Meta: The Efflorescence of Zucking
September 19, 2022
Years ago a colleague of mine and I spent a couple of days with Pat Gunkel. Ah, you don’t know him? Depending on whom one asks, he was either an interesting person or a once-in-a-generation genius. I have in front of me a copy of “The Efflorescent World View.” (Want to buy a copy handed to me by Mr. Gunkel? Just write us at benkent2020 at yahoo dot com. It’s a collectible because only a few of Mr. Gunkel’s books are findable in our wonderful, search-tastic online world.) The image below shows what an actual Gunkel book from his office looks like:
I thought about Mr. Gunkel when I read “Meta Shares Plunged 14% This Week, Falling Close to Their Pandemic Low.” Mr. Gunkel’s method involved creating lists. Lots of lists. I think he would have found the challenge of cataloging Mr. Zuck’s impressive achievements; for example:
- The reference stock plunge
- Implementing an employee management technique in which employees learn that some of them should not be Zuckers
- The “make friends with your neighbors in Hawaii” actions
- The elimination of personal cubes and work spaces in Meta’s offices
- The renaming of the company to celebrate the billions invested in what eGame developers have been doing for — yeah, how long — for decades
- Thinking about charging for its unpopular clone of a really popular app. (Genius with a twist of Zuck? Yes!)
But what’s an “efflorescence”? Some may ask. I have a big fat book on the subject. Let me summarize: One might say a gradual flowering. Others might suggest that it represents a culmination.
My hunch is that the year 2022 marks the efflorescence of the Zuckbook, the knock off of TikTok, and the push to make WhatsApp a superapp for good and evil.
The efflorescence of Zucking. Too bad Mr. Gunkel is no longer with us to undertake this project. He was, I must say, very interesting.
Stephen E Arnold, September 19, 2022
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
