Posts tagged with "Translates to ‘either emperor or nothing’"

You are not prepared for how Mark Zuckerberg is dressing now

September 30, 2024

Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and longtime CEO of Meta (formerly Facebook), is wearing chains. He’s growing his hair out. He’s wearing oversized tee-shirts emblazoned with his favorite classical expressions—the latest of which, donned this week by the CEO to deliver the keynote speech at Meta’s annual Connect conference, featured the phrase “aut Zuck aut nihil,” reports Futurism.

For those less familiar with niche Roman sayings, that’s a take on the infamous expression “aut Caeser aut nihil,” which translates to “either emperor or nothing.” If that sounds at all foreboding to you, your intuition would be correct: The phrase historically has been invoked by ambitious political actors seeking supreme rulership—that, or nothing.

Meta Connect is the company’s annual developer conference, where the tech giant shows off its latest and greatest innovations. This year’s event has unsurprisingly centered on Meta’s efforts to dominate the artificial intelligence (AI space), as well as a buzzy new prototype for holographic augmented reality glasses, dubbed “Orion.”

The glasses are still pretty clunky—although not nearly as ungainly as Apple’s Vision Pro goggles. But, according to Zuck, they’re a “time machine” into the future.

“These glasses exist, they are awesome,” Zuck told the crowd, “and they are a glimpse of a future that I think is going to be pretty exciting.” (The ultra-chunky frames also added a special level of eccentricity to the billionaire’s outfit during the appearance.)

On the one hand, the thick-rimmed AR glasses, designed to add a virtual layer of reality over the real world in real time, are a bet against smartphones and existing devices. In the billionaire’s imagined future, we don’t call our friends or loved ones over FaceTime, or work via multiple physical monitors. Instead, with his glasses, it’s all projected in front of us.

But when Zuck makes grandiose claims about Meta’s innovations powering the future, he isn’t just talking about the future of hardware or wearables—at least, not in a vacuum. Speaking not only to Orion but also to Meta’s various VR projects and fast-moving AI efforts, the swashzuckling, jiu jitsuing CEO declared that he and Meta are constructing humanity’s social future.

“All of this comes together to build what I think is going to be the future of human connection, and the next generation of computing platforms,” Zuckerberg told the Connect crowd. “In every generation of technology, there is competition of ideas for what the future should look like—and at Meta, we are trying to build a future that is more open, more accessible, more natural, and more about human connection.”

In other words, by his own admission, Zuck is explicitly in competition with Silicon Valley foes to establish dominance in a new technological landscape that would continue to define how humans engage with each other and with the world at large.

Indeed, technological advancement and the tools that define a moment in human history have always played a role in our interpersonal relationships, social norms, and politics—a role that Meta’s social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram didn’t originate, but have undeniably filled.

Now, the wealth that Zuckerberg and his company have amassed in the process is being funneled into the billionaire’s new vision for the next version of the web and the technology that powers it. And should Meta win out over competitors like OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft—well, leading tech centibillionaires are probably the closest thing we have to emperors, so aut Zuck aut nihil, indeed.

Research contact: @futurism