Letter back to Mark Zuckerberg, who wrote to the whole world in order to look at no one. I return to you your favorite word, that “everyone,” and with it I turn the planet around —from China to America, counterclockwise— to ask who fits and who does not fit into your idea of humanity.
By Claudia Aranda
On August 10, 2026, a man who possesses one of the largest concentrations of computational power on the planet published a letter and titled it, without blinking, “The Future is for Everyone” (Zuckerberg, 2026). He signed it “Mark,” just like that, in confidence, as someone writing to you, and only to you, from across the table.
I read it in Lachine, on the shores of Lake Saint-Louis, with a coffee that grew cold while I understood what I had before me. It was not a letter to humanity. It was a ball thrown into the air in the hope that no one would throw it back. Well then, dear Mark, here it comes back to you. And like any well-thrown ball, it will reach you as what it really is: a mirror.
To whom do you write when you write “to everyone”
Every open letter lies a little on the envelope. It says “to humanity” and is actually addressed to three recipients who fight over the seat. The first is the nominal recipient, that “everyone” in the title that serves as a pretext. The second is the real recipient: those who have the power to give you or deny you what you ask for. The third is the secret recipient, before whose tribunal one justifies oneself, and which is almost always oneself.
Your letter, Mark, touches all three registers at once, and there lies the first key to understanding it.
When you promise personal agents, tutors with doctorates, and free tools, you speak to the crowd, to the nominal recipient. When you defend silicon export controls, when you propose handing over to the government the intermediate checkpoints of your models, when you ask that the FDA hurry up and that U.S. competitiveness not be slowed down “not even a month,” you speak to the real recipient: the State, regulators, rivals in the race, markets watching to see if your competitive moat holds.
And when you invoke the brothers in the bicycle workshop, the apprentice who discovered electricity, the child in the garage, and above all when you tell how your agent monitors your sleep and how your eight-year-old daughter already programs and bakes with you using artificial intelligence, you speak to the secret recipient: to your own biography, to the figure of the founder-hero, to posterity.
The signature with the first name is not an oversight. It is the final gesture of intimacy that turns a lobbying document into a confession among friends. So your question, the one you take for granted without ever discussing it, does not have one answer, it has three. But I am interested in the fourth, the one you avoid: who, for you, is that “humanity,” that “everyone” you claim to serve?
What are you talking about, in plain terms
Before discussing it, one must understand it, and it is worth stripping away the jargon. You start from a technical premise that you treat as imminent: superintelligence, systems that surpass humans in almost everything, and especially systems capable of improving themselves, that concept that Bostrom (2014/2016) systematized along with the control problem.
Your thesis is not technical, it is political, and it rests on two words: balance of power. You say that the danger lies not in technology, but in its concentration. If a single entity possessed superintelligence, there would be tyranny; if everyone has it, competing interests keep each other in check, as in a market or a liberal democracy, and from that clash the common good emerges.
From that, everything else follows. The personal agent for everyone. Open source as a way of distributing. The rejection of the idea of a single benevolent superintelligence, which you consider impossible because humanity is not a monoculture. The star promise: if everyone has superintelligent cybersecurity, the entire world becomes safer; if everyone has a superintelligent lawyer, justice becomes more just.
And I grant you what is defensible, because the easy mistake would be to call you a cynic, and you are not one. It is true that a single superintelligence, even if it declares itself benevolent, is a major political risk, and that the history of the enlightened despot has never ended well. Distributing is safer than trusting a master, even if the master is an aligned machine. Up to that point, good argument. The problem, Mark, is that you are not a cynic: you are philosophically more interesting. You are a believer. What you write is a theodicy, a justification of order in the shape of a market. And like every theodicy, its strength lies in what it leaves out of the frame.
Around the world, counterclockwise
Here begins the journey, and here is where I return the ball to you by rolling it across the globe. I leave China and go west, counterclockwise, and at each stop I meet someone who has already turned over what you present as self-evident.
