This article appears in the November/December 2021 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
Hello, reader. It’s Meta. The artist formerly known as Facebook. (Prince had the love symbol, Mark has a melted infinity loop. Same deal.) You might be wondering, “Why is a $917 billion conglomerate buying the back page of a lefty rag?” It’s because we’ve changed. We care about the prynted werd™. And informaytion™. And facks™. Also, we will in all likelihood buy this publication in the not-too-distant future. Though “buy” is a strong word for Mark winning it in a hand of poker along with a million hectares of Paraguay.
Illustration by GREG HOUSTON
But mainly, we know you’re upset with us. And we’ve listened.
We know that we enabled would-be dictators to censor reality or create thousands of phony accounts propping up takeovers of their government, in exchange for exclusive control over internet services. Our bad. We know that we accidentally gave your name, address, email, work history, a list of everything you’ve eaten in the last six months, and all pictures of you and your ex-boyfriend to a gaming app about ducks. We goofed. We know that you put your credit card information in for a $4.95 bottle of the face cream Angelina Jolie “uses” and that it was in fact a $98-a-month subscription that took you three months to cancel so it ended up being a $298.95 bottle. But that’s not the point.
The point is, we’ve heard you.
We’ve cleansed clutter from the Timeline, and the Rohingya from Thailand. We tweaked the algorithm like the dial on an electric chair, and you stayed seated. We gave you more of your friend’s baby photos, and then fewer of your friend’s baby photos, and then five times as many of the same photos, and then photos on every second Thursday of the month. And we never once showed that baby being breastfed. Gross.
But maybe we lost our way. Maybe it was when we purchased that skinny chicks app (you know it as Instagram). Addicts say you need to hit rock bottom before you can start recovery. But for us, the rock isn’t necessarily the bottom. You can always break through that rock and find oil!
We’ve had our share of setbacks: whistleblowers, leaked internal documents, and congressional hearings, where senators asked our half-puppet, half-boy CEO some tough questions, like “How do I get the printer to work?” and “What is the password to my email?”
All this talk of “regulating Big Tech” has left us wondering: If we can’t regulate ourselves, do we even deserve to be regulated by others? So we looked inward. And like Michael Jackson, we started with the man in the mirror and asked him to change his ways. We also looked into faking our own deaths and living on an undisclosed Caribbean island for the rest of our lives with M.J., but he said that with his underground Foreva Eva Land there wasn’t enough room.
So we pivoted. We’re going … Meta. (Which is much better than our runner-up name, Squoob. Real close to being Squoob.) Meta is for the Metaverse. And if you don’t know what the Metaverse is, it’s like the Spider-Verse, only it’s a three-hour all-hands meeting with 1998-level graphics. And without any brown characters. Meta means multitudes. Like the ones that stormed the Capitol on January 6th. Meta exists in the future and the past. Like how we did and will again help elect Donald Trump. Meta is for the metadata we mine from your thirsty private messages to internet celebrities. Yes, they were dick pics. Yes, we looked. And we said, “Shoot your shot, king!”
Meta is the world’s first self-regulating social media platform that will utterly disrupt the Corporate Accountability Industrial Complex. And at the helm will, of course, be our Mark. Not a marionette, not yet a boy.
Buckle up, Earth. Where we’re going, we don’t need books. Or faces.
