Where is this all going? What does the future look like?
Every year Facebook holds a developer conference called F8, where it tells the people who build on its platform what it intends to do next. It is one of the few occasions when the plan is stated out loud, in public, by the people making it — not leaked, not alleged, just said.
What follows is an archived recording of Facebook's 2017 F8 keynote. Watch the company describe its own roadmap, then compare the recording with Meta's official announcement from the conference.
Facebook F8 2017 Keynote
Recording: Facebook F8 2017 keynote, archived by Awakened Academy · Read Meta's official F8 2017 announcement
Help people wake up
If this landed, send it to one person. Not as an argument — nobody has ever been shamed out of a habit — but as a door held open. Most people already sense that something is off with how they spend their days. What they usually lack is permission to say it out loud, and somewhere honest to start.
The whole course is free and always will be. If you want to know why, I wrote that down here.
First published 24 July 2018
Michael has spent much of his working life online—and much of the rest of it trying to stop that technology taking over. He has thrown a phone into a lake, locked devices in boxes and experimented with long periods offline. He writes about what helped, what failed and how to keep the useful parts of digital life.