8 The Sunday Times May 1, 2022
BUSINESS
M
ark Zuckerberg is not one
for subtlety. The Face-
book billionaire has his
minions beavering away
on a new virtual reality
headset that will soon, he
predicted, “replace your
laptop”. He has code-
named it Project Cam-
bria. The title is a nod to
what palaeontologists call the Cambrian
explosion, the era some 540 million
years ago when, suddenly, major groups
of animals first appeared on Earth. It was
a blossoming of species unparalleled in
the history of the planet.
Zuckerberg is hoping to catalyse a sim-
ilar flowering of life, but in the metaverse,
by inventing the gear necessary to access
the immersive online world of his visions.
He may be on to something with his evo-
lutionary framing. Meta (née Facebook)
has crashed to earth after nearly two dec-
ades of user growth came to a shuddering
halt. The resulting share price plunge
vaporised half a trillion dollars in value.
Elon Musk, meanwhile, has agreed to put
down $44 billion in cash to take over
Twitter, another social media pioneer
now getting a bit long in the tooth.
In the life of the Internet — and nearly
two decades into the social media age —
we appear to be entering a new epoch, orcoming to the end of one. The apex spe-
cies are showing their age, struggling to
forestall, if not extinction, irrelevance.
Think Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.
Younger, leaner predators, meanwhile,
are quickly clambering up the food chain.
Think TikTok, Snap, and younger pre-
tenders such as photo app BeReal.
Musk’s Twitter bid may come to be
seen as a defining moment of this shift.
Twitter, founded 16 years ago, helped
kickstart the social media age. In its early
days, it showed the immense, novel
power to organise vast swathes of people
into movements, like the Arab Spring.
The darker side of the app’s power to arm
bullies, bots and extremists, have taken
centre stage in recent years amid the
company’s clumsy and mostly ineffective
attempts to control it.
To be fair, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube
and the rest faced an almost impossible
task. They stumbled into a concept that
was a first in human history: a way to con-
nect hundreds of millions of people in
real time. Without any clear regulation
from governments, they had to figure out
the rules of engagement, and harder still,
enforce them. It has not gone well.
Twitter’s stunning inability to keep the
discourse “healthy” is what lured Musk
to swoop. The Tesla tycoon has pledged
to sort out Twitter by removing theguardrails it has haltingly put in place.
Musk’s goal: to allow as much speech as
legally possible. The early signs are not
promising. When Musk called out, by
name, Twitter executives last week over
past moderation decisions, they were
subjected to hails of racist, sexist dia-
tribes — on Twitter.
Jim Scheinman, founder of Maven Ven-
tures and an executive at early social net-
works Friendster and Bebo, said: “This
could be the biggest experiment in ‘free
speech’ this world has ever known.” He
added: “Maybe Twitter gets it right and it
becomes the largest functioning global
town square. Or it could become a cess-
pool of racism and antisemitism and hate
speech.”W
hat is certain is, this first chapter
of Twitter is coming to a close.
Which circles back to evolution.
A social network is only as strong
as the people who are on it. Fall-
ing user numbers equals death. If people
leave because, say, reminders of their
grandmother’s birthday are drowned out
by bullies and bots, the downward spiral
becomes self-fulfilling. Fewer people
beget fewer still because no one wants to
be the only one left at a party.
The powers-that-be are vulnerable.
Three of the top four free apps in Apple’s
App Store are upstarts, including Donald
Trump’s long-delayed Truth Social and
BeReal, a photo app that bills itself as
something of an anti-Instagram. This is
very different from the fallow period
between 2013 and 2019, which James Cur-
rier of NFX Partners, a San Francisco ven-
ture capital firm, called the “social media
ice age”. During this time, most compa-
nies and investors were too scared to
compete with Facebook for fear of getting
crushed or copied to death.
BeReal is an interesting example of the
new wave. Unlike Instagram's emphasis
on manicured images, BeReal sends noti-
fications at random times, encouraging
users to take photos instantly, with notime to pose for that “just-so” shot. It con-
tains no filters.
Benedict Evans, the prominent tech
commentator, said: “Every now and then
there’s another wave of social apps that
use a quirky new idea to break through
the noise. The challenge is whether they
can generalise that and become more
than a gimmick or fad.”
The playing field is shifting to a degree
not seen since the dawn of the social
media era in the early noughts. Consider
Meta. Shares in the Facebook parent have
halved since September to hit $174.95 last
week after users fell for the first time in its
history. The shares staged a small come-
back last week, rising to $205.73, not
because the company revealed a stonk-
ing set of results, but rather because it did
slightly better than expectations.
The company revealed that it had eked
out a 30 million increase in daily users.
Sales grew by an anaemic 7 per cent. The
days of hypergrowth appear to be over.
Part of this is simple arithmetic: there
are only so many humans with a smart-
phone (outside China, where Facebook is
banned). But there is also another
dynamic at work. Scheinman said: “It’s
no longer a question that for many teens
and young adults in particular, but alsoadults, that social media can be harmful
to our health, especially mental health.”
A survey last year of 10,000 teens by
the investment bank Piper Sandler found
that 30 per cent said TikTok was their
favourite app. Facebook? Just 2 per cent.
