More shame than a name: Will the real Mark Zuckerberg please stand up?
What’s in a name? asks a star-crossed lover. The answer, she discovers, is everything. The tragedy of Romeo and Juliet is the realisation that neither can escape the fate dictated by their two names: Montague and Capulet.
In Silicon Valley, one firm has alighted on a similar problem. Facebook’s leadership has realised, at last, that its name is toxic and it wants to escape it. Last night, the company re-named itself ‘meta’ – a suitable name for a company experiencing an existential crisis.
Though it is hard to remember now, Facebook was once the darling of Silicon Valley, credited with giving voice to the voiceless and championing free speech.
The genesis of the less-than-original name comes from Mark Zuckerberg’s vision for the mastery of a dystopian-sounding “metaverse”: a future where the digital and physical worlds collide.
The recent revelations of Frances Haugen, an employee-turned-whistleblower, show quite how far the company has fallen. Testifying first to Congress and then in Parliament, Haugen presented a damning case, backed by thousands of pages of leaked internal documents. Facebook, she argued, has failed to keep its users safe. It has played down the damage it has inflicted on society. It has consistently misled its investors, customers and the public.
For the first time, reputational shenanigans are coupled with real commercial pressures on the tech giant.
Changes to in-app tracking at Apple have made it harder for Facebook to target its advertising; revenues have taken a hit. More troubling still, young people are turning away from the company and its products.
In deciding to change their name, Facebook follows the lead of fellow Silicon Valley giant, Google. In 2015, Google Inc re-incorporated as Alphabet, a holding company that separates the search engine from companies like DeepMind, the artificial intelligence experts, and Waymo, the driverless car developers.
This served a commercial purpose. Eric Schmidt, Google’s former CEO, said he had been inspired by Berkshire Hathaway where Warren Buffet, the Sage of Omaha, sits atop a number of companies, each with strong, independent leadership of their own.
But the decision to separate Google from its subsidiaries had an undeniable added benefit. No longer bound to Google’s name, should its reputation explode, the likes of DeepMind and Waymo are outside the blast radius.
We can only guess at which of these two lessons informs Facebook’s decision making. But clues abound. We should remember that Zuckerberg is said to idolise Augustus, the Roman Emperor most famous for founding the Roman Empire.
When the journalist Steven Levy profiled the company, and its founder, in Facebook: The Inside Story, he reported that Zuckerberg would regularly shout “domination!” at the end of staff meetings, and also that he once declared, in Latin, that Google should be destroyed.
These hardly sound like the characteristics of a man who intends to relinquish power. As such it seems a reasonable assertion that the cause of Facebook’s name change is an attempt to salvage the reputation of the wider business from itself.
In that sense it is grossly misguided. Criticism of Facebook is inextricably linked to criticism of its all-powerful founder. When Frances Haugen decried her former company, she singled out Zuckerberg for her scorn.
It was notable that it was the founder, and not Facebook, that Haugen accused of having “unilateral control over 3bn people.” Zuckerberg has allowed himself to become a lightning rod for criticism, and that will remain true whatever the name of the company he runs.
If Zuckerberg really wants to solve his reputational crisis, there is another, better lesson he could learn from his neighbours at Google. Under pressure from early investors, Sergei Brin and Larry Page, Google’s founders, handed the reins to Schmidt, a non-founder. This likely improved decision-making at Google. Just as importantly, and perhaps more so, it certainly improved the perception of decision-making at Google.
Zuckerberg is a man of undeniable talents. He built a business from a dorm room that achieved world domination. But he is no longer the man to defend it from criticism that is directed, primarily, at him. Facebook is right to notice it has a name problem. But that name isn’t “Facebook”. It’s “Mark”.