China. The philosopher of technology Yuk Hui, with his concepts of cosmotechnics and technodiversity, attacks precisely the operation you carry out without naming it: universalizing a single technological rationality, born in a very specific corner of California, and presenting it as the natural destiny of the species (Hui, 2020). For Hui, there is no technology in the singular, with a single arrow toward superintelligence; there are many cosmotechnics. Your “everyone,” in his language, is a monotecnicism: the reduction of all possible worlds to a single future, yours, into which one can only enter as a user. Alongside him, Zhao Tingyang offers from the tradition of tianxia, “all under heaven,” a rival universalism, a relational one, where the unity of the world is thought from the bond and not from the sum of individuals optimizing preferences (Zhao, 2018). You also say “all under heaven,” Mark. But your heaven is populated by consuming atoms, not by binding relationships.
Korea, and the bridge to Europe. Byung-Chul Han puts his finger on the most uncomfortable sore spot. His critique of psychopolitics accurately describes your personal agent that works for the user twenty-four hours a day: neoliberal power, he says, no longer represses, it empowers; it does not forbid you, it incites you to exploit yourself in the name of your own self-realization (Han, 2014). The subject who believes himself free and the owner of his agent is the one who has best internalized coercion, because he now monitors, optimizes, and squeezes himself, convinced that this is autonomy. Your “fully private mode,” that not even Meta can see, is from Han’s perspective the most revealing detail: the promise of a shielded interiority, offered precisely by the industry that turned interiority into data.
South Asia. Gayatri Spivak formulated decades ago the question that lays bare your title: can the subaltern speak? Her answer is that, in hegemonic discourse, the subaltern does not speak: he is spoken for, he is represented, he is expressed by the one who claims to defend him (Spivak, 2003). “The future is for everyone” is, in her key, a speech act that speaks for those whom it cannot hear. And Amartya Sen, with his capabilities approach, marks the subtle trap: you use a language that sounds like capabilities, “expanding what each person can do,” but you reduce capability to access to computing (Sen, 1999/2000). For Sen, a real capability requires substantive freedoms and public deliberation, not a tool placed in the hand.
Africa. Achille Mbembe, with his concept of necropolitics, asks about the bodies that the narrative of progress renders dispensable (Mbembe, 2003). In your letter, the community appears only once and in a precise role: a site of extraction to be compensated. You promise to be water-positive and to pay bonuses to teachers in Richland Parish, and it is good that you do, but note the grammar: the community is not a deliberating subject, it is an environment to be indemnified. Against that ontology, the African tradition of ubuntu says the exact opposite of your individual: “a person is a person through other persons,” the person as a knot of relationships and not as an atom with rights prior to the community (Ramose, 1999). Your “everyone” is a sum of ones; ubuntu teaches that there is no one before the us.
The Caribbean, and the heart of the matter. Here appears who, in my view, disarms you with the greatest precision: Sylvia Wynter. Her thesis is that Western modernity installed a particular figure —the bourgeois, the rational economic subject, homo oeconomicus— and passed it off as the universal human being, as Man with a capital M; this overrepresentation of a provincial figure as if it were the entire species, she calls the coloniality of being (Wynter, 2003). And here is the blow, Mark: your “everyone” is, point by point, Wynter’s Man. The entrepreneur-consumer-optimizer who directs his agent toward “what he values in his own life” is not humanity; it is a very specific anthropological type elevated to the norm of the species. Whoever does not fit into that mold is not left out through the door: he is left out by definition.
