Zuckerberg Names Loyalist As New Facebook CTO
Facebook has announced the company wants to steer away from political content, reach every connected device globally and expand into the metaverse—a more immersive experience built upon virtual reality and augmented reality.
To spearhead these efforts, founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg appointed Andrew Bosworth, currently head of the hardware division, as the company’s new chief technology officer starting in 2022. Bosworth will replace Mike Schroepfer, who is stepping down after 13 years.
The executive reshuffling is unlikely to usher in radical change at the social network, skeptics argue. Despite the recently announced attempt to revamp its image with a new name—”Meta”—the online giant remains mired in regulatory and legal controversies regarding its business practices.
Bosworth met Zuckerberg at Harvard, where Bosworth was a teaching assistant for a class in artificial intelligence. He joined Facebook in 2006 as one of its first engineers. That same year, he masterminded News Feed, the constantly flowing list of updates from friends and one of the company’s most successful launches. He then went on to develop the platform’s chat, email and video-calling services.
Since 2017 he has led Facebook’s Reality Labs, which focuses on augmented and virtual reality products. As one of Zuckerberg’s most trusted confidants, Bosworth—as a leaked memo and some past statements indicate—sees eye to eye with his boss. The Bosworth appointment makes clear that Facebook is not seeking to change its controversial business practices.
Rather, it is doubling down, according to Katina Michael, a professor in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence at Arizona State University. “The metaverse will seek to know everything about everyone on and off its platform,” she says. “This will be a next-level implementation of behavioral economics and persuasive design exploitation.” However, companies that release emerging technologies and services are consistently outpacing laws and regulations.
The “metaverse” that Bosworth is to help build is being sold in a PR blitz as the “new internet,” but is instead, Michael argues, merely a distraction to deflect attention “from Facebook’s increasing woes.”
Citation: Luca Ventura, 2 November 2021, “Zuckerberg Names Loyalist As New Facebook CTO”, Global Finance, https://www.gfmag.com/magazine/november-2021/facebook-cto-andrew-bosworth
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“If Facebook purportedly ‘knows you better than you know yourself’ then Metaverse will seek to know everything about everyone on its platform. This will be a next level implementation of behavioral economics and persuasive design exploitation. Beyond the negative fallout on personally identifiable information and risks to privacy, the greatest impact will be a highly addictive and immersive environment with detrimental psycho-social impacts on the human mind and body. Virtual worlds might have been in Neal Stephenson’s classic, but what’s it got to do with the global challenges facing us today, apart from being a form of escapism?
“Companies releasing emerging technologies and services are always outpacing laws and regulations. It’s the nature of innovation. But wouldn’t it be a welcome change in company culture, if Facebook, paused before hiring a purported 10,000 more people to get stuck into first mover advantage for Metaverse development, and invested in some deep and deliberative co-design work with the public? As shocking as it might sound, asking people all around the world what *they* want their Metaverse to look and feel like before imposing even more perpetual advertising enslavement on users. What we want to build for our future is nuanced public interest technology, not technology that breaks culture, tries to rip people off by onselling their personal information, ignores local laws and practices, and causes a host of new negative unintended consequences. The Metaverse has already been sold to us like the “new Internet”. But if that’s what it really was, wouldn’t it be “open”, “free of advertising”, “people-led”, and recognizing content contributors? Suffice to say Metaverse is another distraction by Zuckerberg to ensure that attention is deflected away from Facebook’s increasing woes.