Engineering the social world? An intellectual history of Facebook/Meta, 2004-2021

This project charts an intellectual history of Facebook/Meta from 2004 to 2021, analysing the language with which actors in and around the company came to depict the world, its transformations, and the social infrastructure they were building. Whilst intersecting with the fields of platform studies and the cultural history of computing, the theoretical framework for this project draws upon historiographical approaches to time and discourse, as well as a Gramscian framing of power. Based upon a digital archive of several thousand documents, this thesis applied thematic analysis to explore a set of underlying intellectual developments over these two decades. The empirical analysis unfolds across three interconnected dimensions: Facebook/Meta’s conception of space, its articulations of historical time, and its epistemological and ontological positionings. In exploring these underlying discursive strands, this thesis charts the emergence of what it calls a Big Tech ‘hegemonic horizon’, a particular way of imagining and structuring the world. Specifically, it shows the development of a worldview focused on the possibility of reordering global space, a discourse saturated with futurity, and an expansive systems-perspective in which the world itself becomes, and is constituted by, layers of optimisable systems. This thesis explores the intellectual development of Facebook/Meta actors within and alongside broader histories of colonialism, utopianism and knowledge production. It does so by placing this contemporary hegemonic horizon alongside earlier discursive contexts, interrogating past ways in which space, time, and science were imagined and talked about. Specifically, this research situates Facebook/Meta’s discourse within broader histories of coloniality, progressive time, cybernetics, and contestations over the World Wide Web. In so doing, this research shows not only how Facebook/Meta inherited and reassembled concepts and language from the past, but it also reveals what increasingly came to be concealed and ignored, namely, a critical humanist perspective of technology and the human subject.