How Mark Zuckerberg failed his 2019 personal challenge
0Reported today on The Verge
For the full article visit: https://www.theverge.com/interface/2019/11/27/20983916/mark-zuckerberg-2019-personal-challenge-failure
Reported today in The Verge.
How Mark Zuckerberg failed his 2019 personal challenge
The Interface
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