Mark Zuckerberg has been quietly working on a new look and he really wants you to see it

Mark Zuckerberg thinks he has invented the future – and he isn’t sorry about it. When he stood up at Meta’s annual conference this week, wearing a T-shirt that translates roughly as “Zuck or nothing”, he had a new vision of the future to present.

Zuckerberg has presented visions of the future before, of course. Ever since Facebook arrived, it came with an imagined world in which people would be more closely and permanently connected, and be more fulfilled as a result. The vision itself hasn’t really changed – it has just come in the form of new technology – but Zuckerberg has.

Gone is the haircut that made him look like Julius Caesar and the hoodie that became a cliche; here instead is a baggy T-shirt, with his own version of the phrase “aut Caesar aut Nihil”. (Zuckerberg’s version of that phrase – which means “a Caesar or nothing” – swapped his own nickname for the Roman emperor’s.) His hair was curly and his manner was confident.

He looked, in short, like a new person, with new technology to show off. The headlining product of Meta’s annual Connect event was “Orion”, what it calls its “first true augmented reality glasses”. They look like normal specs, with slightly chunky frames. But the wearer will be able to use its lenses as screens, projecting digital content onto the real world.

Meta has been working on something like this for years, and so have rivals including Apple. Until now, Meta’s attempts to build true smart glasses of this kind have come at it from two directions: its Quest headsets, which put displays on their wearer’s face, and the Ray-Ban glasses which include a camera to look out at the world.

The Orion glasses are not here yet – even when they are, they will not be a full realisation of the company’s dream, since they also require a nearby puck to do some of the computing – but the dream is much closer to being realised than it was before.

That vision comes hand in hand with the much-mocked metaverse. The word may now have come inextricably wrapped up in hype over NFTs and dystopian images of people locked up in headsets, but Zuckerberg has been subtly bringing it to us all the same. A hint of it is offered in the – astonishingly good – glasses that Meta makes with Ray-Bans.

They present the metaverse not as a kind of digital world into which you disappear, but as a new layer that can be placed on top of the real world that we share. (Apple has taken much the same approach with its augmented reality goggles, describing them as its “first product you look through not at”.) The Ray-Bans don’t have screens, but they can for instance view the world outside through a camera, analyse it with AI, and then offer information about it. The new Orion glasses seem to be the most advanced yet version of that vision, with a product that should disappear when it is not in use.

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Zuckerberg has been on the defensive for at least a decade, as Facebook became swamped in controversy over politics and division. Even the renaming of his company seemed to have been done on the back foot: the name Meta was supposed to indicate that the company was moving towards being about the metaverse, but it was also a fairly obvious attempt to outrun the bad reputation that Facebook had picked up.

Now he has switched his stance. Instead of dodging and weaving and hoping that critics would tire, he is back on the offensive, taking attacks without apologising but also making the fight go his own way. And instead of taking his clothing and hobbies from the tech world, he now looks more like an influencer: baggy clothes, jiu-jitsu and a kind of studiedly relaxed energy.

For years, Zuckerberg had been the butt of jokes about his face being painted in sunscreen and his robotic manner; they were so common that even in Meta’s regular staff Q&As, during which the chief executive addressed staff, employees would reference the jokes directly to their bosses face. Now, however, it is much more popular to express a new kind of shock about how cool he has become.

Every couple of weeks, for instance, a post will go viral on X/Twitter showing Zuckerberg doing a new hobby – riding an electric surfboard across the sea, for instance – and wondering just how he had become interesting, all of a sudden.

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Zuckerberg’s worry-free approach seems to be carrying over to the company’s work in AI, too. This week, he told The Verge that most people’s work is not actually useful for training artificial intelligence, and that therefore it would just stop using it rather than compensating its creators.

“I think individual creators or publishers tend to overestimate the value of their specific content in the grand scheme of this,” he said; “when push comes to shove, if they demanded that we don’t use their content, then we just wouldn’t use their content”. (He made the comments around the same time as a viral Instagram trend in which hundreds of thousands of users attempted to ask Meta not to use their data for training AI.)

Despite being one of the world’s richest and occasionally most hated men, Zuckerberg has been able to undertake a transformation fairly quietly. As Elon Musk feuded with world leaders, and Tim Cook continued in his competent, consistent quietude, Zuckerberg has been building a whole new brand. It comes with a new commitment not to apologise for or even get involved in something of the things that have dragged him and his companies down in the past, a kind of studied anti-politics.

What Zuckerberg might have in his corner is the fact that he is, perhaps first and foremost, a product person. None of the current crop of super-famous tech CEOs actually built the product with which they are associated: Musk bought Twitter, Tim Cook ran Apple’s operations, and Amazon’s Andy Jassy and Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai both came to power when their companies were dominant. (Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and Netflix’s Reed Hastings may be Zuckerberg’s only counterpart, but both have largely escaped the controversies and scrutinies that have tended to come with being a powerful tech boss.)

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People might have grown tired of Zuckerberg and Meta’s products – or at least they might profess to, even if their phone’s screen time tells a different story. But he seems to believe the way to fix that is to return to those product roots even while reinventing himself. Unlike, say, Elon Musk, he is not attempting to make people talk in different ways, but to give them something else to talk about.

One of the big promises of this kind of product is that they are not a phone; almost all of today’s new hardware releases are based on the idea that people hate their smartphones, despite the fact that they are the single most popular piece of consumer technology ever made. But the tech companies are right that something has clearly changed in the way that people view the technology that surrounds them.

The mistake they have made, however, is thinking that the problem is the technology itself; the greater frustration is surely with the companies rather than the products that deliver them to us. In that respect, Zuckerberg might be right in inventing himself twice over: both he and his company’s products are offering a new version of themselves. And if we’re looking forwards to a new future, perhaps through his glasses, then we’re not looking backwards at where they came from.