Meta's Manifesto Mistake

Zuckerberg’s manifesto isn’t a point of view; it’s a positioning contrivance.

Yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg published a manifesto of sorts, called The Future is For Everyone. Writing these long-form opinion pieces has become the fashionable thing for tech CEOs to do recently, so I thought it would be interesting to see if this 6,500-word example does what a good manifesto should and change public opinion.

Here’s the spoiler: Zuckerberg’s manifesto isn’t really one at all.

It’s a long list of general statements that few would disagree with. And it does little to change the public’s perception of Meta.

Let’s get into why.

First, we should remind ourselves what kind of company Meta really is: an advertising platform. Its users are the “product” it sells to its customers. Meta is also a second-tier player in the LLM space, with Llama. It’s an also-ran. Yet, Meta believes that its long-term existence depends on being a viable contender in the AI space. Thus far, Meta has not been able to keep up with its rivals on product performance or in terms of public perception.

I don’t have access to Zuckerberg’s thinking behind the essay.

But if I were to guess, his reason for publishing this essay might go something like this: since we can’t compete against OpenAI and Anthropic on product, let’s come out with a counter point-of-view that changes the public’s perception of AI in our favor.

That, in and of itself, is not a bad strategy. Let’s not forget that Salesforce did something similar with their “No Software” campaign against Siebel Systems more than two decades ago. Done right, good narratives can be highly effective.

Zuckerberg’s point of view is summarized best with this quote:

Meta is the company primarily focused on building personal superintelligence for everyone. Most other labs are focused on building AI for companies, governments, or other institutions, so if those labs lead, then the balance of power will favor larger institutions over individuals. Meta’s mission since our founding has focused on putting power in people’s hands. If our beliefs and principles lead, then the balance of power will favor individuals and a better future for everyone.

In other words, Zuckerberg argues that superintelligence (which is never actually defined) would be bad for society if access to it were controlled by just a few entities (i.e., OpenAI and Anthropic). Instead, superintelligence must be “democratized” by providing individuals (you and me) with open, equal access to this technology, and Meta is the company that’s going to do that.

But Zuckerberg broke one of the cardinal rules of effective narratives: to change the way people think, you must speak to an actual problem that exists in the world.

In Salesforce’s situation, there were legitimate limitations to on-premise software, and so Salesforce had legitimate grounds for its point of view about the need to host software in the cloud. No one else held that position at that time. When Apple introduced the “internet” Macintosh (which they named the iMac), most PCs were not equipped to deliver a good web browsing experience. Canva’s point of view about graphic design software being too hard for everyday users was equally legitimate.

But Zuckerberg’s manifesto isn’t a point of view; it’s a positioning contrivance. Consider these excerpts:

• People should have agents that work “24/7 on your behalf to improve your relationships, health, career, finances, home management, hobbies, and more” with “strong privacy and security options.”

• Superintelligence should provide everyone with “powerful tools to create new businesses and the economy will become more entrepreneurial,” and these tools should be “free or affordable.”

• Society shouldn’t rely on one model alone because “any singular superintelligence would have to prioritize some values over others and in the process would be incapable of being benevolent to everyone.”

• “Labs should also work with law enforcement to help identify bad actors attempting to misuse their systems.”

You’d have to search pretty hard for someone to disagree with these statements. It’s not like OpenAI and Anthropic, or even SpaceX, have taken counter positions. Yes, they earn a great deal of their revenue from the “companies, governments, or other institutions” that Zuckerberg calls out, but they also have “free and affordable” tiers that anyone can use.

At best, Zuckerberg’s manifesto is a milquetoast laundry list of unsurprising and conventional recommendations for how society should benefit from AI. At worst, it gives readers a reason to be suspect: Zuckerberg never addresses the lessons he learned from the societal harms of social media (another product ostensibly for “individual empowerment”), so why should we believe things will be any different this time around? If the goal was to change public perception for the better (and why else would you write a manifesto?) then little headway was made.

That’s the mistake I hope you can avoid.

If you want to change what the market believes about your brand, you must surface hidden truths. You must give your audience a new mental model for understanding something. You must call out a problem your customers were unaware of, or were desperate to see a brand finally take a stand against. You must offer a perspective others hadn’t considered yet. You must go beyond platitudes and offer a concrete plan for solving these problems.

Meta’s manifesto does none of these things.

It only cements what the world already knew: Meta is struggling to win in AI, but it still hasn’t figured out how.

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John Rougeux is the founder of Flag & Frontier, a strategy consultancy that helps executive teams align around their strategy and narrative when the future is up for grabs.