With their vision of the future, Big Tech companies encourage people not just to buy certain products or learn certain skills, but to see the future as always the same: technological development. Asher Kessler It explores the history of how Facebook/Meta has imagined the future, so that we can think about it differently today.
Our outlook on what lies ahead of us in the future has been shaped historically by a variety of actors. For millennia, religious thinkers have painted vivid pictures of the afterlife, with some Christian leaders imagining the end of the world being imminent. Marxist philosophers have also argued, through their analysis of history and class struggle, that a future of revolution and socialism is inevitable.
But it is our technology leaders who, together with our preachers and philosophers, have shaped the fundamental predictions of our future over the past few decades. For many, the future does not seem to lie in revolution, not in heaven or hell, but in some kind of science fiction. Whether it is the promise of artificial general intelligence (AGI), Elon Musk's vision of colonizing Mars, or a vast extension of the human lifespan, we are constantly confronted with visions of a fundamentally changing technological future.
We often overlook the fact that our sense of what the future holds, what could or might happen, has a profound influence on how we engage with the world. Our expectations of the future have the power to redirect our sense of the present, but they can also prompt us to reframe our memories of the past and re-tell history to better fit the course of the future. For this reason, following Jenny Anderson, I think of the future as a “site of struggle,” where different subjects compete for the boundaries of what is supposed to be imaginable.
My PhD thesis research on the intellectual history of Facebook/Meta explores the different ways that people at the company have imagined the future over the past 20 years. Over the past three years, I've analysed thousands of documents produced by the company, interviewed a range of senior employees and read dozens of blogs to explore different futures for Facebook. This research is being exhibited as part of the LSE Festival.
Early Facebook activists began promoting a future where everyone was connected: a vision of a global communications network that would connect every human on Earth for the first time in human history. In that world, Facebook envisioned, hierarchies would be flattened, people would have direct access to each other without institutional intermediaries, and people would find “community” across national and geographic boundaries. It was also a world in which “Big Tech” companies would drive progress by “modernizing” “developing” countries and helping them catch up with the “developed” world. In return, Big Tech companies would create and have access to huge future markets.
While its first vision of a “connected world” was communicated to a broad audience of Facebook users and journalists, the company's second big vision of the future was forcefully communicated to another community: its shareholders. Here, Facebook envisioned a different, though not contradictory, future in which human intentions and behavior respond to signals that are increasingly easier to understand, predict, and control. With a business model based on extracting and analyzing user data, and selling opportunities to shape that behavior, Facebook officials envisioned a future in which human behavior would become even more streamlined, manageable, and commercialized.
More recently, after a series of scandals, Facebook has promoted a vision of a new social reality that blends the physical world with virtual reality, augmented reality and artificial intelligence. Zuckerberg announced that the metaverse will allow people to “be with anyone, teleport anywhere, create and experience anything.” In this quasi-utopian vision, people are radically liberated from the laws of nature. Geography, distance and gravity are no longer constraints on humanity. When individuals enter the embodied Internet, space collapses, allowing them to exist in an infinite number of different places with people all over the world.
Instilled with norms of inevitability and direction, these futures are meant to shape how people behave in the present; convincing us that we need to buy certain products or learn skills for a different profession in order to avoid being left behind. Today, Meta works with other leading tech companies to embed artificial intelligence into our sense of the future, but how many times have you wondered whether you should act now to prepare for the future you believe in?
How big tech companies articulate their vision of the future has shaped how their products are perceived and imagined by audiences and users, politicians and regulators. For example, Facebook's vision of the future connected world has shaped the boundaries of possible regulation. Just as Facebook worked hard to shape our understanding of the future of technology and regulation in the 2000s, today it has been at the forefront of shaping the norms, rules and ways of imagining new and future technologies.
These attempts to shape what we expect in the future also reshape the way we remember the past, making it fit a particular future-oriented narrative. To take one example, in countless interviews, Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly portrayed history as a long journey in which humanity came together on larger and larger scales, from tribes of hunter-gatherers to the global Facebook community. Influenced by popular history books, Sapiens, Zuckerberg has situated his vision of the future within a particularly progressive narrative of the past, but embracing this progressive historical narrative means retelling the past in a way that ignores people and events that don't fit neatly into this ever-improving story.
All three of Facebook's futures are based on the same logic: the future will emerge from the next imagined technological innovation. Whether it's smartphones, virtual reality headsets, or the widespread adoption of AI, these visions of the future center around the same thing: technological development. This paradigm blinds us to the fact that the future is in fact uncertain and remains radically open.
These visions of the future highlight some possibilities while closing off others, steering us in one direction and distracting us from considering others. The next time you encounter the future of technology, the next time you're promised that we're on the brink of unprecedented change, I want you to ask yourself why a company or person would have you believe this. More than that, I want you to think about how you can imagine a future that is separate from the visions and norms of “Big Tech.” If the future is radically open, how can we take advantage of it?
