1. Why I’m not on Threads these days
Mark Zuckerberg does not give a rats ass about the effects that his platforms have on people, and he never has.
By now, you will have probably heard quite a lot about Mark Zuckerberg’s pivot to Trumpist supporter and enabler, so I’m not going to spend too much time on that. But it’s worth remembering that Facebook has never been a company which was at the forefront of ethical behaviour. Ten years ago, it tampered with the emotional well-being of over 600,000 of its users, without any kind of consent, to see how people reacted to various stimuli.
Is it really surprising that he now wants his platform to become a beacon for free hate speech?
What irks me is that otherwise smart commentators who cannot understand that these are not rational business decisions, or based on principles like the commitment to free speech. They are the decisions of emotionally stunted men – and it’s always men – who want to control the world. This is not about business, it’s about power.
2. A study in pink
The pink pages of the Financial Times have seen some smart writing over the years. Peter Thiel’s weird little essay is not smart. It’s redolent of nothing more or less than a long-winded Reddit post created by a 14-year-old who has been stewing in a broth of Ayn Rand’s terrible writing for a couple of years. It’s chock-full of the kind of conspiracy theories that anyone has fallen deep into the well of the Twittersphere will have been exposed to, all of which fall into the broad category of “bullshit”. But, in the hands of a billionaire and promoted on the pages of one of the most respected newspapers in the world, that becomes “dangerous bullshit”.
Thankfully, the comments on the piece show that the FT’s subscribers are equally sceptical of Thiel’s membership of the reality-based community. I think my favourite might be the comment which describes the piece as “it’s as if someone trained an AI model purely on Russell Brand’s ‘My Booky Wook’ and the Unabomber manifesto.”
3. Capturing the castle
The tech billionaire class that Thiel is a member of are, and should be, figures of ridicule. But it’s important to remember, they have also just seized control of the government of the most powerful nation of the world. Those of us not in the United States are basically trying to keep our heads down and hope that the inevitable chaos (think Liz Truss, but 10x it) doesn’t spread to the rest of the world.
But what is it all about? What’s the end game? What do they want? Anil Dash rightly points out that DOGE – the “Department of Government Efficiency” which is being run by Elon Musk and aims to gut the Federal Government – is really about capturing procurement, making sure that Musk et al. get as many fat government contracts as possible. And Anil is right – billionaires love rigging the game in their favour. As Thiel noted in one of his other “genius mode” essays, “competition is for losers”.
But I think there is a little more to it. I suspect that they really do believe that gutting the federal government, removing protections, ending efforts to increase diversity and all the rest of it is a morally good outcome. They have bought all this, hook, line and sinker. They have, in other words, been radicalised. And because this is America, where protections were already thin and socialised anything is regarded as akin to communism, I think they can inflict far more pain on the US than Truss did on the UK before they get reeled in.
4. Better late than never
John Battelle is a techno optimist. He has long argued that technology empowers individuals and communities, allowing people to communicate, collaborate, and innovate on a scale never before possible. He believes that the internet has created a more open and connected world that fosters creativity and entrepreneurship.
But he’s also, especially, been more guarded. While Battelle is optimistic, he has voiced serious concerns about privacy and data ownership. He was an early critic of Big Tech's control over user data, particularly Google and Facebook. And he has called for greater transparency and regulation around how companies use personal data.
I think he might now be veering towards something that’s more realistic. As he puts it:
“I grew up and made my career in a tech industry that cast itself as the outsider, as a force for good, as eager to reshape and reform society into something better. We were going to revolutionize education, healthcare, entertainment, and yes, even finance. Our companies had lofty mission statements and big goals to be ‘bicycles for the mind’ and ‘organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible.’ But lately, it feels like Tech has become just the latest incarnation of the same old game of influence peddling, plutocracy, and establishmentarianism. I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised by that, but … damn if it isn’t a bit depressing.”
Bicycles for the mind became Lime bikes you rent by the hour. Making the world’s information universally accessible was done “for a price”. The truth is this is what capitalism does: it turns dirt into gold, and then gold into shit.
5. The secret ingredient is crime
As if one attempt to be the uber villain of the planet wasn’t enough, Mark Zuckerberg goes for a second shot. It turns out that Meta’s Llama LLM model was deliberately and knowingly trained on a well-known dataset of pirated books. And Zuck personally gave the OK for this.
