You want him gone. I get it. We all want him gone. The headlines are screaming for blood, and the public comment sections are cheering for his resignation. But if Mark Zuckerberg steps down tomorrow, you won’t get your justice. You’ll get a beautifully packaged illusion of it.
Firing the CEO of an addiction factory doesn’t cure the addiction; it just puts a new suit behind the steering wheel of the damage.
We are treating Meta like a company with a bad leader. It’s not. As one reader perfectly put it: “Meta should just close. It’s like wanting to change the CEO for the dioxin factory.” You don’t hire a nicer person to run a toxic chemical plant. You shut it down. But we won’t shut it down, because we are the raw materials being processed.
The public wants individual accountability. We want a villain we can point to, a face we can put on the dartboard. But competitive capitalism doesn’t care about your mental health, your teen’s body image, or the fabric of our democracy. It cares about your attention. If Zuckerberg suddenly grew a conscience and declared, “Let’s put safety above profit,” he would be ousted by lunchtime. The system that produced him demands what he does.
The search for one “good” CEO is a contradiction of the very system that built the empire.
Look past the hoodies and the VR headsets. The most important people aren’t the executives in Menlo Park; it’s the investor class. If Meta is the “big tobacco of our generation”—and it is—then a resignation is just a PR concession designed to protect the real product: monetized attention and behavior modification. Wall Street needs the extraction to continue. They don’t care who signs the paperwork.
Moral outrage feels good, but it can be safely absorbed by firing one executive while the exploitation engine continues humming in the background.
We have outgrown the need for Meta. The world would not cry if it completely shut down. But what fills the void? Another Big American corporation? A Chinese equivalent? The problem isn’t the name on the door or the face in the boardroom. It’s the business model itself.
Until we dismantle the profit-at-all-costs architecture that treats human attention as a natural resource to be strip-mined, swapping out the boss is just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Don’t ask for his resignation. Demand a new system.
FAQ
Q: Wouldn't a new CEO at least bring better safety policies?
A: No. Any CEO who prioritizes safety over engagement and ad revenue will be replaced immediately by the board and investors. The system demands addiction-maximizing profits, not safety.
Q: What is the practical implication of viewing Meta as 'big tobacco'?
A: It means the product itself is the harm. You can't regulate or reform a dioxin factory into being safe; you have to shut it down or fundamentally change its business model away from monetized attention.
Q: Is it actually possible to dismantle Meta's business model?
A: Not without massive regulatory intervention that outlaws the extraction and monetization of behavioral data. As long as attention is the raw material, someone will figure out how to exploit it for profit.