Tech Won't Save Us - Don’t Fall for Mark Zuckerberg’s Rebrand w/ Karl Bode

Episode Date: October 3, 2024

Paris Marx is joined by Karl Bode to discuss how Mark Zuckerberg's makeover and the PR campaign that’s accompanied it shouldn’t distract from the ongoing harms of his company.Karl Bode is a freelance tech journalist and consumer rights reporter.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Eric Wickham. Transcripts are by Brigitte Pawliw-Fry.Also mentioned in this episode:Paris wrote about the problem with the “Zuckessance” for Disconnect.The New York Times published an article about the political evolution of Mark Zuckerberg.Facebook’s Free Basics was widely called out for being a form of digital colonialism.Joel Kaplan was a key figure within Facebook defending right-wing content from effective moderation.Neil Postman wrote the book Amusing Ourselves to Death in 1985.Support the show

All these executives have wide latitude to do pretty much whatever they'd like at this point, which is problematic when it's operating in sync with a journalism industry that's kind of been set on fire. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, made in partnership with The Nation magazine. I'm your host, Pyrus Martz. Before we get into this week's episode, I wanted to let you know about a special series we have starting next Monday. Data vampires will dig into the massive data centers being built around the world to power the AI boom and the other ambitions of these major tech companies. We'll dig into their climate and other environmental impacts, the people around the world who are fighting back against these things, and the harmful, threatening ideology that is powering this vision of the future that so many of these people in the tech industry are trying to foist on the rest of us.

It will provide an important commentary on the state of the tech industry and why we need to be pushing back against the world they're trying to create. Data Vampires is a four-part series with new episodes dropping every Monday of October, but our Patreon supporters who help us make this show will be able to get the full series on Monday so they can listen to it all at once. Then, in the coming months, they'll get full-length interviews with some of the experts I spoke to for this series to get greater depth on some of the issues I spoke to for this series to get greater depth on some of the issues that we were talking about. So watch for the first episode of Data Vampires on your feed next Monday, or go to patreon.com slash tech won't save us to support the show

and get not only the first episode, but the other three before anyone else. Now, this week, my guest is Carl Bode. Carl is a freelance tech journalist and consumer rights reporter. Now, I'm sure you've seen that Mark Zuckerberg has had something of a makeover. He looks quite different than he did a year ago, and that has reflected in the way that he's been covered and the way that people have been seeing him. I remember seeing some comments earlier this year

when he was Photoshopped with a beard of people saying that he actually looked pretty hot, which is weird to think of for somebody who we traditionally know of with this short haircut and pasty white skin, saying that, you know, he actually looked pretty hot, which is weird to think of for somebody who we traditionally know of with this short haircut and pasty white skin, not your traditional sex symbol or anything like that. But as a result, I've been kind of frustrated in seeing the way that Zuckerberg and his companies have been covered as all of the hatred and critical focus toward tech billionaires has really gone to Elon Musk more than anybody else.

But that doesn't mean that Mark Zuckerberg and Meta have stopped doing things that are really harmful to the public with the way that the social media platforms operate and the broader social consequences that come of them. So I decided to have Carl on the show to dig into that with me, to discuss this rebrand that Mark Zuckerberg

has been able to engage in and quite successfully do so. But also what we really know about his development over the years, what his company is really up to, and how even though he has been receiving more positive press coverage recently, how Meta is still engaged in promoting right wing politics and having a very harmful impact on the information ecosystem and the discourse that pervades society. It's all well and good to be criticizing Elon Musk. It's about time that the press has done so. But that doesn't mean that we should take our eye and our focus off of people like Mark Zuckerberg and these other very harmful companies in the tech industry just because people have finally decided that Elon Musk

is a bad guy. Mark Zuckerberg and many of these other people are bad guys too. And we need to make sure we don't forget that. So it was great to finally have Carl on like a full length show to dig into this with him. And I think that you're really going to enjoy our conversation. If you do make sure to leave a five star review on your podcast platform of choice, you can also share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And if you do want to support the work that goes into making Tech Won't Save Us every single week so I can keep having these critical conversations on the tech industry and the people who run it, you can join supporters like Sean from San Francisco and Sorka in Ireland by going to

patreon.com slash techwontsaveus where you can become a supporter as well. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Carl, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. Really excited to have you on the main show. You were on the series that we did about Elon Musk last year, but I haven't had you on for like a proper full length conversation. And so now is our time to do it. And so I'm really looking forward to it. And I think that we have a great topic to discuss. Of course, you know, last year, we were talking about Elon Musk and the coverage of him. Now, of course, there's another tech billionaire who, you know, I think we need to be talking about a little bit more and in a more critical light. I wonder, you know, generally, we'll start here. Mark Zuckerberg is someone who

doesn't have or at least didn't have the greatest reputation up until recently. What do you make of his evolution that we've seen over the past year and the way that people have been receiving it? You know, I think everybody is well within their rights to have a certain fashion epiphany. I don't want to make fun of sweatshirt choices too much. You know, everybody can style their hair, but he's made a concerted effort for years to be the face of all of his branding, you know, And I always felt bad for the marketing people at his companies with these unlimited budgets who have to sit there and deal with him, the guy who has a charisma of a damp walnut going out there and presenting these technologies when they could

do them in such a more sophisticated and interesting way. So I'm happy in that sense that he's done it, but his personality before had such a bland affect to it that this is such a dramatic and sharp evolution. It just feels almost as inauthentic as he was previously, to me anyway. I'm sure some people think it's wonderful that he wears giant sweatshirts emblazoned with strange Latin sayings and has suddenly developed a fro or whatever, but I don't think it's entirely authentic. And I think it mirrors his personality more broadly that he would think it is. Yeah. That's really interesting. Right. And I would agree with you. Like I, especially given how he looked before, I have no problem with him, like changing

how he looks now and trying to get a bit of a makeover. I mean, it's midlife crisis. Everybody goes through some of that stuff. You know, what do I do with my bald spots and receding hairlines? And you know what, you know, fashion transitions are fine. But this is a very powerful individual at the same time who has a ton of influence in the public discourse. So exactly. And that's the key there, right, is because, yes, there has been this style evolution and this kind of reframing of who Mark Zuckerberg is supposed to be. But along with that has also come,

