INTERVIEW: Mike Isaac on Mark Zuckerberg and the future of Meta
Mike Isaac is a long-time technology writer who has been Technology Correspondent at the New York Times since June 2014. During that time he’s covered a variety of technology companies, including OpenAI, SpaceX, Anthropic, Apple, and Uber, which he published a book about in 2019 called Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber. But the bulk of his recent reporting has been about Meta, the company that owns Facebook. Last week Josh interviewed Mike about what exactly is going on over there, what prompted Meta to make such a big bet on a VR metaverse, and what—from wearable smart glasses to prediction markets—we can expect Mark Zuckerberg to do next.
Comments (3)
Great interview! I like the perspective you bring to these conversations Josh. I went to grad school for HCI in 2010-2013, it was pretty obvious back then how bad "capturing attention" and "nudging" could be imo, even if the specifics weren't clear. The big conferences would have talks on these topics but you'd have about 10 people there. Folks were passionate about doing foundational accessibility and interaction work, but were fine "selling their souls" to do so. Many also just didn't care at all about anything besides $$$. I still work in tech, i don't know if you can be "clean" in this day and age of AI in my field, but I've never really forgiven my peers for designing the slot-machine/doom-scroll future we have today. So many utopian ideals were just a cover to poison the world.
the trashest of all possible futures
We must remember that Tally Candymountain is a closed-causal-loop time displaced bioandroid tasked with bringing about its own technological immanentization That's why it's taken him so long to generate legs