How Mark Zuckerberg failed his 2019 personal challenge

[Karlston]

How Mark Zuckerberg failed his 2019 personal challenge

And why it’s time to give up on this annual exercise

 

As 2019 dawned and Mark Zuckerberg announced this year’s personal challenge, I suggested it might be time to retire the concept altogether. Zuckerberg’s “challenge,” as he described in a Facebook post, would be to “host a series of public discussions about the future of technology in society.”

 

“Every few weeks I’ll talk with leaders, experts, and people in our community from different fields and I’ll try different formats to keep it interesting,” Zuckerberg wrote on January 8th. After his first conversation, he replied to a comment about the project by saying, “I have a dream list of leading thinkers in fields ranging from the internet and artificial intelligence to biology and climate change.”

 

Given the challenges facing the company this year, it seemed like an odd choice. As I wrote at the time:

A 2019 in which the Mark Zuckerberg Show takes center stage threatens to once again present our future as an oral exam — and one that is also incidentally being presented as live entertainment. I’m all for open discussions of the most pressing issues facing business and government — and I hope Zuckerberg chooses to sit down with some of Facebook’s more thoughtful critics for a lively debate. (I’m available!) And yet I can’t help but wonder, given all his other responsibilities, why Zuckerberg sees a series of live broadcasts as a particularly good use of his time.

As it turned out, he didn’t.

 

Over the next 11 months, Zuckerberg held just six discussions, and used the same format every time: everyone seated in an office somewhere, having a polite pre-recorded conversation with one or two people. (Only the first conversation, with Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain, was truly public — held in front of a live audience.)

 

And as Kurt Wagner observed today, the people Zuckerberg chose to speak with were almost entirely the same sort of person that Zuckerberg is himself:

Almost all of Zuckerberg’s discussions were with fellow white men -- who have always dominated the technology industry.

 

In the six discussion videos Facebook posted throughout the year, 8 of Zuckerberg’s 9 guests were male, and almost all of them were white. Seven were professors or doctors -- and all but one were over the age of 40.

Broadly speaking, the first five chats focused on privacy, journalism, history, Facebook’s forthcoming Oversight Board, and health research. The final discussion, which landed on Monday, featured a conversation between Zuckerberg, Stripe CEO Patrick Collison, and the economist Tyler Cowen. The most abstract discussion yet, it centered on the nature of “progress” — something Collison and Cowen wrote about for The Atlantic earlier this year. The word “Facebook” is mentioned in the discussion exactly twice.

 

So much for that big discussion on climate change. And so much for these interesting questions he once hoped to address, from his original post:

In a world where many physical communities are weakening, what role can the internet play in strengthening our social fabric? How do we build an internet that helps people come together to address the world’s biggest problems that require global-scale collaboration?

How do we build technology that creates more jobs rather than just building AI to automate things people do?

On one hand, I remain skeptical of the value of in-depth conversations on social issues that are conceived, first and foremost, as a content marketing exercise for a giant corporation. On the other — those are some pretty good questions! And it might have been worthwhile to have Zuckerberg and his “dream list of leading thinkers” weigh in.

 

The most interesting of the six discussions, I thought, was Zuckerberg’s talk with Yuval Noah Harari, in which the author of Sapiens brought welcome historical context to our many dilemmas about platforms and governance. And as I wrote then, the discussion also revealed Zuckerberg’s thinking as worryingly underdeveloped:

 

Is that why these discussions ground to a halt? (It was two months before the next one, and nearly four more months till the one after that.) I don’t know, and Facebook didn’t respond to a request for comment.

 

In any case, if the idea was to galvanize public discussion, it doesn’t seem to have worked. Zuckerberg has started plenty of public discussions this year, mostly on accident — by pledging to fight Elizabeth Warren in that audio we leaked, for example, or by insisting on the right of politicians to lie in advertising. His best public discussion this year was an impromptu one — when he decided to broadcast a Facebook all-hands meeting in the wake of the leaked audio, giving the public a glimpse into what employees are concerned about and how he thinks about the challenges facing the company.

 

If nothing else, Zuckerberg’s near-abandonment of his 2019 personal challenge offers another good reason not to try another one in 2020. There’s a critical US presidential election in the offing, and that ought to be more than challenge enough.

 

 

Source: How Mark Zuckerberg failed his 2019 personal challenge (The Verge)