it feels like this reassessment of who Mark Zuckerberg is as well because his fashion has changed, right? And it seems like because he seems more appealing, because he seems more personable than he used to a year ago, all of a sudden, all of these concerns that we used to have about meta don't

seem to be getting the attention that maybe they used to receive when it was clear that this was somebody who you probably shouldn't trust, who, you know, had motivations that were very different from your own. But because he seems more personal now, oh, well, he's a different kind of guy. He's really changed. But has he changed all that much? No, not at all. I think, you know, Trump and Elon Musk have shifted the asshole editorial window so far to the right that Zuck has benefited tremendously from that. And now he has a little bit of room to play, you know, as the playful MMA fan, fun executive who, you know, is building Hawaii bunkers and likes to do quirky and wild things, you know. But yeah, it's still the same company doing the same things,

lobbying for the same mindless deregulation, acquiring as many companies as it can. You know, as you saw, there was that New York Times article this week that talked about how he was shifting away from politics, right? And then if you read into the article, it actually disproves its own headline. It talks about how he's doing all this outreach to Republican policymakers, Republican PR and K Street lobbying firm guys. You know, he's only outreach to the Trump campaign, not the Harris campaign. I mean, he's clearly still the same person. You know, this is a performance. I think it's pretty clear to say. I mean, if he's having fun with the

performance, you know, great and power to him. But I still think it's a performance. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, a performance is fine, but when you're one of the wealthiest people in the world and have so much power and influence, then, you know, we need to be kind of chipping away at that performance and seeing what is on the other side of it. You know, you started to talk about what is happening now, but I want to kind of go back a bit first and maybe have us work through this trajectory a little bit. Can you give us an idea about before this transformation, how Muck Zuckerberg has really been seen over the past six or eight years? Well, look, to me, he lucked into his fortune. You know, he created a misogynist

app at Harvard that turned out to be popular. And it did require skill to take that and build it into a global sneaker advertising platform for boomers. I think, you know, you have to give them credit. That wasn't without its challenges to create such a giant company. But in the last eight to 10 years, the name of the game for that company has been to buy smaller competitors and crush them before they can be a lobby lawmakers to deregulate and avoid things like basic antitrust reform. Yeah, the reason that Facebook is what it is today. And the reason that, you know,, this company that holds all these other social media platforms and other ventures that they're involved in, is so successful had because any competitors that really tried to rise up against it, Mark Zuckerberg would buy them, right? Or would try to destroy them by adopting their features. And so that is the reason why it has been able to be so powerful and why Zuckerberg himself is able to be so wealthy and, you know, have the power to make decisions that

affect billions of people's lives. Yeah, exactly right. And the thing is that, you know, when journalists talk about him, they still suggest that he really does a lot of amazing things, you know, and you'll see him compare himself to Apple as if he's creating these amazing technologies. But the hardware he releases, you know, they bought Oculus, which does some interesting things. They're not really innovating that much on that. They like to release these augmented glasses every, you know, six months where a new prototype like today was revealed, which has like a 30-minute battery life, but nobody really likes it because it looks clunky and strange. I mean, the thing I think that happens is these

journalists and the people surrounding him aren't interested in tech so much as they're interested in unchecked wealth accumulation, which is not really about tech. You know, it's about grabbing as much money as possible and defanging any government regulator that tries to engage in antitrust reform or combat consolidated corporate power. So it's kind of this weird, surreal religion that's mostly to do with wealth. And, you know, people get very excited to be in his proximity simply because he has immense wealth, not because he's naturally innovative or creative. You see the same thing with Elon Musk. You're seeing now that he's not a particularly savvy super genius engineer. He never was. There was 15 years of unskeptical press coverage that kind of propped him up as that caricature. And only now that he's descended

into complete bigotry and conspiratorial madness or people like, oh, yeah, this guy isn't fabulous. You know, I don't think Zuck is as bad. I don't think he has that inherent base bigotry in him, but I don't think he's a good person or an ethical person. There's just endless examples of his company doing predatory, terrible things. No, I think that's a really important observation, right? And what you're talking about there about, you know, that desire to evade scrutiny and that focus on wealth over technology, I feel like you can see, especially through Zuckerberg, how that appeal to technology and to the future that technology is going to create is used to try to dismiss criticism and dismiss kind of regulatory efforts and things like that. And, you know, the example that stands out most prominently to me was after the Francis Haugen leaks a few years ago, when Facebook was

facing all of this scrutiny as a result of that, you know, he not only rebranded the company, but before this big, you know, kind of presentation that they did, where he announced that they were changing the name of the company and that they were going to focus on the metaverse and all this kind of stuff. There was like this short clip that appeared before the presentation that was pre-recorded where Zuckerberg basically like made this argument that there are some people that want to try to hold us back that don't believe in the future, but he's there for like, you know, the builders or the creators or whatever the word was that he used, you know, referring to like tech people who want to build these products that are supposedly going to change the world. And he's there for you and he's focused on you. So he's not listening to like the haters

because these tech engineers are trying to change the world. And I was like, this is such an interesting framing because you can see directly who he's speaking to and how he uses that justification to try to evade scrutiny and accountability for the harms that he's doing. Yeah, I saw that most pointedly, like when they were trying to elbow out companies in the Indian ad market, I don't know if you remember. So they launched something called Free Basics was like this free internet service that they tried to mandate, you know, it was basically like a bare bones version of the internet.

