In his complicated and understandable attempt at change the image of the Facebook group, now Meta, Mark Zuckerberg keeps changing words. Words are important, they define who we are and in a company they indicate where we want to go, what our values are.
When Steve Jobs scelse lo slogan “Think Different”, that is, “Think differently, do not homologate”, gave a very strong identity to the early Apple, which challenged much larger and more consolidated companies. And when Google debuted on the stock market a few years later, it made a flag of the slogan “Don’t Be Evil”, do not be bad, presenting itself as a fairytale company, where everyone was good. Amazon’s culture is all wrapped up nel motto “Work Hard. Have Fun. Make History”. That is: Work hard, have fun, and do memorable things. More credible than what circulated at one point, which pointed to Bezos’ company as the safest workplace on Earth.
He had stuck to Facebook the motto with which Zuckerberg started, “Move Fast and Break Things”, that is, move quickly and break things, withdrawn when it was discovered that among the things broken by the social network there were also social cohesion and trust in institutions. Now Zuckerberg tries to start over with new words: the employees of the group will be called Metamates, Meta’s companions; the flow of news we see will only be a flow, a Feed, without the word News anymore, given the proliferation of fake ones. And for the slogans Zuckerberg proposed “Live in the future”, live in the future. Which is between science fiction and the escape from the present. Building a better world must have seemed too ambitious.