Zuckerberg Shares His Vision for New Decade but Doesn’t Mention Libra

Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled his vision for 2030, but also a whole bunch of decade-end aims for his social media Goliath, including an extensive “opportunity” for Facebook to “decentralize” finance and business.

He wrote in a post:

“Over the next decade, we hope to build the commerce and payments tools so that every small business has easy access to the same technology that previously only big companies have had.”

As the reader could further see, in this vision are included Instagram storefronts, messenger-based customer support, remittances via WhatsApp – technologies that Facebook wants to badger. Zuckerberg wrote that he would like his company’s attempts will “go a long way towards creating more opportunity around the world.”

However, we could wonder where is Libra in this whole story. He seems to have forgotten the controversial project that he personally announced last summer. Ok, maybe he did say something about Facebook having “hands-off” from Calibra but still.

Libra? Who the F… is Libra?

And it’s weird you know. That after “Scylla and Charybdis” Libra Association and Facebook went through – he doesn’t mention it at all.

Zuckerberg did actually formally kept some distance from the whole project, and he does not run the association. Still, he went through the grilling from Congress as well as David Marcus.

And also, let’s not forget that Zuckerberg already stated the company should work together with governments – at least as long as those governments stay afloat.

He said:

“As long as our governments are seen as legitimate, rules established through a democratic process could add more legitimacy and trust than rules defined by companies alone.”

One thing is also new in Zuckerberg’s family. He said he will stop giving himself a New Year’s Decision list. He explained it in a way that he’s now handling more “social responsibility” and is raising a family so he can no longer set himself any annual challenges.

Over the last ten years, the 34-year-old billionaire chief executive has welcomed in the new year with a range of different pledges and projects, including, but not limited to, building his own AI-powered robot assistant and a promise to only eat meat from animals he killed himself for a year.

Now he said:

“Rather than having year-to-year challenges, I’ve tried to think about what I hope the world and my life will look in 2030 so I can make sure I’m focusing on those things. By then, if things go well, my daughter Max will be in high school, we’ll have the technology to feel truly present with another person no matter where they are, and scientific research will have helped cure and prevent enough diseases to extend our average life expectancy by another 2.5 years.”

Probably it’s not hard to wear the tie to work every day (that was one of the challenges) or reading more books.

Scandals vs. Challenges

However, the scandals around the platform in the past two years, from the Cambridge Analytica’s desecration of more than 80 million users’ data to the platform’s role in spreading hate speech during the Myanmar genocide, have left the company’s reputation damaged.

He commented:

“When I started these challenges, my life was almost all about building the Facebook website. Now there’s so much more to learn from. At Facebook, we’re building lots of different apps and technology — ranging from a new private social platform to augmented and virtual reality — and we’re handling a lot more social responsibility. And outside Facebook, I’m a father now and I love spending time with my family, working on our philanthropy, and improving at the sports and hobbies I’ve picked up over the years. So while I’m glad I did annual challenges over the last decade, it’s time to do something different.”

Zuckerberg also gave some of his predictions of how technology and the world might evolve over the next decade. For example, he suggested that by 2030 “more institutions will be run by millennials” focused on problems like climate change, education, and healthcare. He also said that in the next decade “we will get breakthrough augmented reality glasses that will redefine our relationship with technology.”