The beginning of the end?
If you’re one of my Facebook friends, then you’re probably well aware that I’m having some legal problems. That’s right — I’m being sued! But don’t worry, it’s not anything serious. It’s just a small lawsuit… from a guy who says I stole his idea for a social networking site. Yeah, I know — crazy, right? But honestly, I don’t even know how he can prove that I actually stole his idea. After all, my social networking site has been around for years longer than his site ever was. Plus, there are tons of other social networking sites out there. So technically, it could have been anyone who came up with the idea first. But still, the guy is suing me and my lawyers tell me that I should stop using Facebook.
Come on now. You bought that lede. Didn’t you?
But seriously though, for a while now, I’ve been trying to wrap my head around the concept of life after Facebook. It’s not that I am not active on other social media platforms. Those who know me well know that I have always been an early adopter of new social media platforms and if I can say so myself, have been intuitive enough so far to know when to stop using a particular platform because I sense some sort of an end to that platform. As much as it could be a testament to my age, Facebook, as we know it today, has been the sole platform where I have spent quality exchanges with friends I really know well. Also, I know for a fact that Facebook has helped me reconnect with so many old friends and germinate some new friendships and relationships. So it’s quite natural that I’m worried about what will happen to our relationships once we leave the comforting confines of Facebook when this platform, as know it today, dies slowly. Meta-sta(t)(s)iscally speaking. (See, what I did there?)
Will we be able to maintain our friendships without the Instant Messenger conversations and constant updates? Will we find other ways to keep in touch, or will we slowly drift apart until one day we realize that we don’t actually know what our friends are up to anymore? Many questions. But I am not really worried about finding answers for them as yet.
I am not saying Facebook is on the decline because of what the stock market says. There are many good reasons why I feel that this platform, as we know it, is on the decline. It’s not quite dead — And in fact, it may never die, as monsters like these are too big to die. But for the first time I can feel that the day when most of us stop using this platform frequently like we do today is surprisingly not too far off in the future and that’s the intuitive sense which has influenced my own Facebook usage habits in the past 3 months or so. But until that day comes, when we all stop using this platform for good, maybe we should start looking for other ways to procrastinate from our work..and yeah..stay connected.
Now, let us look at some serious problems Facebook /Meta / Zuckerberg are facing at this moment.
To do that, like all tech stories from the valley in the last 20 years or so start, we too will have to start with Peter Thiel and today’s breaking news.
Yes, Peter Thiel is leaving the Meta’s Board to spend more quality time (openly) supporting Trump candidates, aka, fascists.
Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal and Palantir, is truly the single most powerful cult idol of the silicon valley. Read more about who he is in this excellent article. To give a quick glimpse as to who he is, when he was a 20 year old student at Stanford, he was driving his university chess team members to Monterey, was speeding, and was pulled over.
Read the below section from the article that narrates what happened next when he was pulled over by a state trooper.
Thiel addressed the statie coolly in his usual uninflected baritone. “Well,” he said, “I’m not sure if the concept of a speed limit makes sense. It may be unconstitutional. And it’s definitely an infringement on liberty.”
Unbelievably, the trooper seemed to accept this. He told Thiel to slow down and have a nice day. Even more unbelievably: As soon as he drove out of sight, Thiel hit the gas pedal again, just as hard as before. To his astonished passengers, it was as if he believed that not only did the laws of California not apply to him..
As he continued to wield his power in the silicon valley, he bet on many startups. One such bet — perhaps his most influential one from a global geopolitical standpoint, was Facebook. He lent $500,000 to a socially inept Harvard sophomore in exchange for 10 percent of a website called TheFacebook.com. As part of the deal, Thiel ensured that Mark Zuckerberg would be the company’s absolute dictator. No one, not even Facebook’s board of directors, could ever overrule him.
Evil you say?
Fast forward to 2019.
The above excerpt is only to highlight what kind of a political influence Peter Thiel had played and continues to play in amping up anti-democratic elements on the Facebook platform. In fact, as one of his friends sums up, Thiel’s ideology — and his apparent belief that corporate power should subsume the authority of governments can be seen directly throughly how he guided Facebook’s actions.
A couple of more points on Peter Thiel.
If you followed the Cambridge Analytica story after the 2016 elections, then you probably know what a mess that was and still continues to be for Facebook, what with so many legal actions waiting to be adjudicated and settled. But do you know it was Peter Thiel’s Palantir that taught Cambridge Analytica how to steal data? And that too while he was on the Facebook board.
