This week Mark Zuckerberg announced a new video-streaming service, Facebook Live, the next step in his company’s mission to control every aspect of our digital experience. Photograph by Andrew Harrer / Bloomberg / Getty

It's often difficult inside a closed system to see the boundaries that surround you. Sometimes you think you can see the whole of the universe. This is how closed systems like it: their inhabitants looking out through a distorted curvature that gives shape to space that is not there. This is how Facebook, Apple, and other technology platforms hope to trap and keep you. Sated, oblivious, and well fed. But human beings are not good with closed systems, and so, eventually, we see the fences, and then we run our hands along them to feel for shape and structure. We study how the fence weaves into and out of the trees. And one day, when the sun has gone down and the guards are asleep, we catapult over to the other side, and see all the things we couldn't see before.

I wrote several years ago that Facebook's dream is not to be your favorite destination on the Internet; its desire is to be the Internet. It would prefer that when you connect in the digital realm—an increasingly all-encompassing expanse—you do it within Facebook, which now includes Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus VR (in addition to its robust news feed, its Messenger chat app, its Moments photo-sharing platform, its video-player platform . . . well, you get the idea). This isn’t exactly a new phenomenon; for years technology companies have waged platform battles, hoping to lock in users with hardware, software, or services that only function inside a proprietary venue. Closed systems make your patronage simpler and more consistent, and it is through a closed system that a company can most readily own and control your data, which is then converted to revenue.

Facebook has been particularly focussed on three areas lately: publishers’ content (that is, all the stuff that makes Facebook worth reading), video (the thing every creator on the Internet must do right now), and the youth market (all the people Facebook will need tomorrow). In all three places, the company has been playing a haphazard game of catch-up, trying to concoct a mixture of services, partnerships, acquisitions, and outright steamrolling that will insure ownership and control of these three crucial axes.

On Wednesday it launched a service called Facebook Live, which simultaneously takes aim at the trifecta. The new feature—essentially a riff on Twitter’s Periscope and Snapchat’s native video sharing—hopes to keep you plugged in to its news feed with live, streaming video not only from the people you follow and regularly connect with but from news organizations and celebrities around the world. Mark Zuckerberg announced the feature using Live itself, and, though a glitch prevented him from showing off the service, he did talk, and he was quite enthusiastic. “We built this big technology platform so we can go and support whatever the most personal and emotional and raw and visceral ways people want to communicate are as time goes on,” Zuckerberg told BuzzFeed News.

Once you see it, it looks awfully familiar. In fact, parts of it seem nearly identical to Snapchat. Filters that allow you to alter the color and quality of the image, and drawing tools that allow you to paint over top of your video (a feature Facebook says is on the way), will make users of that quickly growing social app feel right at home—and that’s not an accident. Recent studies show that the generation following behind Millennials (or, more accurately, people born between the early eighties and the early aughts) are becoming less interested in Facebook. Remember, if Facebook wants to be the Internet, it has to be the Internet for the next age, too.

The company has taken a similar brute-force approach in its attempt at dominating and controlling the mechanism through which we read our news. Obviously, the service has tremendous value as a layer of distribution for news outlets and media producers, including The New Yorker. But, increasingly, Facebook has moved to control more and more of the actual experience of reading and viewing news with tools like Instant Articles and an aggressive approach to leveraging its video platform for publishers. It used to just link readers to publishers’ Web sites. Now the company is focussed on having publishers present their stories wholly inside of Facebook. That work seems to be doubled in its rollout of Live, as the social network is literally paying major media organizations like the Times, BuzzFeed, Huffington Post, Condé Nast (The _New Yorker’s _parent company), and others to use the new service. That combination makes for an ethical gray area when you consider some of the excited news coverage of the service. The blurred line between a company’s news apparatus and its business-side relationship with Facebook is a wonderful example of how Facebook’s tactics in the market can have negative results for users.

If anything, Live further exposes Facebook’s active, seemingly unquenchable thirst for more ways to become the middleman in your digital interactions. It literally wants you to broadcast your life on the platform. But, as noted earlier, being caged doesn’t come that naturally to humans. In fact, the mass proliferation of new social networks, apps, and experiences over the past decade shows our innate hunger for variety and surprise. New experiences like Snapchat might never have happened inside Facebook, because in many ways it’s a reaction to Facebook itself. The rawness and ephemeral nature of Snapchat’s “disappearing” content is the locus of its appeal: it allows you to share, connect, interact, and then move on. The youth market isn’t embracing the app because of its inclusion in the same social network their parents use; they’re embracing it because it eschews the very foundation upon which Zuckerberg and company have built their empire—permanence.

Compare Facebook’s interlocking approach with one of Silicon Valley’s most long-lived and dominant success stories: Google. Both companies have been wildly successful at upending our notions of how to navigate the world, but Google’s core product—search—is expressly designed to do the opposite of what Facebook attempts. Search, by its very nature, is an action that leads you away from the platform, into other experiences and onto other platforms. Even though Google has built up a relatively sophisticated infrastructure of services around its search product (which plenty of critics argue has created another kind of closed loop), it has never abandoned the foundational element of its business: openness.

Live is a fine enough product, and it's likely that many Facebook customers will find themselves tuning in from time to time, or even broadcasting themselves. But others, I suspect, will find the three-hundred-and-sixty-degree, everything-all-the-time nature of Facebook’s ecosystem increasingly tiring and predictable—a homogenous experience that begs someone to start exploring to the edges of the forest. An experience that leads to the discovery of a fence.

If history is any guide, people are omnivorous and fickle. Facebook might want to take a stab at a platform play that isn’t just about keeping the ground it has stamped out but that encourages inclusion and exploration. It may discover that its real strength isn’t in just what it keeps for itself but in what it’s able to give up.