The Community Engagement Updates are a series of 8 ½ x 11 flyers produced for Tinworks 2020, a collection of temporary public art projects hosted in Bozeman, Montana. Designed to be posted on local community bulletin boards around town, each of the three Updates repurposes language from the leaked transcript of an internal June 2, 2020 meeting between Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook’s employees, which had been convened to address his decision to leave up an inflammatory post from Donald Trump regarding the nationwide protests for racial justice in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. Zuckerberg’s decision produced widespread dissension within Facebook, and later led to a massive advertiser boycott of the platform.
The language Zuckerberg uses throughout the meeting is curious for its opacity, repetitions, and avoidance of direct terms to address the issues at hand. Extracted from its original context (and shifted from the first-person singular to first-person plural), its dissociative qualities become more ambiguous and absurd, but also more ominous and far-reaching. This material feels particularly relevant in the current moment, not only for its timeliness but for the way the evasiveness of Zuckerberg’s language mirrors larger dysfunctions in the US.
By extracting material from an internal meeting at Facebook, one of the most powerful entities in the world (the platform currently has more than two and half billion users, or roughly one-third of humanity) and inserting back it into the context of a local community bulletin board—a real-world, analog format upon which the earliest versions of Facebook were modeled—the Community Updates also comment ironically on the scale of such platforms, and their ability to influence individual perceptions.
