(Epistemic disclaimer: there are few Extremely Big Tech Companies to whom I feel apathy more vividly than Meta. I had a Facebook account in high school and college and got rid of it at some point post-graduation, though I'd be hard-pressed to tell you when exactly that was.)

It was fun to listen to Acquired's six-hour episode on Meta. Ben and David have reached the Dan Carlin podcast local maxima for me: you can take some level of umbrage with their analysis (see, for example, The taste of beer) but their storytelling is so earnest and thorough it's hard not to have a great time listening to them.

Meta, in particular, was a fun episode, because listening to it felt not unlike taking a trip down my own memory lane and getting a better grip on my own relationship with social media (and how it's changed over the past two decades.) Some notes I jotted down:

• One thing that I lived through that I didn't quite understand until now was just how much of the Facebook "platform" was a feint towards a business model that never quite worked out, and how immaterial it became to their overall strategy once they really solved advertising. This is particularly noteworthy in 2024, as it contextualizes Meta's ostensibly developer/network-friendly efforts in Threads (for more thoughts, read Bluesky et al) and, conversely, a bit of a bull case for Bluesky itself.
• The concept of "reading someone's wall-to-wall" feels like a lifetime ago. The social primitive of a "wall" has technically not existed for a decade, now!
• As bullish as Ben and David are on Meta writ large, I think they are correct in saying that Meta's enduring two assets are:
  • the single largest network effect in human history
  • an organizational agility to be comfortable deploying as much energy, capital, and user activity as possible to what it considers useful.
• Relatedly, the open question of "what social interaction has Facebook actually developed or pioneered in the past decade" is a trenchant one, and one to which I cannot find a cogent answer.
• One rhetorical question: was Facebook inevitable? Which is to say: is Zuckerberg a Great Man of History, or if he decided to hard pivot into, say, video game design, would some other mega-corporation own a three-billion-MAU network graph? I have always felt the latter — I'm a dialectical materialist at heart — and yet there is something singular about Meta's agility and (I mean this not unkindly!) complete lack of scruples that I suspect would not play out in a parallel universe.

In closing, I am reminded of Zero to One's cute thesis about monopoly power being net-beneficial because it gives organizations margin and overhead to invest in projects that are otherwise unjustifiable in short-term competitive landscapes. Some of Meta's open source work is nakedly strategic (OCP, Llama); much of it is less obviously so (React, Presto, fbt).

Xerox was founded in 1906; 118 years later, its chief legacy is that of PARC — the personal computer, the mouse, the GUI, Ethernet.

Meta was founded in 2004, a time that this year more than others seems so distant as to be foreign. It is hard for me to prophesy what its stature will be in 2122, but it does not strike me as impossible to believe that its technological contributions will speak larger than its sociological ones.