Beme is Shutting Down, But Our Work Is Just Starting

Why I’m proud we’re joining CNN

Today we announced that Beme has been acquired by CNN. Below is my personal perspective on our future.

At my age in 1993, I definitely should have been asleep at 11pm. The sound of my dad, always a night-owl, making chocolate cake must have woken me up. I walked into the living room and was transfixed by an odd scene on TV: A white, twelve-story building spewed smoke. Tanks hovered in the foreground. The word “LIVE” in the corner and the subdued voiceover made clear this event was of grave if uncertain significance. That night, I was handed a piece of warm cake and a lifelong obsession with global news.

I only hazily understood it at the time, but this was the 1993 constitutional crisis in a newly democratic Russia. Boris Yeltsin had ordered his country’s own parliament building shelled, ending a coup attempt. Instead of hearing about it the next day in the paper or nightly news as would have been the norm, I watched it live, in real-time, 8,000 miles away. I was watching CNN.

CNN changed the world at the end of the twentieth century, using the then-emerging technologies of cable television and satellite video feeds to add depth, breadth, and speed to our understanding of it.

In starting Beme, our goals were just as lofty: to reshape social media into the vehicle for candid, unfiltered perspectives that we always felt it should be. We wanted to create more empathy in the world by making the perspective of each of its inhabitants immediately and compellingly accessible through video.

Social media is supposed to connect across geographies and beliefs, to be the tool for building a less cruel and more creative world. It is this idealism for what technology can achieve that built Beme. Recent days have made it crushingly obvious that the social media we have built so far — at Beme or elsewhere — has not yet achieved this ideal.

Beme as a single product failed. Beme as a vision for the kind of technology and media that must be built is just getting started.

Like us, CNN believes that technology should be used to share necessary information, to promote human understanding, not to simply manipulate attention. Truth matters. Hearing voices and seeing perspectives far from your own matters. These principles, on which Beme was built, will form the core of our mission as a part of CNN.