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Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and longtime CEO of Meta-formerly-Facebook, is wearing chains. He's growing his hair out. He's wearing oversized t-shirts emblazoned with his favorite classical expressions — the latest of which, donned this week by the CEO to deliver the keynote speech at Meta's annual Connect conference, featured the phrase "aut Zuck aut nihil."
For those less familiar with niche Roman sayings, that's a take on the infamous expression "aut Caeser aut nihil," which translates to "either emperor or nothing." If that sounds at all foreboding to you, your intuition would be correct: the phrase has historically been invoked by ambitious political actors seeking supreme rulership — that, or nothing.
Meta Connect is the company's annual developer conference, where the tech giant shows off its latest and greatest innovations. This year's event has unsurprisingly centered on Meta's efforts to dominate the AI space, as well as a buzzy new prototype for holographic augmented reality glasses, dubbed "Orion."
The glasses are still pretty clunky, though not nearly as ungainly as Apple's Vision Pro goggles. But according to Zuck, they're a "time machine" into the future.
"These glasses exist, they are awesome," Zuck told the crowd, "and they are a glimpse of a future that I think is going to be pretty exciting." (The ultra-chunky frames also added a special level of eccentricity to the billionaire's outfit during the appearance.)
On the one hand, the thick-rimmed AR glasses, designed to add a virtual layer of reality over the real world in real time, are a bet against smartphones and existing devices.
In the billionaire's imagined future, we don't call our friends or loved ones over FaceTime, or work via multiple physical monitors. Instead, with his glasses, it's all projected in front of us.
But when Zuck makes grandiose claims about Meta's innovations powering the future, he isn't just talking about the future of hardware or wearables — at least, not in a vacuum.
Speaking not only to Orion but also to Meta's various VR projects and fast-moving AI efforts, the swashzuckling, jiu jitsuing CEO declared that he and Meta are constructing humanity's social future.
"All of this comes together to build what I think is going to be the future of human connection, and the next generation of computing platforms," Zuckerberg told the Connect crowd. "In every generation of technology, there is competition of ideas for what the future should look like — and at Meta, we are trying to build a future that is more open, more accessible, more natural, and more about human connection."
In other words, by his own admission, Zuck is explicitly in competition with Silicon Valley foes to establish dominance in a new technological landscape that would continue to define how humans engage with each other and with the world at large.
Of course, describing a pair of neat new glasses or Dame Judi Dench-voiced AI assistants — you can also opt for AI John Cena or AI Nora "Awkwafina" Lum if you so choose — as the "future of human connection" is sanctimonious, and certainly not a mission statement that Meta and its leader have ever shied away from.
Still, technological advancement and the tools that define a moment in human history have always played a role in our interpersonal relationships, social norms, and politics — a role that Meta's social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram didn't originate, but have undeniably filled.
Now the wealth that Zuckerberg and his company amassed in the process is being funneled into the billionaire's new vision for the next version of the web and the technology that powers it. And should Meta win out over competitors like OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft — well, leading tech centibillionaires are probably the closest thing we have to emperors, so aut Zuck aut nihil, indeed.
And yet, at the exact same moment, Zuck's Ceaser pitch comes amid moves by the CEO to step away from the political sphere.
As recent reporting from The New York Times reveals, years of finding himself and his platforms at the center of political controversy and scandal have left the billionaire wanting to disentangle his image from anything that is or could be construed as a partisan political effort.
That includes endorsing any candidate for president in the 2024 election cycle, even though one of those candidates — guess who — is threatening to send Zuck to jail over false accusations that the Facebook founder colluded to interfere with the 2020 election (as multiple legal reviews have shown, there's no evidence to support the notion that the 2020 election was in any way stolen, rigged, or interfered with by Zuckerberg or anyone else.)
"I've made the decision that, for me and for the company, the best thing to do is to try to be as nonpartisan and neutral as possible in all of this and distance ourselves from it as much as possible," Zuckerberg told The Verge's Alex Heaththis week during their annual Connect interview.
"Maybe it doesn't matter on our platforms, whether I endorse a candidate or not, but I don't want to go anywhere near that."
It doesn't feel like a stretch to say that the billionaire's increasingly hypebeast-y wardrobe is reflective of his wish to disengage. This isn't the clean-cut, sweater-wearing, democracy-threatening tech oligarch of the Cambridge Analytica days. This is Cool Mark! Chill Mark! Likable, apolitical, definitely-not-causing-any-problems Mark!
But Zuck's powerful place in national and global politics isn't just inherent to his wealth; after all, his alleged stepping back from politics is more or less a classic Libertarian arc.
Political power is also inherent to his products, which of course are avenues — healthy or not — for politically-charged ideas, discourse, and action. You can't seek to mediate humanity's social world for eternity, and not take on or make decisions about any of its messier, more volatile parts.
Maybe the "aut Zuck aut nihil" shirt was an attempt at irony. But its message is ironic because of how much truth there is to it — and Zuckerberg, meanwhile, wants everything both ways.
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