Regressive Futuring: Zuckerberg’s Rebranding Against Techlash’s “Crisis”

By 2018, techlash had opened a possible crisis for Silicon Valley’s technology industry, otherwise resolutely committed to selling imagined technofutures. No company or celebrified founder has borne the brunt of public opinion’s pendulum swings as much as Facebook, Inc. and Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg’s rebranding of Facebook, Inc. to Meta in 2021 is a case study for how Silicon Valley’s industry and elite recuperatively make and remake their ideology—the industry’s defining feature—against a critical broader public and techlash discourse through regressive futuring. With textual analysis of Zuckerberg’s rebranding keynote, I map the limited, familiar repertoire of storylines and stages in selective response to techlash critique with (1) (attempted) recuperative humor of geek masculinity, (2) perfunctory acknowledgements of governance made visible through infrastructure, and (3) intra-industry power struggles. Regressive futuring—familiar dramaturgical regimes and recycled charisma—foregrounds how failures to perform become a failure of Silicon Valley’s meaning-making, as these repeated performances are the industry’s active, attempted sutures against substantive reckoning with Big Tech’s illogics.