Sharding the Self: Ben Thompson & FaceBook’s Muse Agentic System: THURSDAY THAUMATURGY
Not only are many of our deep relationships increasingly parasocial, but they are also increasingly role-bound and partial: a pleasing shard of the whole personality, which if parts of it were not kept decently draped and thus hidden, would mean that we would fail to maintain the “social interaction… balance between self-expression and the accommodation of others, which means that in the analog world it is a constant struggle to strike a balance between being myself and annoying everyone around me…”
Ben Thompson is very excited about FaceBook’s Muse Agentic System.
But there is a potential fly in the ointment, and one that should, I think, push him back toward using his own systems and away from his using, or indeed recommending, Muse.
Why? Because of this observation he makes:
Ben Thompson: One More Note on Agents, Meta Connect, Meta Enterprise Platform <https://stratechery.com/2026/one-more-note-on-agents-meta-connect-meta-enterprise-platform/>: ‘How much of ourselves should we show the world?… Do I want you to know that I am a longtime Fortune magazine journalist who covers technology and is now writing a book about Facebook? Or should I tell you I am a fifty-seven-year-old husband of an artist, father of a teenage girl, sometime poet, and former union activist?… On my single Facebook profile, pretty much all is revealed….
Zuckerberg, along with a key group of his colleagues… believes that by openly acknowledging who we are and behaving consistently among all our friends, we will help create a healthier society. In a more “open and transparent” world, people will be held to the consequences of their actions and be more likely to behave responsibly….
I just flat out disagree….Separating my identities… [is] far superior…. Social interaction… is always a balance between self-expression and the accommodation of others, which means that in the analog world it is a constant struggle to strike a balance between being myself and annoying everyone around me…. [Hence] my enthusiasm for messaging and group chats… I can simultaneously be a Bucks fan with the Fiefdom, be a tech enthusiast with my Slack group, explore ideas with my WhatsApp group, and talk politics with my trusted friends. The fact that I am not my whole self in any of these groups is a feature, not a bug, and one that is uniquely made possible by digital…. I am in private groups with plenty of folks that I disagree with about a whole host of things, but because we share a common interest, and are ok being trusted friends on that vector, I have learned a lot about why they believe what they believe about a bunch of issues…. It helps my analysis, and I think it makes me a better citizen…. What I think is even less debatable is that having separate identities for your private life and work life is not just health[ier], but also a vastly superior product experience…
That above seems to me to be 100% true.
There is great value in role-bound structured interactions, and in keeping them within the structures, even with close friends.
Of course, there is also value in occasionally breaking out of those role-bound interactions, and giving a hint of the multi-dimensional and multi-faceted deep self.
But only a hint. And not too often. And mostly as a sign of concern and connection, rather than as a breaking or a widening of the role-structure. Life just works better when one recognizes that there are times and places to be just one of “[1] a longtime… magazine journalist who covers technology… [2] is now writing a book… [3] a fifty-seven-year-old husband of an artist, [4 a] father of a teenage girl, [5 a] sometime poet… [or 6 a] former union activist…”. And yet FaceBook wants very much to stop him from being able to properly shard his self to do that.
Yet Ben Thompson overlooks that when he begins talking about FaceBook’s Muse Agentic System, “provisioning every user in… with a virtual machine with a 2-core processor, 8GB of RAM, and 8GB of storage.., a real-deal computer, which is pretty remarkable, and also the only way to make agents work for most people…” which has gotten him instantly excited, as he had found:
first coding agents, then an overall idea tracker agent… most recently an agent specifically tuned to my company’s needs…. Agents… are an AI that has access to a computer…. AI w[ill] not replace computers, but rather operate them… not that probabilistic LLMs would somehow become deterministic, but rather that LLMs would be able to leverage deterministic computers to do computer things; that’s exactly what an agent does, augmented by its ability to write things down…
But then he brings himself up short, when he runs into FaceBook’s idea that its Muse Agentic System would be not just for the home but for the office as well:
Having separate identities for your private life and work life is not just health[ier], but also a vastly superior product experience. We just saw Microsoft realize that Copilot for both professional and personal lives was a mistake, and double down on the former; that Meta is risking the possibility of owning the latter to pursue the former, with literally no reason to think they might succeed other than what I believe to be a mistaken understanding of human nature, is crazy to me. Muse is cute and fun; why would you want to associate that with work, and intermingle what you have to do with what you want to do?…
I am instantly reminded of Erving Goffman. We are no longer in the environment of evolutionary adaptation, where we see and interact with the same 70 people day after day after day. In a typical day I talk and listen in person in interactive exchanges to or move in the same space as step around perhaps 200 people, 180 of whom I have never seen before and will never see again. That works only because almost everybody, almost all the time, stays in their social-role lane.
Goffman’s core argument: that healthy people “segregate the audiences” to whom they perform different roles is how interaction stays coherent, not how it turns dishonest, in the huge amount of human sociality that is simply The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. A self made legible to all roles at once maximizes role strain rather than resolving it. Role theory’s functionalist strand tells us that society coheres because a bank teller, a teacher, a patient each come with a script, and so most encounters need no negotiation. A role-unbound agent reintroduces negotiation into contexts that used to and ought to run on autopilot. That is friction disguised as personalization. And the “constant struggle to strike a balance between being myself and annoying everyone” that your draft quotes is civility.
Plus Mark Zuckerberg assures us now that Muse won’t share VM data with ad systems. But isn’t a complete, cross-context dossier of a whole human is the most valuable advertising asset ever assembled? The odds that Zuckerberg will not only change his mind in the future but knows right now that he will change his mind in the future are very very high.
And there is, of course, the very deep problem with the whole FaceBook enterprise: it is there to harvest your eyeballs and eardrums to make money by selling you ads. Ben Thompson may be the only person on earth who likes FaceBook ads—he sees them as just more amusing and informative content. But even Ben has had it up to here with Amazon and Google ads as things that attack and degrade his quality of life in the interest of making mere billionaires into multi-billionaires. And I think he will, someday, come around to recognizing that FaceBook has an even bigger alignment problem vis-à-vis the flourishing of Ben Thompson.
So: No, I am not going to be spending any time with Muse.
Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. <https://monoskop.org/images/1/19/Goffman_Erving_The_Presentation_of_Self_in_Everyday_Life.pdf>.