SUNDAY SCARIES: It’s a Mad Mark Mad Meta World
- Nick Bayne
- 2 days ago
- 8 min read
In 1963 the director Stanley Kramer packed nearly every comedian in America into one movie and called it It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. It’s filled with mayhem and slapstick comedy and it was a big hit when it was released, but it’s so filled with cringe-worthy ethnic stereotypes and innuendos that any modern viewer would struggle to finish it.However, when Mark Zuckerberg published six and a half thousand words on superintelligence last Monday, I realized it was the third Sunday in a row his company was in my weekly pile and I was reminded of the 1963 movie poster. Instead of resisting it, I’m turning into the skid; when you line up the last fifteen years properly you find the same plot from:It’s a Mad Mark Mad Meta World
1. POLITE PROMETHEUS
If you don’t have anything else on your schedule today, feel free to read Mark’s manifesto, “The Future is for Everyone”.But, since I wouldn’t force anyone to spend even an hour of their August reading his 6,500 word essay, I will summarize it:
Zuck argues that the genuine danger of superintelligence is a handful of institutions ending up holding it, and that history has been unkind to the notion of a benevolent absolute power looking after everybody else. The irony is deafening, of course, coming from him. Like a King sending out a decree across the land that monarchies are dangerous and folks should just stick with him.
Meta released an open model the same day, so his warning arrived in the same package as his solution.
What Meta is offering is an agent that works “24/7 on your behalf” across your relationships, health, career, finances, home and hobbies, something that “will free up time for the things you enjoy,” a tutor holding “a PhD in every subject and unlimited patience,” free for billions of people, and beyond that a pricing mechanism he says “will guarantee that everyone gets the lowest price possible.” There’s no mention of whether or not a frictionless existence is good or whether it will, in my opinion, remove any human problem solving from our character.
And there’s a very telling line that should not be skimmed: “Meta is the company primarily focused on building personal superintelligence for everyone. Most other labs are focused on building AI for companies, governments, or other institutions.”
A document about the danger of anyone standing between people and the machines, written by a man who has spent twenty-two years standing between people and each other, who has now nominated himself to hand-carry superintelligence to the species; like a polite and personable Prometheus bringing a more destructive fire to the party and telling everyone to trust him.
Takeaway: Mark’s document warns about the danger of one entity delivering superintelligence to the world, while promoting his own superintelligence and nominating himself to be that entity.
(Sources: The Verge, Meta, August 10 2026; Axios)
2. THE PROPHET HAS BEEN VERY WRONG
You’ll remember that Mark gave the world another manifesto in October 2021. And the first prophecy probably cost the company more than any speech in corporate history.
The guy who couldn’t get a date at Harvard proclaimed that the future would be “an embodied internet where you’re in the experience, not just looking at it,” you’d teleport as a hologram rather than commuting, and a billion people would be living in it within the decade.
He changed the name of the company to prove how serious he was, and told everyone that from that day forward Meta would be “metaverse-first, not Facebook-first.”
The market took the other side of that with more violence than it has ever shown him. Shares fell seventy-seven percent from their September 2021 peak and closed under eighty-nine dollars in November 2022, the worst level since 2016. He laid off eleven thousand people that same month with a note saying “I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that,” and then cut ten thousand more the following March, (a total of twenty thousand jobs in five months and roughly a quarter of the company).
The product was in worse shape than the share price. Internal documents reported by WSJ in October 2022 showed the target of half a million monthly Horizon Worlds users had already quietly been walked down to two hundred and eighty thouzsand, with the true figure sitting under two hundred thousand and falling.
Like college kids who arrive at a party only to realize no one else is there, they left and didn’t come back. Under one percent of the users ever built anything, and total creator payouts worldwide across the entire life of the thing came to less than five hundred dollars.
Meta’s own document described it better than any critic bothered to: “An empty world is a sad world.”
Though the Sorkin version of Zuckerberg was fiction, you have to connect the dots with his social savvy and this error in judgment. The goggles were a no-go from the get-go and Mark couldn’t see what everyone else knew. They were the most ridiculous things imaginable. As Scott Galloway famously and routinely mocked, the “headsets are nothing better than wearable sex repellent.”
Reality Labs has lost north of eighty billion dollars since 2020. The glasses out of that same division now move around seven million units a year with Apple, Google, Snap and OpenAI all following him into the category, so he read the object correctly while getting the world around it comprehensively wrong.
Takeaway: He bet the company’s name on a social movement nobody else joined. He took the share price down seventy-seven percent and cost twenty thousand jobs but was never at risk of losing his own.
(Sources: WSJ, October 15 2022; CNBC; Macrotrends; Meta FY2025 results)
3. RULES WITHOUT THE SAFETY
I’ve been on the receiving end of Facebook’s totalitarian best practices and rules for fifteen years, so let me be specific rather than theoretical. In 2013 our 360i team won the Facebook Blue Award for best use of the platform for our work with Oreo. Still, we had Facebook reps policing us weekly and enforcing rules that our images could never carry more than twenty percent text, because, we were told, “the public was so tired of ads.”
