The profound irony that “social” media mogul Mark Zuckerberg is someone who clearly doesn’t like to socialize much is well-trodden territory, but it was pretty much all I could think about while watching a recent podcast appearance involving the tech executive.
Zuckerberg sat down for a live interview on The “Acquired” podcast Last week in San Francisco, a video was shared that was made public on Tuesday. The conversation covered many topics, but one of the most important was Zuckerberg’s idea that social interaction is a kind of Platonic ideal.
Zuck, who often gives the impression that he just met the human race, managed to explain his views on social interaction with all the studied, abstract rhetoric of someone who makes a living monetizing it — which is, of course, what he does. Still, it was a bit jarring (and laugh-inducing) to hear the tech executive wax philosophical about what he called the “ideal social experience,” a concept he’s apparently thought about a lot and which he says involves “glasses.”
“I think what you’d like to have is not a phone that you look down at and that kind of distracts you from the things and the people around you… but ideally you’d like to have glasses, and through them, you can see what you see and hear what you hear, and in doing so, they can be sort of the perfect AI assistant for you because they have context about what you’re doing. But it’s also possible that the glasses could project images, basically, like holograms, into the world, and in that way your social experiences with other people aren’t limited to these little interactions that you can have with a phone screen.”
I see. So, according to Zuckerberg, the “ideal” social experience involves wearing glasses that produce holograms on your head while simultaneously interacting with a chatbot that never turns off. In Zuckerberg’s formulation, the “ideal” social experience would also seem to require perpetual use of one of Meta’s products, which can mediate whatever social interaction you’re having. Notably absent from Mark’s description of the “ideal” social experience is any context in which other people are physically present with you. He also seems to forgo any mention of things like intimacy, fun, laughter, or other aspects of social interaction that most normal people might consider “ideal.”
Of course, the fact that Zuck is looking at social interaction through this lens (literally) shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise. Lately, he’s been intrigued by the idea of Building a new generation of AI-powered glasses that can integrate with Meta’s ecosystem of apps and software. Zuck’s discussion of “the ideal social experience” was intended as an opportunity to promote this concept.
Zuckerberg’s comments about the social experience deserve a little deeper scrutiny. At another point in the conversation, he said, “We are very physical beings. People like to intellectualize everything, but so much of our experience is very physical, and this physical sense of presence that you’re with another person, doing things in the physical world, is something you’ll be able to do through holograms, through glasses.” Admittedly, being physically with other people and doing things in the physical world is very pleasurable, which makes it ironic that Zuckerberg’s hypothetical product seems to actually bring you into reality. far from the physical world, taking you instead into a strange hybrid physical-digital world where you are never fully present.
Zuck’s strange metaphysical musings aside, there was plenty more humor to be found in the hour-long conversation with the Acquired folks. At one point, out of the blue, Zuckerberg said, “I’m done apologizing”; in a fit of unintentional humor, the moderator asked the Meta CEO if what he does is similar to carving the statue of David out of a block of marble; Zuck also noted that, like Kanye West, he had started making his own clothes.
The event’s standout moment, though, came toward the end of the talk, when Zuck shared an anecdote about how he crushed his 7-year-old daughter’s dreams of becoming the next Taylor Swift. “One day, my daughter — we took her to a Taylor Swift concert, and she said, ‘You know, Dad, I want to be like Taylor Swift when I grow up,’” Zuckerberg said. “I said, ‘But you can’t. That’s not available to you. ’ And she thought about it and said, ‘Okay, when I grow up I want people to want to be like August Chan Zuckerberg. ’”
I have no idea what kind of father Zuck is, although telling your young daughter that she definitely cannot be the next global pop star is undeniably funny. Maybe if he had been wearing some Meta glasses, that conversation with his daughter might have been even better.