20 years after the creation of Facebook, the all-powerful GAFAM

In February, the social network Facebook celebrates the 20th anniversary of its creation in a small student room at Harvard by Mark Zuckerberg. In two decades, the student has become a multi-billionaire, and Facebook has become the Meta group, whose applications are used by nearly 3 billion people. Along with the other tech giants Google, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft (the GAFAMs), a handful of companies have found a way to virtualise (and monetise) our lives, often for the worse. Recently, Elon Musk’s extravagances have been the talk of the town, with his transformation of Twitter into X and the launch of Neuralink, a brain implant worthy of a science fiction dystopia. It’s the same impression we get from Apple’s virtual reality headset, released in January, which further blurs the lines between the virtual and the real. With the current explosion in artificial intelligence, the ground covered since the first ‘like’ in 2004 seems dizzying, and the future of these technologies as exciting as they are worrying.