The way they established it was to drop a five-by-five grid over the artwork and count the squares. Six squares with type in them and the ad simply didn’t run. As was the trend, I watched lots of great “real time” ads die against that grid because a piece of copy the size of a freckle crossed over the line and we’d miss our window in culture. Meta eventually withdrew the whole rule in 2020 without ceremony or apology, which shows you how much the public actually cared.
With more AI tools, the rules have tightened in the same direction. Automated review went after before-and-after photography, and for weight-loss claims, and for health language any human being would have approved in four seconds. Everyone who’s been making advertising knows the perpetual struggle it’s been to say something coherent about a product without tripping one of the invisible wires.
But the issue I have isn’t about what Meta prevented from being posted.
My issue is with what the same company waved through during the same years that I couldn’t claim a product worked: coordinated foreign election operations, misinformation at industrial scale and speed, whole networks of accounts that were never people at all. Facebook built a system that could count the letters on an Oreo but claimed they couldn’t count the bots that made Americans believe the unbelievable.
That asymmetry is the most honest description of Meta’s moral compass I can give you, and it hasn’t softened with age. Advantage+ has since reduced most of what remained of an advertiser’s judgment to a suggestion the system is free to override, and since last October Meta has been spending up to five percent of budget on the placements advertisers went to the trouble of excluding. Meanwhile, the most cliche behavior left on the platform is one misinformed parent sending false warnings to another with a sense of absolute certainty because Meta hasn’t said otherwise.
Takeaway: Mark built the most exacting censor in history and pointed it at advertisers while giving fake facts a free pass.
(Sources: Adweek; Search Engine Journal; Meta Newsroom; Social Media Today)
4. WHERE ARE THE KIDS WE’RE PROTECTING?
A jury in Santa Fe found Meta liable in March and awarded New Mexico three hundred and seventy-five million dollars, and ten days ago the same court put another five hundred and sixty-seven million into a fund for repairing the damage.
In June, Brussels issued preliminary findings about kids under thirteen for both platforms and again in July about addictive design, while Meta booked two and a half billion dollars of legal charges last quarter and warned shareholders that this year’s youth trials “may ultimately result in a material loss.”
The irony of what is otherwise good news for humanity is that people aren’t discussing that the kids aren’t there anymore.
In 2014, seventy-one percent of American teenagers were on Facebook. Today, only thirty percent have accounts on Facebook and only three percent of teens use the platform with any regularity. They left long ago but Mark is now writing nine-figure checks for the wellbeing of an audience that walked out on him years ago.
The young people he does still have are only on Instagram, which he didn’t build. He bought it in 2012 for a billion dollars because he could see it coming for him, same as WhatsApp and others, and it has since become both the only reason he has anyone under twenty-five and the address on most of the paperwork. But YouTube is the leader for video, X is still more powerful than Threads for information, and TikTok is still the juggernaut that holds the focus of Gen Z.
Takeaway: He is paying nearly a billion dollars for the children on Facebook, and there are hardly any children left on Facebook.
(Sources: New Mexico Department of Justice; Washington Post, August 6 2026; European Commission; Pew Research Center, December 2025; Meta Q2 2026 results)
THIS WEEK’S RED THREAD:
THE MAD MAN BEHIND THE WHEEL
I have spent at least fifteen years making ads that had to pass Mark’s tests before they could exist. We learned to write around a grid and make brands appealing in less characters than your mailing address. We got good at it, and getting good at it is exactly how you stop noticing you’re inside a machine you don’t control.
That’s why Mark’s business wins and losses are almost irrelevant when you consider the degree of influence he and Meta have had on the world. He’s been steering behind the scenes no matter what.
Mark wins because of where he’s been since 2004: between you and your friends, between a brand and its customers, between a teen and whatever she was about to look at next.
He is in the middle of it all, like a dastardly designated driver who’s only going to be taking you where he wants to go.
So when his manifesto claims that no single entity should hold superintelligence and the answer is to put it into everyone’s hands, but follows it by saying that Mark and Meta happen to be the outfit best suited to the handing, that’s not a new outlook at all. Despite the tone, it’s the same tune as he’s always been singing since he was twenty-four years old. He knows the middle is where the power is and he’s never going to give that up to Anthropic, OpenAI, or anyone else.
Interestingly, Mark has never once described his own position as power. He describes it as service, and I think he means it, which is the part that worries me most.
There is nothing more terrifying than a leader who truly believes it’s their duty to use their power to shape the world how they see fit. If you don’t see the problem with having one person decide they know what’s best for everyone, there’s a few thousand years of recorded history to catch up on.
Amazingly, Mark is far from the only character like this in our world. (Elon doesn’t even write manifestos – he just treats the world like a toy store in which he is allowed to break everything but never forced to pay for anything).
But Mark has never been confused about the value of being in the middle. In 2008 he wrote that “it is better to buy than compete.” In 2012, explaining the Instagram purchase to his own finance chief, he wrote that “what we’re really buying is time.” Those are not the sentences of a man who wandered innocently into leverage and is just working out how to help.
This is still Mad Mark’s Meta World and he knows it.
— NB
Comments