And the problem was that Facebook dictated all the content, all the ads, they had complete control. You know, and when activists in India got mad all the criticism was from radicals who were simply mad that he was trying to help people. You know, in organizations like Mozilla was like, if you really wanted to help those communities, you'd help them build fiber connections. You know, you deploy like real broadband, you would deploy this half-assed walled garden of a monstrosity that basically dictates you towards terrible Facebook curated sneaker ads 24 hours a day. So that's always been the case. And when they pivoted to meta, I found that particularly entertaining in the press because basically they were going through all those privacy scandals, Cambridge Analytica. People were realizing there was no real safeguards on

consumer data, despite a lot of pretense, just the massive amounts of data that's being hoovered and not really properly secured. And to distract the public and everybody else from it, they pivoted to meta to pretend, oh, you know, we're going to suddenly corner the augmented reality video game virtual spaces, and we're going to call ourselves meta, you know, and the press immediately without dropping a beat immediately, like obliged, started calling a meta started talking about how innovative this new company was. All the privacy concerns immediately evaporated into the mists. Everybody forgot about all of that. And we were inundated with stories about how innovative this company is despite not actually innovating. And that's consistent to today. You see it at every event they show where the products

are lackluster. Nobody wants a giant piece of crap sunglasses that has a 20 minute battery life with Facebook embedded. They don't want it. People don't want it. It's not innovating, really. I'm sure there's some technical iterations that are interesting and the engineers they're working are making progress on battery life and stuff like that. But I mean, the actual products are not sexy.

They're not interesting. And their core platform, Facebook itself, is so awash in AI scams and fraud. That's also ignored the fact that their core moneymaker is so immensely dysfunctional because it's such a huge scale that they've lost control over it globally. That just gets forgotten in most press coverage. That still wants to fixate on his innovation. I find that so interesting, right? Because the way I was initially thinking about it when I was like approaching this episode was kind of like, okay, we went through the Cambridge Analytica moment, you know, those revelations were in 2018, I think. And so then for a few years after that, you know, Facebook was really reviled, right? And Mark Zuckerberg personally was like the tech

billionaire that people hated most of all. And if you are thinking about like an evil tech billionaire, he was the guy who came to mind because he is, you know, hoovering up all your data on Facebook and serving you these ads and potentially messing with elections and all this kind of stuff. Right. And whether it was the Democratic Party or the Republicans, like, you know, he was persona non grata. Nobody liked him. You know, it received all this criticism. And even when Francis Haugen like made these leaks, even her message was very focused on like, this is a Facebook problem, not like a Silicon Valley problem, right? Everything had to be about Facebook. But then you move into the kind of meta and metaverse era. And I was thinking about that more as like, okay, then it becomes a bit more of like a joke. They're doing

this like silly thing. But I think you hit the nail on the head there, the way that you were describing it, where like, this is already an attempt at rebranding this company away from the scandals and the problems of the business. And they're still causing many of the harms that people were concerned with, you know, because of Cambridge Analytica and all these other issues that have happened with the Facebook platform for so long. But by focusing on meta, by focusing on the metaverse, it becomes something else. And even if we're joking about it and saying that the metaverse looks stupid and that it's not going to get anywhere, it still works for Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg because we're not talking as much about the social media platforms. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. And there's a certain underlying hubris too, because he really thought he could corner the entirety of the virtual spaces market. They thought they could

corner video gaming, augmented reality, virtual reality, you know, roll it onto one sexy platform that everybody uses. They thought they could just transfer the success they saw with Facebook into this virtual space, you know, and they failed terribly. They burned billions of billions of dollars on this effort. And then when, you know, when the whole house of cards collapsed, you know, what happened? He fired all 10,000 employees. He himself saw no accountability for, you know, complete missteps and strategic screw ups. You know. It was the employees that paid the price. And the press, again, when you read about the latest innovation this week, all of that stuff Facebook just floats over, you know, all of the terrible things, all of the, you know, failed promises, all of the layoffs as if they're not really contextually important. Yeah. Which is, you know, as we've discussed in the past, you know,

a general problem with a lot of tech coverage and not just about meta, unfortunately. But I find that interesting as well, right? So we went through this kind of metaverse moment where facebook seemed like kind of a joke even though it was spending all this money on the metaverse but now you know i even look back a year ago right when mark zuckerberg was doing the meta connect 2023 you know obviously they were talking about metaverse stuff they were talking more about ai because now ai is the next big thing. It's not crypto or the metaverse anymore. So they're making sure that they're getting in on that hype and, you know, making sure their share price is getting a boost because of it. And, you know, of course, they're totally embracing open source and all this kind of stuff for very good reasons, not just because it's better for market share and for them

to try to catch up on open AI. But even at that moment, like Mark Zuckerberg still had a short haircut. He was still like really pasty white. He didn't look wholly different from the way that we have seen him for many years. But then, starting a few months after that, we start to see this transformation, these pictures coming out of him shirtless after a fight with some MMA guys, you know, we start to see him having his curly hair, you know, starting to dress a bit more fashionably and then like very different from how we've ever seen him with his gold chains and his baggy clothes and all this kind of stuff. That really enters a new era. And in the way that you've talked about how the press and the coverage and the way that we looked at the metaverse was able to allow zuckerberg and facebook to get away from these problems in the past it feels like this moment

this transformation is not just a personal transformation of mark zuckerberg him hitting his 40s and you know his midlife crisis moment but also it was a very key kind of pr decision and you know the marketing department really took advantage of it to say that Mark Zuckerberg is somebody different. The company is something different. You know, things are totally changed. And we are not like he is not like the evil guy that we perceived him to be in the past. Yeah.

