“Um,” he started, and then paused, weighing his words as carefully as American presidents once did. “Not usually.” He argued that some of Facebook’s critics’ proposed fixes for news on the service, such as hiring editors, were impractical due to Facebook’s scale and global diversity. Personalization, he said, remained a central tenet. “It really gets back to, like, what do people want at a deep level,” he said. “There’s this oversimplified narrative that a company can get very successful by just scratching a very superficial itch, and I don’t really think that’s right over the long term.”

Yet by our second meeting, Zuckerberg’s position seemed to have evolved. Facebook had by then announced plans for the Facebook Journalism Project, in which the company would collaborate with news companies on new products. Facebook also created a project to promote “news literacy” among its users, and it hired the former CNN news anchor Campbell Brown to manage the partnership between it and news companies. Zuckerberg’s tone toward critics of Facebook’s approach to news had also grown far more conciliatory. “I think it’s really important to get to the core of the actual problem,” he said. “I also really think that the core social thing that needs to happen is that a common understanding needs to exist. And misinformation I view as one of the things that can possibly erode common understanding. But sensationalism and polarization and other things, I actually think, are probably even stronger and more prolific effects. And we have to work on all these things. I think we need to listen to all the feedback on this.”

Still, in both our conversation and his new manifesto, Zuckerberg remained preoccupied with the kind of problems that could be solved by the kind of hyperconnectivity he believed in, not the ones caused by it. “There’s a social infrastructure that needs to get built for modern problems in order for humanity to get to the next level,” he said. “Having more people oriented not just toward short-term things but toward building the long-term social infrastructure that needs to get built across all these things in order to enable people to come together is going to be a really important thing over the next decades.” By way of example, he pointed to Safety Check, Facebook’s system for letting people tell their friends that they’ve survived some kind of dangerous event, like a natural disaster or terrorist attack.

“We’re getting to a point where the biggest opportunities I think in the world ... problems like preventing pandemics from spreading or ending terrorism, all these things, they require a level of coordination and connection that I don’t think can only be solved by the current systems that we have,” Zuckerberg told me. What’s needed, he argues, is some global superstructure to advance humanity.

This is not an especially controversial idea; Zuckerberg is arguing for a kind of digital-era version of the global institution-building that the Western world engaged in after World War II. But because he is a chief executive and not an elected president, there is something frightening about his project. He is positioning Facebook — and, considering that he commands absolute voting control of the company, he is positioning himself — as a critical enabler of the next generation of human society. A minor problem with his mission is that it drips with megalomania, albeit of a particularly sincere sort. With his wife, Priscilla Chan, Zuckerberg has pledged to give away nearly all of his wealth to a variety of charitable causes, including a long-term medical-research project to cure all disease. His desire to take on global social problems through digital connectivity, and specifically through Facebook, feels like part of the same impulse.

Yet Zuckerberg is often blasé about the messiness of the transition between the world we’re in and the one he wants to create through software. Building new “social infrastructure” usually involves tearing older infrastructure down. If you manage the demolition poorly, you might undermine what comes next. In the case of the shattering media landscape, Zuckerberg seems finally to have at least noticed this problem and may yet come up with fixes for it. But in the meantime, Facebook rushes headlong into murky new areas, uncovering new dystopian possibilities at every turn.

A few months after I spoke with Zuckerberg, Facebook held its annual developer conference in San Jose, Calif. At last year’s show, Zuckerberg introduced an expanded version of Facebook’s live streaming service which had been promised to revolutionize how we communicate. In the year since, Live had generated iconic scenes of protest, but it was also used to broadcast a terrorist attack in Munich and at least one suicide. Hours before Zuckerberg’s appearance at the conference, police announced that a Cleveland man who had killed a stranger and posted a video on Facebook had shot himself after a manhunt.