Today, news broke that Facebook is changing its company name to “Meta” and the announcement came with new promising “futuristic” features to further Zuckerberg’s promise to “connect people”. I remember the first time I made a Facebook account around early 2010. This was during college and some instructors started using the platform (assuming everyone was in) to post announcements like quizzes, assignments etc. After missing out on a few of these—threatening my grade—I was left with no other choice but to adapt.
I was relatively late to the party. I never wanted to join in the first place. It just did not appeal to me as much as it has to my peers. I remember that time, most of them were hooked on the Facebook game called “Pet Society”. I never played it. The only game I played later on was Texas HoldEm Poker.
I did not enjoy it at first (the whole social media thing, except for the poker game) but just like most people, it grew on me eventually and saw its benefits. Zuckerberg’s promise with Facebook “to connect people” or “to make the world closer” is something I really like. And this particularly gives me the “Facebook dilemma” after a decade of being in Facebook on-and-off (This is my third account. I went about 2 years of not having any social media.) seeing how it became a platform of fake news, fake lives, and the ongoing issue of privacy.
You see, FB is a nasty place to be, but like most, I also have had some meaningful connections and interactions there. I was astonished when I first joined Facebook (despite I didn’t really want to) because it was true to its early promise. It really connected people. And I have always wondered—and skeptical—on how on earth this app is free?! How are they making money? What’s the catch? Of course, I got the most generic and obvious answer—it’s through the ads! I get it but I still feel off (despite being active) the question lingered. This is a billion-dollar business. This is a product. But how come it’s so free? What is the catch? Today, I think I have my answer.
It’s free because Facebook is not the product—I am.
Facebook has created a hybrid business by taking advantage of not just our good desire “to belong” but our most despicable nature. Think of HBO’s dystopian Sci-fi series ‘Westworld’ created by couple Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan. It is based on Michael Crichton's campy 1973 film about a Wild West theme park in which customers amuse themselves by shooting robotic desperados and sexually abusing robotic prostitutes. The theme park was made to satisfy man’s most vile desires until the robots developed consciousness, sick of such cruel demands and revolt. We may not be shooting one another with bullets like in the wild wild west, but we sure are giving each other—most times ourselves—an even more fatal mental attack that has already resulted in real life casualties.
It was revealed in Westworld season 2 that one of James Delos’ (the prime investor of Westworld) motivations for investing in the theme park was to transfer his mind into a host (robot) to achieve immortality, as well as collect information on park guests, perhaps for similar purposes. Westworld is not accessible to everyone because it is crazy expensive ($40,000 per day) unlike Facebook. But in the same way, Westworld guests are not the consumers, they were the products being tested. If you carefully look at it, Facebook has made it more pronounced compared to the exaggerated fiction of Westworld by making it so easily accessible.
My new question now is, where do we go from here? I wish I could just watch another Westworld episode and know the answer. Maybe it will take another decade to get another answer. Anyway, I firmly believe, asking questions is not necessarily for us to get answers but to develop a process.