I have some questions for Mark Zuckerberg

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Nilay Patel (2:03)

Hi, I'm Nilay Patel, Editor-in-Chief of The Verge, and this is Decoder, my show about big ideas and other problems. It's a big week for Meta. The company has its big Connect conference, and the new Muse AI agent appears to be an early hit. I've been using it. It is surprisingly good. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has obviously been out there taking a victory lap, doing a lot of interviews about all this. So of course, we asked for him to appear on Decoder. Meta declined my interview request for whatever reason. But luckily, Mark just did a big interview with our friend and former colleague Alex Heath on the Sources Podcast. So I figure we could just highlight some moments from that conversation, and I could point out some obvious gaps in what Mark is saying about the company right now. And hopefully, the next set of people who get to talk to him can ask him some follow up questions. So here's some of the things I would love to ask Mark Zuckerberg if he would join me here on Decoder. One thing before we get going, don't forget to subscribe to at DecoderPod on YouTube for new episodes every Monday and Thursday. Let's start with Mark's comments on Metaglasses.

Mark Zuckerberg (2:58)

So we actually feel quite good about the product. I think it if I mean, phones don't have a light. I mean, people go around like recording people all the time.

Nilay Patel (3:05)

So I think it's very important to note that the entire tech industry really wants passive surveillance devices to fit into the same category as phones for you to understand everything from flock cameras to ring doorbells to Metaglasses the same way that you might understand a smartphone. Now, there are some very obvious differences here that I think are worth really pushing on in these conversations. For example, if you want to record someone with your phone, you have to take it out of your pocket, open the camera app and literally hold it in their face. This is a physical action that is meaningfully different than having a pair of glasses on your face with a light and just passively recording someone. That physical action means that you have to announce your intent to do something with your body and other people can react to it. Obviously, you don't do that with metaglasses. You just start recording and people can notice that there's a light or not. But the big physical announcement that you're about to begin recording is not present. So I think one of the reasons the entire tech industry is so eager to fit these passive surveillance devices into the same kind of mental framework of smartphones is so that no one has to question whether there should be a new social etiquette for these devices. And instead you're like, oh, it's just a smartphone. I already understand how to use that. But importantly, that also brushes over the fact that we did have to create a massive new set of social rules and norms around smartphone recording. We did live through the entire Black Lives Matter movement because smartphone recording allowed people to record the police and we as a society didn't quite know what to do with that information and maybe still don't know what to do with that information. I would just push on this over and over and over again. Do you want there to be constant recordings of everyone? Do we think that smartphones allowing everyone to record everything all the time was good?