Roundup: Don't buy the "Zuckessance"

Sometimes it feels like the media only has room for one evil tech guy at a time. For years, Elon Musk was their darling. It didn’t matter that he was union busting, overseeing racist and sexist work environments, pushing weird reproductive politics, and much more besides — they were just the quirks of a future-building tech mogul. It was only after he started destroying their favorite social media platform that many journalists really turned on him. But that appears to have had the effect of giving other tech villains the opportunity to remake themselves, and no one’s done it better than Mark Zuckerberg.

In the latter half of the 2010s, there were few tech CEOs more evil in the public’s mind than the weirdly robotic Facebook founder. Zuckerberg was rightfully demonized for the many ways his platforms were harming society, from enabling election manipulation to outright genocide. The company was allowing right-wing extremists to operate with little moderation, was putting few resources into non-English moderation in particular, and there were growing questions about the impacts of its algorithms on people’s mental health. When Frances Haugen leaked a bunch of internal documents, Zuckerberg responded by renaming the whole company Meta and launching a plan to build the metaverse that’s so far cost $45 billion. You’d think someone like that would be discredited for a long time, but you’d be wrong.

Since Musk took over Twitter, Zuckerberg has been reinventing himself. He got into mixed martial arts, started working out, began wearing gold chains and baggy t-shirts, and grew out his hair so it’s no longer a weird Caesar cut. Importantly, he also positioned himself in opposition to Musk: he launched a direct competitor to Twitter called Threads and the two occasionally talk about physically fighting one another. That’s been enough for a lot of media and tech watchers to warm to Zuckerberg and overlook his harmful actions in the way they used to do for Musk. The implication is that if Musk is bad, then Zuckerberg is at least better by comparison — if not just a pretty good guy these days.

People were swooning a few months ago when someone altered an image of Zuckerberg to give him a beard. He can depend on softball interviews with publications like The Verge or having Bloomberg’s Emily Chang talk to him about the “Zuckessance” before wake surfing on his boat on Lake Tahoe. There’s rarely a deep interrogation of the implications of Zuckerberg’s goal to make Meta’s AI tools a dominant platform, the continued problems on its social media platforms from AI-generated content to right-wing organizing, what it really means for the company to suppress “political” content, its decision to block news in Canada and Australia, with threats to do it elsewhere, or even his continued colonizer status on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. When those reports do happen today, they don’t affect Zuckerberg’s reputation in the way they used to.

We’ve gone from the days of #DeleteFacebook campaigns to people seriously making the argument that leaving Twitter/X because of Elon Musk’s ongoing promotion of right-wing political movements to instead post on Mark Zuckerberg’s Threads makes you morally superior. It’s a perverse state of affairs that shows too many people need to remember that Zuckerberg is still a tech villain.

In the roundup this week, there are some important pieces about how tech companies are enabling Israel’s genocide in Gaza, what Microsoft is doing to hedge its bet on OpenAI, and how the US sold the Soviet Union a bunch of faulty tech in the 1980s. Plus, the usual labor updates and other news you might have missed this week.

On Tech Won’t Save Us, I spoke to Rachel Gilmore and Luke LeBrun about how executives at Shopify are allowing merchants selling hateful goods and Nazi memorabilia to use their services despite being in breach of the Acceptable Use Policy and one co-founded a far-right media website in Canada. I also spoke to The Real News about tech billionaires’ involvement in the US presidential election, and Techtopia in Denmark about self-driving cars and tech criticism.

Have a great week!

— Paris