Mark Zuckerberg has never been known for generating massive amounts of goodwill, but the past several weeks have been particularly rough for the Meta founder. Earlier this month, reports emerged that his superyacht was booed for leaving a much smaller boat’s passengers stranded in Alaskan waters. On Wednesday, his company agreed to pay a whopping $17 billion to settle claims by multiple states that features on Instagram and Facebook harm children and teen users. That same morning came revelations that Meta planned to lay off thousands of its employees, replace them with AI “agents,” and turn the company into a dystopian hellscape — until the humans revolted and the technology failed to deliver the output executives had been banking on.
Reuters reports that during a January leadership retreat at Zuckerberg’s $100 million Hawaii compound — the one expected to serve as a “postapocalyptic bunker in case of civilization collapse” — the Meta founder and his lieutenants “hatched a radical plan to reimagine work” at the company. Under the codename Project OT, the scheme involved transforming Meta into an “AI native” organization in which “AI would take over much of the daily work performed by thousands of human employees” and “virtual workers would be overseen” by smaller groups of “human staffers,” according to people familiar with the matter. Obviously, that plan necessitated getting rid of huge swaths of said humans, and “in scenario-planning exercises … executives explored slashing the size of many teams across Meta by as much as 60%.” While some people would have been offered new positions in new units, many others would have been laid off in two waves of redundancies. According to Reuters, the first wave occurred on May 19, with the slashing of 10 percent of employees, but the November cuts were called off. Perhaps not surprisingly, the employees whose jobs were (temporarily?) spared remained pissed, which might have had to do with, among other things, seeing their colleagues fired and having their keyboards spied on for the benefit of bots.