Instagram, Facebook’s lure for young
people, had fallen to 22 per cent. An anti-
trust suit means Facebook cannot buy
any rivals of import, and thanks to years
of congressional hearings, and scandal,
Meta has become synonymous with the
most toxic elements of social media.
Hence Project Cambria and Zucker-
berg’s bet on the metaverse. Young peo-
ple are spurning Facebook. Launching a
whizzy new way to access the web may
give them a reason to come back. Philip
Rosedale, founder of Second Life, a vir-
tual world that preceded Zuckerberg’s
metaverse scheme by more than two dec-
ades, said: “It’s a big Hail Mary move.
Facebook is an ageing company that’s
becoming irrelevant. They need to pull
out a big move to make it work.”A
mid the shifting of these tectonic
plates, Tiktok has emerged. The
streaming video platform is just six
years old — it was the outlier of the
ice age — but has already passed
one billion users and is projecting $12 bil-
lion in ad sales — three times what it
brought in last year, more than double
what Twitter generated in 2021 and four
times Pinterest’s sales.
TikTok’s secret sauce is its artificial
intelligence system, which recommends
videos not based on who you know but
subtle cues it picks up from what you
watch. Zuckerberg, tellingly, is following
TikTok’s lead, abandoning the “social
graph” that has driven its experience vir-
tually since inception, and spending lav-
ishly to build up a similar AI recommen-
dation engine.
It is an undertaking that only the most
deep-pocketed — and desperate — com-
pany could even attempt. But one must
do what it takes to survive.SEASON FOUR OF
DANNY IN THE VALLEYSPRINGFREE’S SUNIL PATEL:
‘I TRIED TO GIVE
THIS IDEA
AWAY FOR
TEN YEARS’
THESUNDAYTIMES.CO.UK/DANNYINTHEVALLEYSun rises on Biden’s solar dream
When Joe Biden finally bowed
to reality last month and
opened up federal lands to
new oil drilling, the president
was pilloried.
Environmentalists called it
a “betrayal”, “reckless” and
“incompatible with our
climate obligations”.
Biden, after all, had billed
himself as a green candidate
who took climate change
seriously and would finally
wean America, and the West,
off its oil addiction. On the
campaign trail, he pledged:
“No more drilling on federal
lands, period. Period, period,
period.”
Faced with what he
dubbed “Putin’s price hike” —
the oil price has surged by a
third this year amid the
Ukraine war — Biden broke
his promise. Yet amid the
hullabaloo, two rather large
points have been missed.
One, the drilling leases
were, really, a gesture — a
canny PR move to answer the
howls from Republicans
baying about “energy
security”. More important,
just days before the drilling
announcement was made, his
government unveiled anambitious energy plan under
which 29 gigawatts of new
solar fields, and a few wind
farms, would be built by 2025
across the American west.
For context, that is 40
times the 750 megawatts of
solar arrays that Britain built
last year and more than
double Britain’s entire
installed base of 13 gigawatts.
Biden’s embrace of
renewables comes at a time of
extreme tensions over energy
security. Europe has imposed
a ban on Russian coal
imports, while Vladimir Putin
raised the stakes on gas last
week, shutting down exports
to Poland and Bulgaria.
Further, Boris Johnson’s
government has struggled to
balance his commitment to
slashing carbon emissions
with his efforts to spur oil
production to reduce Putin’s
leverage and bring down sky-
high energy bills. The result,
last month’s energy security
strategy, was a damp squib. It
did none of the above.
America is in a better
position. It is a net energy
exporter, thanks to fracking,
and has been able to ramp up
oil production in recentweeks, while allowing Biden
to quietly forge ahead with
his green agenda.
Under the solar plan, the
Bureau of Land Management,
which oversees vast swathes
of desert, pastures and Native
American tribal territories,
will fast-track approval and
reduce lease fees to catalyse
39 developments in six
western states including
Arizona, Nevada and Utah.
The programme would
supercharge an industry that
is already booming. In the
first three-quarters of 2021,
solar (54 per cent) and wind
(35 per cent) accounted for
virtually all new electricity
generation. Natural gas made
up the other 10 per cent of
new installations, according
to data from the energy
consultancy Wood Mackenzie
and the Solar Energy
Industries Association.
Biden’s oil plan is less
fulsome. He increased
drilling royalties from 12.5 to
18.75 per cent, the first time
in a century the government
has pushed through such a
rise. But he also slashed the
amount of available acreage
from 733,000 acres to144,000 — an 80 per cent cut
— by applying an array of new
environmental and cultural
considerations.
Deb Haaland, the first
Native American to be named
Secretary of Interior, said:
“For too long, the federal oil
and gas leasing programs
have prioritised the wants of
extractive industries above
local communities, the
natural environment, the
impact on our air and water,
the needs of Tribal Nations,
and, moreover, other uses of
our shared public lands.
“Today, we begin to reset
how and what we consider to
be the highest and best use of
Americans’ resources for the
benefit of all current and
future generations.”
Indeed, some of the land to
be developed was handed to
Native American tribes
precisely because of its
inhospitality, being extremely
hot or windy.
Emily Kirsch, founder of
renewable investment firm
Powerhouse Ventures, said:
“Now that land is some of the
most valuable from a
renewable generating
perspective.”We
appear
to be
entering
a new
epoch
TECH TALK
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ILLUSTRATION: PETE BAKERDANNY FORTSON IN SAN FRANCISCO
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