And it's helped by a journalism industry that's increasingly, you know, facing layoffs and, you know, restrictions and destroyed outlets that get closed after a year of functioning. And I think the goal of corporate power is to create kind of a journalistic simulacrum everywhere. You know, it looks like journalism. It talks a little bit about the gadgets, but it doesn't get too complicated. Look at Mark and his, you know, sexy haircut, 10 million clicks. Look at Mark, you know, he wants to fight with Elon Musk, 10 million clicks. A detailed story about what Zuckerberg is doing in developing nations, four people click on that. So we're not going to spend too much time. We're going to just constantly focus on clickbait, which I think is just utterly systemic, especially in tech journalism, where the

chasm between tech reality, what tech does, how it impacts people, and the hype, the VC hype, from the people who, again, are mostly interested in unchecked wealth accumulation. It's just gotten bigger and bigger and bigger. And, you know, I think they're starting to lean into that more. A quick short TikTok video of him, you know, with his shirt off doing some MA stuff is going to have way more impact than, you know, a deep dive journalistic piece into how he screwed up India's developing internet market, you know, so that's just where we are. And that's why I value folks like you and other independent journalists that are kind of stepping into that void that's been created by the New York Times and others

who are clearly averse to criticizing corporate power with any real zeal. Yeah. Well, and you too, man. But I think what you say there is so important, right? Because we have obviously been seeing for the past several decades this like slow erosion of journalism as the funding model that it was built on for decades, a century, yes, there's less resources for, you know, these hard hitting investigations and things like that. But on the flip side of that, a lot of the media that we consume, we often find through these very platforms, right? Through Facebook, through Twitter, something like that. And these platforms have algorithms that are designed to serve us certain content over other types of content. And increasingly, Musk has made changes to Twitter that downgrades posts with links in them. So

you're going to be less likely to see things like that. And of course, you know, we know he's made other changes to try to get rid of things that are too critical of him. And then, of course, on Facebook and on the other kind of Zuckerberg platforms, he's talking about how he wants to suppress things that are too political and he doesn't want to focus on political discourse. And that obviously affects news stories and in particular news stories that are going to have the kind of in-depth rigor that you're talking about over things that are just more flashy, look at this TikTok video, whatever. So that is a real change in the information ecosystem and how we access information as well, fueled by these platforms that these very powerful people control. Yeah. To be clear, the collapse of US journalism isn't just some happenstance. It's an active effort by corporate power and a lot of right-wing political actors to dismantle any sort of shared,

understood, informed consensus. They love this scattershot, superficial simulacrum that's become journalism now. They love that. It doesn't get too deep into any of their real issues. It doesn't critique them with any vigor. They love it. And it's very hard to watch the trajectory over 20 years. When I first started in tech journalism, there were all these little small independent outlets that really were interested in the nuts and bolts of the actual technology. What does it do? How is this impacting people? How do I make it work for me? And over time, these changes have just created this artifice. You saw it with Musk's announcement about Mars this last week. The press doesn't learn. They don't seem to learn from repeated criticism or failures. It's something I affectionately called CEO said a thing journalism, where the CEO makes just some

lavish statement and like 10,000 press outlets just parrot it completely unskeptically. They're all rushing to get those first click engagement links so they don't do any sort of depth. They could get on the phone with an academic or a scientist who has been studying this for 45 years, but that would take an additional hour or two to get an informed voice in the piece. And that's just not what we want. Yeah. Then they would miss the rush of clicks, right? Yeah. So, you know, that's just not done. So you have somebody like Musk who was like, if President Harris is elected, we'll never go to Mars. You know, and then the news wires are just filled with stories, including the lie in the headline, unchallenged and in the sub headline

with no criticism, no skepticism. It's incredible. And there's no financial incentive to change because these ad markets, you know, we based our entire journalism truth apparatus on ad engagement, which has just been at scale. It's just been positively fatal because, you know, what people click on, if you click on it, it's good. So that's what we get. We get a lot of stuff that you must like that a lot. A lot of people clicked on it. That must mean it's good. Mars and Musk promising we're going to go to Mars in a couple of months. That's more exciting than reading a detailed expose on his labor and environmental abuses.

Yeah. And that's part of the way that Elon Musk has become who he is, right? Because the press knows that he has long been a character that people will click on stories about, that people will want to read about, they'll buy magazines if he's on the cover. This is part of what has built him up into what he is today. And now it's just like in the past couple of years that people are saying, oh, he's a bad guy now and we should be talking about him differently and covering him differently. When it's like, well, he's changed a bit, but some of those things have been there for much longer and they were happy to ignore them. The signs were always there. The pedo cave thing was what, 2018? 17 even, I think.

There's endless examples where like, you can clearly see this is not a guy who understands what he's building or doing. This is a racist person, you know, but the fact he has wealth, just like Zuckerberg, he has immense wealth. So that immediately gives him a certain credibility that he didn't have to actually earn. And the press loves that stuff. It's wild. Yeah. You know, it's always shocking to see and disappointing as well, right? Because it's not just Musk, but Zuckerberg and these other billionaires who get away with so much of what they're doing and so much of the harm that they're causing, because, you know, on the one hand, there is the lack of resources to look into it effectively,

but also this desire to write about the things that are more exciting because they are going to get more engagement, right? I joked about the Musk thing, you know, where he was saying that we won't go to Mars if Kamala Harris becomes president to say, oh, look, this is his way to get out of all the lies he's told about going to Mars for decades now, right? Preemptively excusing himself for something he was never going to do. Yeah. And the press is so culpable. They don't learn. It's incredible. It's stunning to watch it. And it's not just Musk. It's not just Zuck. You know, you see this in every industry. The CEO says,

you know, earnings are up, or we had to fire those people because inflation. And the press is like, they had to fire those people because of inflation. And it's just all parroted. There's not a lot of rigor. There's not a lot of insight. I like what I'm seeing in independent media as a counter to that, but it's been tough. Even in the New York, like we talked about that profile piece about Zuck talking about how he got out of politics. The headline was like, Zuck's no longer interested in politics. And then you dig into the article, some of which was well reported and researched, and you find out that no, he's just hiding his more conservative leaning politics. You know, he's got most of his outreaches to Republican lobbyist strategists. He's reached

out to the Trump campaign twice to chat up, you thought it was super cool and rad that Trump got shot and raised his fist. It's clearly political. His company still clearly spends $10 to $20 million annually on lobbying for deregulation, which is a political act. There's a hubris that you can claim you're not political while being one of the most politically influential people in the country. Even in the outlets like the New York Times, who were ostensibly, I think they were trying to be funny with a headline that claimed he wasn't in politics. I'm not entirely sure, given their recent history. But even they kind of give a credibility to him that he didn't deserve. Yeah, absolutely. And I thought that that was a really interesting piece as well, right? Because I feel like, you know, we've been talking about his development as a CEO of the company and the way that he was perceived through that. But there is