Europe. Yanis Varoufakis gives the economic name to what is happening: technofeudalism. Platforms are no longer markets, they are fiefs; cloud-capital does not earn by producing, but collects rent by controlling access (Varoufakis, 2023). In that light, your star promise, “free tools for billions,” ceases to be generosity and becomes the very mechanism of servitude: the lord does not charge for entry to the fief, he charges for everything that happens inside. Free is the bait of vassalage. And Antonio Gramsci, with his idea of hegemony and common sense, explains the form of your text: the operation by which a project of a very particular class presents itself as the interest of all, as obvious (Gramsci, 1975/1981). Your letter does not argue that the market is providence: it takes it for granted, and that taking for granted is the hegemonic work. Jürgen Habermas, for his part, would mourn what you dissolve: the public sphere, the space where a community deliberates and reaches agreements (Habermas, 1992/1998). In your world there is no us that discusses; there are millions of selves that optimize in private.
Latin America, my shore. Enrique Dussel offers the deepest critique from the south. Against the ego cogito of modernity, “I think, therefore I am,” Dussel unmasks its hidden reverse, the ego conquiro, “I conquer, therefore I am”: modern subjectivity was constituted by dominating an Other whom it first had to conceal (Dussel, 1992/1994). Every totality that declares itself universal, he says, produces an exteriority, an outside of beings that do not count. Your “everyone” is a totality of that kind, and its exteriority is the billions without connection, without device, without the way of life that your system presupposes. Bolívar Echeverría gives that figure a Latin American and unsettling name: whiteness, not the color of the skin, but the ethos that the modern subject must adopt to be recognized as full, productivist, individualistic, disciplined (Echeverría, 2010). Wynter’s Man and Echeverría’s whiteness shake hands across the Atlantic. Aníbal Quijano, with coloniality of power (Quijano, 2000), Walter Mignolo, with the decolonial option (Mignolo, 2005/2007), and Johan Galtung, whose concept of structural violence makes visible how institutional and technological dynamics themselves impose invisible and systematic harms on the vulnerable (Galtung, 1969), close the diagnosis: “for everyone” is the rhetoric of modernity, and coloniality is its hidden face, the one that manufactures those who are left out so that a few can be inside.
North America, your home. I arrive, counterclockwise, at the point from which you departed. Shoshana Zuboff, with her anatomy of surveillance capitalism, blows up your promise of private mode: she describes how the industry of which Meta is an emblem turned human experience into raw material for predicting and modifying behavior (Zuboff, 2019/2020). Promising an interiority that not even the company can see, from that track record, is to ask for a considerable act of faith.
And on the most contemporary front, Timnit Gebru and Émile Torres have shown that the very discourse of superintelligence —that mix of salvific utopia and apocalyptic warning— functions as an ideology with roots in the eugenicist tradition, which uses the language of benefit for all to evade accountability (Gebru and Torres, 2024).
Your letter, read thus, is an artifact of that ideology: it promises heaven, stirs the hell of concentration, and offers itself as the path to salvation. To close the circle, a contrast with John Rawls suffices: you brush against a language of justice, but you forget the decisive Rawlsian criterion, judging the order by the fate of the worst off (Rawls, 1971/1995). Nowhere in your letter is the future measured by the last. It is measured by the average, which is the statistical way of seeing no one.
The debate, head-on
Now then, let us discuss it without caricature, because I owe you a clean fight.
I have already granted you your due: against the catastrophism of other labs, you are right to distrust the single master, and there are domains, like cybersecurity, where distributing a capability can harden the entire system rather than weaken it. You lucidly detect the trap of the rival who says “this is so dangerous that only I can guard it, give me the monopoly.” All of that is true.
But there is one logical leap, just one, that supports your entire edifice. You confuse distributing the use of a technology with distributing power over it. You distribute consumption and call that balance of power. Distributing personal agents among billions does not touch at all who trains the models, who owns the computing, who sets the terms, who operates the auction that allocates intelligence. That meta-power, power over distribution, remains intact and, worse, it is consecrated. Because a world of atomized individuals, each absorbed in optimizing his life with his agent, is precisely the ideal condition for platform sovereignty. There is no demos that collectively negotiates the terms; there are users who accept terms of service.
Your balance of power is, at best, a balance on the ground floor of the building, while the owner watches from a rooftop that your letter never mentions. Divide and serve.
