zuckerberg seems to have reached such a point. He would like to leave Facebook behind, rename the company "Meta", change the world again with a new technology and reinvent himself in the process. That can't work.
Because Facebook is not going away. It may be uncool, but it remains indispensable: in developing countries and in rural regions, for private relationships, local politics and small businesses. At the same time, the socio-political damage is immense - and obvious. He will be forever associated with Mark Zuckerberg's name, unless the boss takes the arduous path and reforms Facebook (and Instagram at the same time) as best he can.
So far, however, Zuckerberg has only healed as much as it does not jeopardize profits. This is borne out by documents recently published by a former employee. Money was often more important than ethics.
Authoritarian regimes are rushing to Facebook - and the company is standing still
To this day, Zuckerberg and his close management team in many regions of the world allow people to spit out their agitation almost unhindered on Facebook. Outside of the US and beyond Europe, not enough language-proficient moderators are hired to pacify the network. A current example of this is India, where Muslims are threatened and slandered unfiltered. Elsewhere, the group would have to risk a conflict with an authoritarian regime that incites against its own opposition on social networks. This is what happens in the Philippines, for example. But Facebook is keeping quiet.
Zuckerberg promoted Donald Trump, even if he is politically distant from him, and it is still open whether the former president will be allowed to be active again on Facebook. This problem is also on Zuckerberg's desk. Anyone who, like him, has made almost ten billion dollars in profit in the past three months alone and chooses not to invest any of it in the common good bears personal responsibility. This is one of the reasons why he is threatened with humiliating hearings in the American Senate and Congress. In Europe, the social network is in a regulatory debate. And the global minimum tax that leading industrialized nations passed last week will hurt Facebook's bottom line.
At that moment, Zuckerberg suddenly renames his company and tries to disappear behind himself. Departure of the controversial entrepreneur - appearance of the brilliant visionary. And should the audience applaud this shirking? Probably not.
A bit of rocket envy is sure to add to that. As is well known, two greats from Silicon Valley set off for the stars. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos buckle up and leave the earth behind, their transformation into astrovisioners is going fantastic. How could Zuckerberg watch that? He now opposes the trip into the universe with his departure into the metaverse.
For this reason alone, it is worth taking a quick look at this new medium. It's an old idea according to which people would be able to dive deeper into the Internet than before, if it were technically possible. Some computer games give an idea of what it feels like. There, players put on smart glasses and choose a figure, they enter a three-dimensional, virtual world - enjoy it and spend quite a lot of their lives there. Proponents of the metaverse believe that a similar technique could be applied to other areas of life. Video conferences with grandma would be more like real family get-togethers.
Zuckerberg says the time has come to build the metaverse. Everything is still vague, more wanting than being, more should than have. It almost seems as if Zuckerberg got lost in the novel that released the idea of the metaverse into the world: Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. In it, people flee into virtual reality in the face of an ugly, uncomfortable, violent world. For Mark Zuckerberg himself this is no way out, the Facebook crisis is his personal crisis. How he deals with it will forever define him as a person and entrepreneur.
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