“It Might Well Be Unsolvable”: Nilay Patel on Facebook’s Reckoning With Reality—And the Metaverse-Size Problems Yet to Come

The early 2010s were a great time to be a tech blog: The digital media industry was still reasonably flush with hope, and Silicon Valley remained something of an exciting curiosity worth geeking out over. This was back when Gizmodo leaked the iPhone 4 prototype (courtesy of a forgetful bar patron in Redwood City); back when the biggest news out of F8 was the launch of something called “the Timeline” (which TechCrunch noted “looks a bit like a really nice Tumblr blog”). So when top Engadget editors quit the AOL-backed (lol) tech site to launch The Verge in 2011, no one could have guessed it was basically going to be the last new tech blog as we knew it.

One decade later, The Verge has not only managed to stay successful and relevant, but the parent company it originally launched under—Vox Media—has matured into a digital media player itself, or at least the only one that’s ever bought a whole entire magazine. Meanwhile, The Verge has stayed the course, cranking out gadget reviews, a Pulitzer-nominated feature, and, of course, the elusive Facebook scoop.

On the eve of The Verge’s 10th anniversary, Vanity Fair spoke with editor in chief Nilay Patel about the way tech coverage (and the public’s expectations for it) has changed in the last decade, especially in regard to a certain social media network in the news recently…

It’s been a week since we first started officially hearing about the Facebook Papers, but there’s still so much coming out. Has there been anything in the papers so far that’s surprised you?

The most surprising thing is that so many of our assumptions are true. We can imagine how these companies operate—the bureaucracy of a hundred-thousand-person company that has deep political interest from players across the spectrum, from multiple countries across the world. What the papers have conclusively demonstrated is that one, most of those assumptions are true.

And two, inside of Facebook, there is an enormous amount of dissent. Facebook has internal corporate values, so it’s strange for all those people who go to Facebook, take the orientation and are told how to behave at work, and then ship something that actively cuts against those values. What the papers have shown us is that they know it. I don’t think there’s a lot of earth-shattering scoops in there, but the overwhelming outcome of the work that’s being done with the papers is to put together a meticulous theory of the case of why Facebook has gone astray.

Looking back at Facebook’s trajectory, does it seem like this was always going to be the inevitable conclusion for the company?

This moment is one that any good monopolist from history would have absolutely managed to head off at the pass. If you look at all of the cell carriers, they are all monopolies or duopolies; there isn’t a lot of competition. But the reason they don’t take the hits is because they are perceived as national champions, right? AT&T and Verizon hold themselves up as winning a race for 5G. They have deeply enmeshed themselves in the government; they lobby all the time. Other telecom firms have figured this out.

Facebook has held itself apart. That distance has always meant that this moment for them is inevitable. They had a lack of understanding of how the other enormous power in this country—the government—might seek to reassert itself, and how that process might get used by whistleblowers or by other people who wish to make change.

I think it’s hitting them like a truck. Now they’re spending a lot of money lobbying and are putting up the ads that say, we welcome regulation.

Let’s zoom out to the bigger picture around tech and media from the past decade. How has coverage evolved from, like, its early, breathless gadget-review days?

I think we’re a little past breathless gadget reviews, but at the same time, we’re still heavily invested in reviews because they offer us a kind of power and control over a story. We can take everything Apple has done with the App Store and antitrust and photo scanning, and then we can look at their phone and say, “This is a nine.” That connection has been an enormous force of our authority. I cannot think of another part of media where the loop gets closed like that, except for sports, right? You can cover teams all day, but at the end of the day, someone’s going to win. At the end of the day in tech, they’re gonna ship a product and it’s good or not.

I think reviews of the products these companies actually make are gaining in importance because you’re surrounded by them and the marketing noise all day. Authoritative review, for us, is going to be critically important. It feeds the journalism. Because when we do the investigative journalism and the big features, we’re not confused about how the products work.

Has the subject-source relationship changed, do you think? Has one side taken more power?

We live in the age of going direct: CEOs starting their own marketing channels, companies doing their own Clubhouse, venture capital firms starting media organizations. And that’s fine. Because, for example, I host a podcast where I interview executives every week, and they keep coming. It’s not like they’re fading away—they want to be on the show.