also this political development that comes along with it, right? And, you know, like that piece in the New York Times was talking about, there was a time when he was, you know, more engaged philanthropically and was trying to do more of this Bill Gates thing where he was funding these various seemingly progressive initiatives, try to kind of raise his profile. But then this piece talks about how, you know, he became disillusioned with Washington when they basically started to try to hold him to account for what his platform has done. And he didn't like that very much. And he also didn't like that the workers at his philanthropic organizations and also at his company started pushing him to do better. Right. You know, especially as they saw the growing crises under the Trump administration and beyond that, that they wanted to try to respond to, especially in organizations that have positioned themselves as supposedly being more socially progressive as the tech industry has long done and as his philanthropic group has done. But now you see it's not that he's not involved in politics, but rather that he has, because he's one of the richest men in the world and has faced this kind of regulatory and kind of like political accountability backlash, he, you know, wants to be left alone. He doesn't want to be held to account. He doesn't want to be taxed. So the article says he considers himself a classical libertarian, you know, which I think as we can see with many of these tech people is actually, you know, very right-wing ideology of leave me alone. But like that stood out to me as well, right? Where certainly I'm

sure he was never like the most progressive person in the world, but it's clear that as his wealth has grown, as his annoyance with accountability has grown, his politics have also shifted to the right. And now he's trying as much as possible not to piss off the Republicans and, you know, to do things that are going to make them happy and not see him in a negative light. And I'm sure will also benefit him commercially and personally. Yeah, by apolitical, he means, you know, conservative. That's what he means. I mean, it's not subtle. You're suddenly into MMA. You like deregulation. You don't like antitrust reform. It's conservative

ideology. I mean, it is. It's center right ideology. And you can tell that he's really frustrated that a lot of his early philanthropic efforts didn't immediately buy him the acclaim he was looking for. Plus, when you're dealing with Republicans, they're never satisfied with absolutely anything. They're going to lambast you no matter what you do. You know, he actively made sure that they could continue to spread online election disinformation on the internet. And his reward was like a big, whiny antitrust investigation that they pretended to conduct. You know, there was that whole thing where Republicans basically were pretending that they pretended to conduct. You know, there was that whole thing

where Republicans basically were pretending that they suddenly cared about corporate power. You know, they're suddenly interested in engaging in antitrust reform. I don't know if you remember this. It was like a three-year news stretch where they were pretending they cared about this stuff. What they actually cared about was threatening these companies away from moderating race-baiting political propaganda on the internet. That's what they were doing. They didn't care about that. But the press again, jumped in and I saw endless articles, you know, suggesting that the Republican effort at antitrust reform was in good faith. Yeah, often focusing in particular on like Josh Hawley, who is one of the most

far right members of the Republican caucus, right? That whole segment of pseudo populist Republicans who have leveraged, you know, critiques of corporate power as a performance art measure. You know, they don't care about corporate power. They don't care about reining in anything. They care about making sure that nobody gets in their way. You know, that party's entire cornerstone of their modern success is online propaganda. And so, they successfully bullied Google, Facebook, and all the other companies into basically, you know, tucking their tails between their legs and giving up on even trying to do anything about it. And it was really super successful and the press genuinely helped them.

This is the fascinating thing, right? Because you're talking about how, like the article talks about what is going on now, this New York Times article that we're talking about. But you can go back to 2019, you know, the years after the Cambridge Analytica scandal. And even then, like, it's very clear that, you know, Meta hired Joel Kaplan, who was this Republican operative who was very involved with the party who worked in the George W. Bush administration. And he was like, I believe he was head of like global public policy or something at the time. And he was, you know, kind of like Zuckerberg's guy to make sure that

Republicans weren't going to get pissed off about moderation decisions. So he was standing in the way of banning Alex Jones from the platform, you know, notorious for info wars and saying that like Sandy Hook never happened or whatever, you know, and also stopping like the moderation of right wing content and right wing misinformation and disinformation and organizing and things like that on the platform. And so already then in like 2018-19, you're seeing the platform being shaped around the whims of the right-wing, the Republicans, because they are unleashing this disingenuous criticism of the platforms in the way that they've done with like traditional media to make liberal media go more and more to the right and cover more and more of these right-wing stories and framings. And now using that in the social media era to make the social media platforms do the exact same thing. And now what you see with Zuckerberg is that he's basically doing the same thing yet again, not learning from the fact that it was not enough for them in 2019 or whenever. So of course, he's going to keep doing it. But now it feels like he's even

more politically invested in this point of view, where I don't think he really minds that the platform is going to be more right wing and going to be pushing more of these things, because he himself seems to be more aligned with those perspectives than he would have been a few years ago. And he realized he's going to benefit more from putting out in his MMA performance superficially while he quietly does all of this stuff undercover. You know, he's realized that there is no point in being more public and open about anything. You know, the thing is, I think these corporations got really used to being lambasted by Republicans. And as Republicans became more and more authoritarian in this country and started to do things like strip away abortion rights, the left became more vocal and were suddenly increasingly and increasingly critical of their behaviors.

I think you're seeing the same thing in the press. The press was used for years. They were kowtowed by the Republicans who claimed that the press had a widespread liberal bias in the United States. That was always the narrative. So, outlets go way out of their way to pretend that they're very nice to Republicans as often as they can be. But in this election cycle, where you see a lot of widespread animosity at the terrible political journalism going on in the US, you're starting to see a much more vocal, broader coalition of people criticize not just corporations like Facebook, but traditional media outlets, and none of them are responding well. You see all of the mainstream journalism outlets responding with just the most indignant defensiveness, you know. We do a great job.

