In November 2022, Meta fell like a knife. Most analysts were asking whether the advertising slowdown was cyclical or structural, whether the metaverse bet was visionary or delusional, whether Mark Zuckerberg would right the ship. These are reasonable questions. They are also, I think, the wrong ones.

I was asking something different.

I was asking whether a company that had hired psychiatrists to engineer youth addiction into its core product — and knew it — could ever become something coherent. Whether a platform whose business model required harvesting and monetizing the most intimate details of billions of lives could genuinely change without dismantling the very flywheel that made it valuable. Whether the governance structure, the culture, the DNA of the thing was fixable — or whether the rot was foundational.

Read the rest of this essay on Lynn Marie's Digital Garden