Mark Zuckerberg’s “The Future is for Everyone” reads less like a blueprint for shared prosperity than a polished piece of corporate propaganda designed to legitimise Meta’s dominance over the next technological epoch. Beneath its utopian rhetoric lies a familiar playbook: concentrated power is reframed as empowerment, commercial strategy is dressed up as moral philosophy, and Meta’s business model is presented as the only viable path forward. While Zuckerberg champions “open” models, Meta retains significant control over the compute infrastructure, data pipelines, and deployment environments that underpin them. This is not democratisation; it is dependency masquerading as liberation. What is being distributed, however, is largely the illusion of empowerment.
The implications extend beyond economics and technology into the information environment itself. Meta’s systems routinely exclude, suppress, or deprioritise content deemed undesirable, effectively influencing how historical facts and political discourse are encountered. If information exclusively flows through AI filters shaped by corporate and political interests, the result is not empowerment but epistemic control.
Once AI systems become the primary intermediaries through which people access information, communicate, and make decisions, those who control the underlying infrastructure gain unprecedented power to shape what people see, know, and ultimately believe. Historical facts can become editable, dissent can become invisible, and “wrongthink” can be algorithmically excluded. Zuckerberg’s vision of personal superintelligence agents working “24/7 on your behalf” therefore becomes distinctly dystopian if those agents ultimately serve Meta’s commercial and political interests rather than the user’s autonomy.