They're convinced. And you see Zuckerberg realizing he's just going to have to be more quiet, do all the same things, you know, lobby for the same self-serving things, but just be more quiet about it. The fact that it works, the fact that he can just do some MMA stuff and have a few short, cute TikTok videos and it mostly really does distract that same media from the real problems, you know, is a pretty damning critique of the culture at large. Well, I feel like this is the key comparison, right? Because on the one hand, you have Elon Musk, like who, you know, is obviously sharing a lot more far right stuff very publicly, has really embraced this extreme right-wing and its culture war issues

and political project and all this sort of stuff, right? There's no question about it. And has also remade the Twitter platform to be a platform that rewards right-wing posters and right-wing misinformation and all that sort of stuff, right? But then on the other hand, you have Zuckerberg, who is doing not dissimilar things to the Facebook platform. They are pulling back on moderation. They have unbanned Donald Trump. They're not doing as much moderation of right-wing content as they were in the past. He submitted this statement to one of the committees in Congress, basically saying that the Biden administration pressured Meta to moderate COVID-19 misinformation more aggressively than they would have otherwise, and he felt bad about that or whatever. So it's like he's playing into these narratives. He's,

you know, helping support this project in a very clear way. But because Elon Musk is much more outspoken and because the press has really turned on him in the past couple of years, he is treated as like one of the most evil people in the world, unless he makes some statement that's going to have great headlines to it. Then they'll repeat that kind of uncritically. But Zuckerberg, because he has had this rebranding, because he has changed the way that he looks, because he's not the most evil tech person in the world, all of a sudden when he takes these actions, they are not framed or treated nearly the same way as they are when Musk does something like that, because now Musk is the one who it's OK to hate. And Zuckerberg, you know, benefits from that, it seems. Yeah, it'll be interesting to see if Zuck's image reform effort is sustainable, given that their core business platform is full of boomers and young people don't really like meta properties very much. So they're, you know, like all these companies, they're doubling down on AI. And as I'm sure you've,

you know, I've heard you cover several times. There's a bubble there coming. Automation isn't going anywhere. There's going to be, you know, advancements and interesting stuff in automation, but this greed fueled hype bubble they've created, that's so massive. It is going to pop. And when that happens, I'm not sure how many cutesy TikTok videos are going to help make people calm about it. I see trouble on the horizon and I don't think any number of image stylists are going to help. What do you make of that comparison though that we see increasingly, right? Where, okay, the press has turned on Elon Musk in a very clear way since the acquisition of Twitter in particular, and,

you know, kind of progressing through the whole process of will he buy it, won't he buy it. Meanwhile, you know, as you were saying, Zuckerberg has been through this process where Metaverse started to get the attention off of the more negative parts of that business and what they're doing on the social media platforms. And now this rebranding and this kind of personal makeover has helped to propel that even further. Like, what rebranding and this kind of personal makeover has helped to propel that even further. Like, what do you make of this distinction between how Musk is covered now and how Zuckerberg is covered? As long as you're not, you know, explicitly going online and railing against Haitian immigrants and

the Jewish population in an extremely ugly and overt way, you have pretty free reign to do whatever you want as an executive. You know, again, Musk and Trump are so ugly, so racist, so vile in their rhetoric that anything below that is now normative, you know? So, all these executives have wide latitude to do pretty much whatever they'd like at this point, which is problematic when it's operating in sync with a journalism industry that's kind of been set on fire. You know, I've lost track in the past five years of the number of talented editors and writers and colleagues that I've seen shit canned and forced out of the industry. And all of this is happening collectively. And I don't think it heads anywhere particularly good. Yeah, no, I definitely agree

with that. And especially when we look at Elon Musk and like what he has been up to recently, like, you know, he's never been a particular positive or good dude in my view. Obviously, you know, some people's view is different on that. But even if you do look at the past two years, like the shift in what he supports and what he advocates is so extreme and so dire, like that not only says something about him, but also about the tech industry more widely, where a lot of these billionaires and executives are right at his coattails, are right behind him. And maybe they're not as outspoken, but some of them are in embracing this really extreme right wing, even fascist politics, you know, this opposition to democracy, this desire to, you know, really overthrow and remake the American government to promote their power. Like this is a dangerous moment, it seems. Yeah, it is. It would be nice if the AI implosion that's coming could come along with a little bit more introspective at the same time. You know, in the early 2000s, Silicon Valley,

a lot of the engineers dominated the scene. And these were people, you know, they had their own naive notions of certain things. You know, they didn't plan out, but they genuinely cared about tech. They cared about how tech impacted people. Through 2010 and on, you know, bankers and VC folks came in. And they saw, again, tech not as a useful towards any particular goal outside of wealth accumulation. And that dominated not only the tech sector, but the tech press coverage of the sector. And it would be nice if we could see at the end of one of these hype cycle implosions, a little bit more self-awareness that we need to

get back to like stone mortar foundational concepts. You know, what does the tech do? Is it good? It would be nice to see some kind of revelation that we've let the hype get just preposterous. Everything feels like a caricature. Like you've covered several times on your show that most of the tech evolution seem very highly iterative. It feels like they haven't really come up with a lot of new fabulous ideas. And after crypto failed and NFTs failed and smartphone innovations stalled out, they see AI as the next big savior. And when it's not the next big savior, what happens? Do we learn anything from this next implosion? Do we learn anything? Because we haven't learned anything from the last several.

WeWork and Elizabeth Holmes and Elon Musk, it's just a chain of these people promising, you know, nonsense and gibberish, you know, and at some point we have to learn something. And I'm excited when that day comes. Yeah. At what point do we realize how much of this is really like built on fraud at the end of the day and a bunch of false promises and stop, you know, repeating those and believing that they're going to come true and allowing them to be used to justify eroding regulations, eroding labor rights and all these sorts of things that make most of us, the vast majority of us like worse off. Yeah. I also think people are really tired of these giant room social media companies where everybody and your aunt, from your punk rock fan college roommate to your aunt, gather in a large

social space and pretend that we all get along. I think as you've covered, we're going to probably see a shift back to more siloed. I don't like the term silo necessarily, but smaller, more easily moderatable communities where people can get together, which has good and bad effects. But I think you're going to see a shift away from the kind of things Metaverse wants to build. These all-encompassing, this-is-for-everybody platforms, that's clearly come with some problems. And I'd like to see a reversion towards smaller, more useful communities again, which I think you're starting to see with fracturing in the social media space with Blue problems and i'd like to see a reversion towards smaller more useful communities again which i think you're starting to see with like fracturing in the social media space with

blue sky and you know other apps i like some of the trajectories i'm seeing on those fronts yeah i definitely welcome that i feel like the biggest like impediment to that taking hold the dueling like uh incentives that exist there because like there are a lot of people who have built these like massive followings with millions of followers on these platforms that do have like everyone crowded on them and if you start to break that up and have these smaller communities that like destroys what they have built their whole like identity and business and career on and maybe something like that is not as replicable on like you you know, a Blue Sky or a Mastodon as it would have been on a Twitter

or a Facebook or something, right? And like, those are interesting questions to contend with that I feel like there are sometimes discussions of, but when you talk about like the creator economy or whatever, actually getting to like, what does it look like if we don't have these massive platforms that everybody uses anymore? Like, what does that mean for it?