And here the entire journey converges. What Wynter calls overrepresentation of Man, what Dussel calls concealment of the Other, what Han calls self-exploitation of the performance subject, what Varoufakis calls rent of the fief, are faces of the same mechanism: a universal that functions as a pretext. Your “everyone” is not an error in the letter, it is its engine. It serves so that the distribution of a concrete power can present itself as its dissolution. The word “everyone” does, at the level of discourse, exactly what the market does at the economic level: it naturalizes. It turns a historical, contingent, and interested decision —that of a company and its business model— into an almost physical law of human progress. It is, to put it in the tools I handle daily, myth in the sense of Barthes (1957/1999) and doxa in the sense of Bourdieu (1980/2007), operating in full light.
Coda: the ball, the mirror
Let us return to the envelope, which is where we began. To whom do you write, Mark?
You write to the State and regulators, to ask them for computing, speed, and export controls. You write to your rivals, to dispute their narrative of what responsible artificial intelligence is. You write to the markets, to assure them that the moat holds. But beneath those three, and sustaining them, you write to a figure who is none of us and who at the same time pretends to be everyone: that universal Man, entrepreneur of himself, whom modernity fabricated and whom your letter crowns as the destiny of the species. And that figure, look closely, has a face. It is the child in the garage who made it, the founder whose agent monitors his sleep and plans weekend recipes with his daughter. Your humanity bears an astonishing resemblance to you.
That is why you sign “Mark,” in confidence. Your open letter to humanity is, in its deepest layer, a theodicy in which the author occupies the place of providence, and a mirror in which the entire species appears with your features. You do not write to humanity. You write to your image of humanity, which is your own image, using humanity as a frame. That “everyone” is the glass. And like every well-polished mirror, it has the virtue that whoever looks into it believes they are seeing the world when they are seeing themselves. Because in that human range you represent, “the others” are just that: the extras. Those who are left over. Those who are counted at the end, in the average, so as not to have to look at them one by one.
So here is the ball back to you, dear Mark, after going around the planet. May it reach you as that mirror to which, by virtue of truth, you speak. The question that your letter does not ask itself, and that a future worthy of that name would have to ask itself, is the oldest in political philosophy and the most absent from Menlo Park: not what can each person do with their agent, but who decides, together, the terms of distribution. That question is not answered with a free tool. It is answered with an us that you, precisely, need not to exist.
I am, for your picture, one of the extras. A plebeian who returns the ball to you from Lachine. But it happens that this plebeian knows how to read a mirror. And yours, Mark, is looking at you.
MARK ZUCKERBERG’S LETTER
The Future is for Everyone: The Path to a Positive AI Future
By Mark Zuckerberg
At Meta, we believe that artificial intelligence has the potential to unlock human creativity, productivity, and economic opportunity on a scale we have never seen before. Superintelligence is no longer a distant theoretical concept; it is an approaching reality that will redefine how every individual interacts with the world.
However, the defining political and technological question of our era is not whether superintelligence will arrive, but how its power will be distributed. There are two competing visions for this future. One vision seeks to centralize superintelligence within a small group of closed institutions, relying on a single, centralized authority to dictate what is safe and beneficial for humanity. We believe this path carries immense risk. History teaches us that the concentration of unprecedented power inevitably leads to tyranny.
The second vision—and the one Meta stands for—is built on an open equilibrium of power. We believe that the safest and most just future is one where advanced AI capabilities are made broadly available through open source technology, personal agents, and accessible infrastructure. When everyone has access to superintelligent capabilities—whether for personalized education, advanced cybersecurity, legal representation, or scientific research—no single entity can dominate the rest. Competing interests naturally balance each other, empowering individuals and fostering an inclusive ecosystem.
To achieve this future, we must ensure that regulatory frameworks support open innovation, maintain robust infrastructure, and protect democratic access without hampering competitiveness. The future of technology should not belong to a select few gatekeepers. The future is for everyone.
Mark
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