What's going on: Mark Zuckerberg (you may know this guy for founding a little company called Facebook) is back with a fancy New Year's resolution. After he successfully visited every US state in 2017, ran 365 miles, built an AI for his home, read 25 books and learned Mandarin in the years prior, he now gave himself the most ambitious task to tackle: fixing Facebook (and the Internet).
In a surprisingly honest post Zuckerberg acknowledges that people have lost their faith in technology: "Back in the 1990s and 2000s, most people believed technology would be a decentralizing force. But today, many people have lost faith in that promise. With the rise of a small number of big tech companies — and governments using technology to watch their citizens — many people now believe technology only centralizes power rather than decentralizes it."
So it's his task for 2018 to fix the most pressing problems Facebook is facing at the moment, including the proliferation of hate speech and misinformation.
And that's where it gets really interesting for us: Zuckerberg calls encryption and cryptocurrency as "important counter-trend" to "take power ... back into people's hands". Though these things are harder to control he is "interested to go deeper and study the positive and negative aspects of these technologies, and how best to use them in our services.”
Why should I care: Zuckerberg isn’t the only big name at Facebook who is interested in this space. David Marcus, the company’s vice president of messaging products, joined the board of Coinbase in late 2017. He wrote on their blog on Dec. 12.: “I’ve been involved with, and fascinated by cryptocurrencies since 2012, and I’ve witnessed how Coinbase has started democratizing access to this new asset class.”
Zuckerberg's post and Marcus' support for Coinbase may seem not that important right now, but I think it marks a big shift that will have a huge impact in 2018: The big players on the Internet are finally getting their heads around crypto.
Source: bloomberg.com, facebook.com
GIF: giphy.com
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