And it feels like there's not really a desire to have that discussion yet. But it does seem like, you know, there's inklings of the possibility of moving in that direction. It's coming. There's a lot of change on the wind. The next 10 years are going to be very interesting to watch. And not just because you're actually seeing a return to some interest in antitrust reform, some interest in breaking up these giant lumbering monstrosities that don't care about anything, but just unchecked growth. Growth for growth's sake

is the mantra everywhere you look in every industry in America. I cover telecom for a living, so I grew up learning how this worked, these monopolies that just dominate sectors and then bribe government on the state and federal level to just turn the other cheek. And it feels like we're finally seeing a shift in some of that stuff. Now it's going to take a while and it's not the most impressive array of antitrust reform going on right now, but it does feel like there's a sea change finally coming in. And that's going to be bad news for the Mark Zuckerberg of the world and the Elon Musk's of the world. Yeah, I certainly hope so. I just wish we could speed it up, right? Like, yeah, it would be nice. Yeah. It's going to be interesting to watch either way. There's a lot of change coming. Yeah, no, I definitely agree.

And not even all on the antitrust front, right? There are certainly many other ways that the power of these companies are being reined in, or at least we're trying to rein them in and trying to change the way that they operate. And hopefully, like, you know, we can see some progress in that in the next few years to start to try to chip away at this. Because as we've been discussing, and as you know, I've discussed with many other people, and you've been writing about, like, the harms of these companies do seem to be becoming much more apparent, right? At the same time as the benefits that maybe we used to receive from these companies seem to be receding as they further cut back on staff or, you know, add more ads into things and erode these things that we used to enjoy at the same time as

like this digital dystopia we seem to live in seems to be getting worse and worse. Yeah. And you can really sense a broad fatigue from people, the engagement economy and the way that authoritarianism exploited it, you know, and just the endless parade of people who are just contrarian trolls and make a million dollars being assholes on the internet. People are tired. I'm tired. You know, the last 10 years has fatigued me greatly. So I'm happy to see whatever comes next. And I would hope some of it, including journalism, gets away from, you know from ad engagement as the central pillar of everything. A little more honest discourse would be great. Cultivating smaller audiences that actually care about detailed subject matter, a return to some of that stuff, that's probably naive on my part. 80s to now in the United States is a very clear line. If you look back at academics like Neil Postman, they saw this trajectory coming before the internet was even a twinkle. This obsession with engagement at scale is all pervasive in Facebook and Twitter and whatever disrupts that,

I will embrace. It'll come with its own caveats and problems, but anything that shifts us back a little bit towards real community and real conversations, I'm going to applaud. Yeah. It's always fascinating to look back at those like earlier identifications of the problem, I guess, if you can put it that way, right? Because we seem to think that so much of this is like novel to the internet era or just has to do with these major tech companies. But often we could have, and we did see these problems coming even before it was clear how the internet was going to change a lot of things. Because often they're rooted in much deeper, more fundamental issues, which is not to give the tech platforms a pass,

but to say that just addressing the tech platforms doesn't address the underlying structural issues that allowed that to happen as well. Media and telecom are every bit as terrible as Silicon Valley could ever hope to be. These telecom monopolies that I've covered for most of my adult life are every bit as terrible as anything Facebook could ever do. And one of the greatest things that's happened in this era is that the tech companies have become so insufferably annoying on some of their behaviors that like companies like AT&T don't even get

press coverage anymore. Like they could go demolish a small town's, you know, competition, broadband competition with a swing of their fist and nobody would even cover it in the press because that's not what gets the clicks. So these are systemic issues. Media consolidation as well, you know, letting a handful of right-wing, very rich white billionaires consolidate all of the journalism industry into a handful of companies was a very bad decision. And you can see the impact of that everywhere, including the coverage of bigger, similarly annoying tech companies. So, yeah, these are systemic. And I'm heartened by the fact that I'm seeing antitrust reform. I'm heartened by the fact that I'm seeing an uptick in independently owned media and smaller communities. So I do have faith that there is, you know, some interesting changes afoot,

even though we have a lot of work to do. Do you think that there is a way, you know, obviously you've been talking about these changes that we're seeing, you know, obviously when I look at the media landscape, whether it's in the United States or far too many other countries, like, you know, it looks very similar to what you've described, where these major media organizations have been consolidated, whether it's, you know, traditional like print media, whether it's in broadcasting cable news, whether it's in radio stations, a lot of that has become controlled by like, right wing billionaires, right-wing interests. And they use that to spread these narratives that are very harmful, that promote, you know, the shift to the right in our political systems that make us focus on these culture war issues and identifying immigrants as, you know, the problem and all this kind of stuff, instead of looking at like the real fundamental issues in our societies and the growing poverty and housing crises and what's really underlying that and the capital interests that are often very much underlying that. And then of course, you know, beside that you have this like huge internet based right wing media ecosystem that has sprouted up that's, you know,

been funded by all these right wing interests. And sure, there's some like independent media, there's some left wing media, but like it doesn't have nearly the same degree of like scale or support. Do you see any hope? Or do you think that there's any ways that we can try to encourage this move toward, you know, a greater critical focus in tech journalism, but also like a healthier journalism industry in general that is paying attention to these critical issues, you know, instead of the issues that we're seeing in journalism right now? There is a market demand there. You know, people are tired of bullshit. They're tired of being lied to. They're tired of like shallow superficial coverage that doesn't tell them what they can see

with their own eyes. You know, all of these outlets are built on the idea of engagement. So to maximize their potential audience, they can't get too pointed with the truth. You know, even the New York Times, even these major outlets, they can't be too critical of corporate power. They can't be too honest about the impact of authoritarianism because that potentially impacts their access to sources. It pisses off ownership that tends to be right wing billionaires half the time. It makes it harder to get people to read. So anything that maximizes engagement, again, has been the church of gospel across everything. You see it with your own audience. There's people who really crave being told the truth about things in a blunt, non-bullshit sort of way, which is a niche I've tried to fill for 20 years.