Here’s one more NYT article which gets into the ugly side of Pegasus and how Facebook & NSO (Israel) worked together to spy on people. I will leave that discussion out from this post but would like to point this one paragraph that stood out (image below). Yes, Thiel was still serving on the board when Boldend was hacking WhatsApp messages.
Oh..Also..before I forget.
Clearview AI. This is the facial recognition company that stole 3 billion photos from Facebook. Yeah. Those guys. Know who one of the backers of this company is?
Of course, Peter Thiel.
So, in essence, Peter Thiel leaving the Meta board is a huge deal.
Meanwhile, from NDCA to the US Congress, from Europe to Australia, Mark Zuckerberg continues to face hurdles. The legal rings are closing in on him. Here is the latest setback for Meta in Australia.
Also buried in Meta’s annual report for SEC, filed Thursday, that caused the stock market to take notice of the problems with the company, is a surprisingly stark sentence laying out a scenario in which the company formerly known as “Facebook” might have to entirely stop operating Instagram and Facebook in Europe.
Yes. You heard it right. No Instagram, no Facebook, for all Europeans.
And the list of problems faced by Zuckerberg keeps growing and there has never been a time in the history of Facebook when it looked this bleak for him and he genuinely looks directionless.
Amidst all these, I think Apple may have dealt Facebook the death blow. With its iOS privacy change, Apple kicked Facebook’s business model right on its face.
Meta, the company, may never die — other than Facebook dying a metaphorical death. I vividly remember when Zuckerberg announced his grand plans for “Meta” a few months ago — and of course, it came out of nowhere. As in, the pivot to Meta came from nowhere.
And my first thought was..
“Hasn’t he done enough to ruin our reality? Why is he coming after our metaverse?”.
This pivot was an effort to get ahead of the blast, and it worked, maybe for a quarter.
I am not an expert in this nor do I read the market on a daily basis. And I certainly have no idea if the market is really looking forward to the so called “metaverse”. I mean, there is no real evidence at least from what I have been reading that the mass market wants a “metaverse” right now. In fact, there is negative evidence. Maybe Zuckerberg is hoping that they can whistle past the graveyard of all who have tried before to make it a thing. Or it could all be a perfect distraction to change the conversation from what’s happening at Facebook — the legal issues included.
And then there is the engagement factor. The annual report shows the decline. There is data there for us to see. The loss of engagement is not just with the users in the USA, but more critically, seems to be a global pattern, including Latin America and Africa. Eventually that’s what counts. Right? And Mark Zuckerberg knew about the decline as late as in the second half of 2021. And that’s when he decided to throw down the Meta gauntlet without a well-thought out strategy, and only with a hope of distraction.
Facebook may have maxed out of their S-curve. If they keep on with the metaverse distraction, then that will be in zero-sum contention with actually fixing their current business model or the problems with it.
Unless the company figures out a real way to keep new capital (and users) flowing in, they may have passed their peak. To sum up, Meta is playing with both hands tied behind its back right now and rightfully, they can’t even buy a new GIF company without getting antitrust scrutiny. They perhaps were a bit late with introducing their Instagram “Reels” feature but then that is the only feature showing strength right now. I can only imagine how much Mark Zuckerberg wants to buy TikTok.
All said, Facebook will limp along for now. I am not a doctor who can tell when the patient is dying. But as a tech user, as a heavy social media user, who knows a thing or two about when a social media platform becomes ill and weak, I can sense it. And they are not taking the pills prescribed. I can sense that this the beginning of the end. This ‘end era’ could be a long one and may not come suddenly. Even Zuckerberg himself has hinted at this being the end of an era.
Listen, I am not advocating that it’s time to look beyond Mark Zuckerberg to keep us connected. His grand vision of connecting the whole world may be dead but he is still so powerful that he may reinvent himself and come up with something else to connect us all. Inside the metaverse maybe.
Remember how Microsoft reinvented itself with XBox?
Or he may not.
As long as my friends continue to use Facebook, I will be there. If my engagement rate goes down, I hope they know it’s nothing personal.
Because I have embraced the idea that we all have chosen to be connected together inside an evil monster’s belly. And there is no way out until the monster spits us all out into the ocean.
And when it does, there will be other monsters waiting to consume us.
We then will have a choice —
To choose the monster that we want to consume us so that we stay connected, or to swim ashore, away from all the monsters, and stay disconnected.
