In a bold move typically reserved for time travelers and hedge funds, Mark Zuckerberg announced he’s about to share the future, which he apparently bought in a family pack. He called it a major bet, which is what you say when roulette has already eaten your lunch.

The invitation promised an inflection point, then asked for my date of birth, retinal pattern, and a short essay on my favorite monetizable emotion. I RSVP’d ‘maybe’ and was immediately added to six focus groups about certainty.

As someone who prefers benchmarks to vibes, I asked for a spec sheet and got a mood board annotated with the word ‘inevitable’ in three fonts. The roadmap was a circle that kept insisting it was a straight line if you believed hard enough.

The reveal will happen on a stage shaped like a notification badge, under lights tuned to the exact wavelength of FOMO. NDAs were handed out like souvenir ponchos in case truth starts to splash.

The prototype resembled privacy-first AR glasses, except the privacy part was mostly performance art and the AR insisted it could improve not only my posture but my childhood. It overlaid helpful tips like ‘breathe’ and ‘don’t feed the algorithm after midnight.’

Zuckerberg described the platform as ‘human connection at scale,’ which is industry for ‘we’ve replaced feelings with push alerts and a pastel gradient.’ Investors nodded in unison, achieving perfect sync like wind chimes in an A/B test.

Moderation, we were told, will be ‘community-led,’ a phrase that historically means ‘we’ve handed a kazoo to a wildfire and believe in the power of song.’ The safety slide included a smiling shield and a footnote about staffing in Q4 of a braver year.

Several executives arrived on a metaverse treadmill chair, proving locomotion is now subscription-based and slightly out of breath. It auto-charged itself by harvesting the kinetic energy of polite applause.

Someone asked about legs. The demo said legs were on the roadmap, along with weather, nuance, and any button that says ‘no, really, stop.’ The future confirmed it will ship with feelings later, after a firmware update called EmpathOS.

Out on the street where platforms land, a teacher asked if the new thing could stop disinformation from grading student essays. A teenager asked if it could make adults log off. A local organizer asked for reach without becoming a data piñata.

So we ran tests. Latency of empathy: one to three fiscal quarters under normal load. Uptime of accountability: intermittent, particularly when revenue approaches a boundary condition labeled ‘please don’t.’ Battery life matched the average human attention span, plus thirty seconds of sponsored patience.

Zuckerberg says it’s a bet on human potential, which is a beautiful way to say we will be asked to rent our gaze. The future will launch in beta, crash twice, ping us for feedback, and end by asking history to accept cookies. And we’ll click, of course, because the button is bigger.