Oh, and just to make things more interesting: the company acquired the data via torrent, and shared the pirated content further by seeding it. This is the kind of thing which gets individual users jailed.
What’s the likelihood that Zuck will do time? Well, zero, of course. Because while individuals who achieve this scale of piracy largely do it for either personal use or a sense that information should be freely available to all, this was done for profit – and we all know that profit has the magical property of removing any moral qualms.
6. Shouting at tractors
Erin Kissane is obviously super smart, and you should be following everything she writes, but this essay on the reasons why large social media platforms are just so bad at governing themselves is a particularly good and insightful read. As she puts it, “Yes, X is currently controlled by a bizarrely gibbering billionaire with obvious symptoms of late-stage Mad King disease. Yes, Facebook and Instagram—which control vastly more territory than X—are controlled by a feckless, Tulip-craze-mainlining billionaire with a long history of grudgingly up-regulating governance efforts when under public or governmental pressure and then immediately axing them when the spotlight moves on.”
But actually, it wouldn’t matter much if sane people were in charge. It is part of the nature of the beast that large social platforms make bad things happen. “A tractor structurally can't spare a thought for the lives of the field-mice; shouting at the tractor when it destroys their nests is a category error.”
Corporations are not governments. Not only aren’t they, they can’t be – and we would not like it if they were. Expecting them to act like anything except rapacious machines designed to extract money from your pocket, avoid competition, and form monopolies to maximise profit, is expecting that tractor to start caring around the field mouse. It ain’t happening, my friends.
Side note: I am incredibly glad Erin also mentions the ludicrous “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” written by John Perry Barlow, one of the silliest documents I have ever read. Were we ever really that naive? Yes, yes we were. Perhaps we should have read a little more Marx.
And there is still a streak of optimistic naivety in the older internet generation. It’s notable that the EFF initial response to Meta’s announcement felt more like a half-cheer than anything else. The concluding sentence -- “We applaud Meta’s efforts to try to fix its over-censorship problem but will watch closely to make sure it is a good-faith effort and rolled out fairly and not merely a political manoeuvre to accommodate the upcoming U.S. administration change” – sounded just incredibly naive to my perhaps-jaded British ears. It didn’t take long for the penny to drop, thankfully, but that penny should have dropped considerably sooner.
7. Matt’s latest tantrum
We had a whole couple of weeks without any WordPress drama, but that couldn’t last. And now Matt’s back with some news: Automattic (the company) is cutting the number of resources it devotes to WordPress (the product) to just 45 hours per week, the equivalent of one full-time developer.
Matt – and make no mistake, this is Mullenweg’s soapbox – is, of course, claiming this is just playing fair, and making a level playing field with WP Engine. Once the legal “attacks” have stopped, he says, things will return to normal.
This is the equivalent of taking your ball home because no one will acknowledge you as the captain of the team. It’s childish, silly, and makes it obvious that WordPress is not a platform anyone should be devoting large amounts of time or resources to while Matt is at the helm. And that’s leaving aside the fact that Matt’s tantrums have demonstrated that open-source software is not really a defence against dictators, benevolent or otherwise.
Never have I been more glad that I moved to Ghost.
8. Meanwhile, in Greenland
It turns out that the “Trump supporters” who were posing enthusiastically in MAGA hats in Greenland were, in fact, homeless people who had been brought in and promised free food. What made me laugh, though, was Sean Hannity asking “How did they get a MAGA hat in Greenland?” to which the correct answer is, of course, using fabric from China like every other MAGA product.
9. Oldies but goodies
Every few years, I reread Danny O’Brien’s account of the start of Wired UK because (1) it’s such a good read, and (2) it reminds me quite how good a writer Danny is. You should read it too. And for those of you who know: Haddock omertà still applies.
10. RIP
It seems fit to end by raising a glass to Martin Banks, one of the founding fathers of UK tech journalism, who has passed away. I must, at some point, have at least shared a room with Martin, but as I was mostly in the world of the Mac rather than Windows or enterprise stuff, I don’t think we ever conversed much. However, everyone that I know who worked with him notes how loved he was, and how encouraging to young journalists. He wrote to the end, and what better way to go is there than that?