I don't have an agenda outside of wanting to see people live happy, functional lives and have corporate power checked a little bit so that we all can get along a little bit better. But I think there's a real appetite for more honest journalism. With the direct and newsletter stuff and these independently owned outlets, I see it starting to get filled. It's just starting. You know, you just see places like 404 Media or the places I write, like Tector. You know, these places are really filling a niche for people that want the straight poop, so to speak.

And I think that's going to keep happening. The problem is whether that kind of stuff scales with sociopathic billionaire lawsuits. We're out financed, we're outgunned journalists that are trying to do good work. And yet you see outlets like ProPublica and stuff survive anyway. So I think there's a path there, but it's a very fractured landscape. I don't see a place where the New York Times or Politico suddenly realizes that their coverage is kind of feckless and normalizes authoritarianism. I don't see any great revelation there. I see a greater segment of audiences shifting to newsletter authors or smaller independent media, which it would be nice if the government had

developed any time in the last 30 years, a coherent media policy strategy, because they really haven't. They haven't fought consolidation. I mean, if we can get some antitrust regulators, again, I hate to keep harping that one concept. If we can get people in government that realize you need to fight media consolidation, if you can get people in government that realize you need to fund academia and journalism with the same amount of vigor that you spend on every stupid tech fad that comes along. We can change some things. I think it's possible. I think it requires a lot of coordination and work, but I see some promising, you know, sprouts at the moment. Yeah, that makes a lot

of sense. And that kind of stuff is essential to allow those promising sprouts to really scale in the way that we would need them to, right? I think just to like close off our conversation, you know, we started by talking about Mark Zuckerberg and what has been happening with him. And I feel like we should go back to that as we close. Like we have obviously seen this transformation in Zuckerberg over the past year, you know, if we can put it lightly, but, you know, it's, it's kind of like an exterior transformation on a guy who is still a really bad guy whose company is doing a lot of very harmful things in the world. I wonder, you know, when you look ahead at what's coming for Mark Zuckerberg and what's coming for Meta, do you see any real roadblocks for them or, you know, difficulties

as they have had this, you know, I think easier year than they probably would have if Elon Musk wasn't capturing all of the negative attention in the tech press. What do you see coming for Zuckerberg and for Meta? Like I said before, they have a very captive audience of limited boomers who are going to die off and not be replaced with an equal contingent of younger audiences, which is why they're in such a mad rush to pretend that they're huge innovators in the AI or special glasses or virtual reality spaces. But I don't think it's going to work. It's clearly not going to work. Somebody is going to innovate in the AR space and the VR space, but I would pretty much guarantee it probably won't be Apple, probably won't be Facebook. It'll be somebody smaller. And if we can have regulators that allow smaller companies to flourish and let

those innovators develop their products and excite the masses, then he's going to have a hard time because Zuckerberg's entire mythology was built on the fact he's an innovator, which I think people are starting to see through. It's built on the back of capture and kill, predatory anti-competitive tactics, which regulators have clearly started to see through. To succeed and continue on their trajectory requires a massive pivot towards genuine, interesting innovation. And I'm just not sure they're capable. And there's only so many MMA TikTok videos you could put out that are going to mask over that. Yeah. I think especially when you look at Zuckerberg and at Meta, on the one hand, it doesn't seem like they're really coming up with much that's new, right? They're playing on the hits, you know, the things that are popular.

They're still relying on their legacy digital ads business. They're facing antitrust and competition investigations in the United States and I'm sure in Europe as well. So there are difficulties coming down the pike for them. And I think it's quite clear that I think it's fair to say that Zuckerberg has had an easy year or an easier year than he would have otherwise. But the issues with Facebook have not gone away and the other platforms that the company runs. And I think that they are going to come back to bite Zuckerberg, to bite the executive team in the future. And even his embrace of right-wing politics, I don't think is going to get easier for him in the future.

I would just like to see a bit more of that scrutiny and a bit more of the recognition of those issues come into some of this more recent coverage and attention that he's been receiving so that we're not just focused on, you know, how he looks a bit different and, you know, seems to be more personable now because he's still doing very evil things that deserve a lot more attention than they're receiving. Yeah, and independent. And however much he wants to get rid of traditional journalism, there is a lot of good journalism out there still. And they're going to continue to point out his failures and his problems and his empty promises, whether he likes it or not. And there's only so much fabricated distraction that can draw people's attention away from it. So with a captive audience that's slowly dying and, you know, a changing media landscape that's getting more critical of tech finally, after, the financial fallout from overinvesting in half-cooked artificial intelligence, is as half as problematic as'll be trying to make it more difficult for them, you and I both. Carl, it was really great to finally have you on the show, you know, properly

for a full length discussion. Thanks so much for taking the time. I appreciate it. Thank you. I really appreciate being here. Carl Bodie is a freelance tech journalist and consumer rights reporter. Tech Won't Save Us is made in partnership with The Nation magazine and is hosted by me, Paris Marks. Production is by Eric Wickham and transcripts are by Bridget Palou-Fry. Tech Won't Save Us relies on the support of listeners like you to keep providing critical perspectives on the tech industry. You can join hundreds of other supporters by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and making a pledge of your own. Thanks for listening and make sure to come back next week. Thank you.