Ridiculous Opinions #272
It’s that time of year again! That time of year when billionaires think that you are too beholden to their wares that they will practically crap in your face, secure in the knowledge that they can do anything they want and you will do nothing about it. This has happened many times over, and many times over with the particular person in question today that has caused me to write this newsletter.
This morning, I deleted my Instagram account.
Part of the reason is that Mark Zuckerberg has been in the news quite a bit this week because of his deletion of fact checkers, which will allow disinformation to proliferate online. But it goes deeper than that:
Folks are mostly missing the forest for the trees re: the recent Meta announcement. Specifically, the focus on the move from fact checking to community notes. There two different changes that are a much bigger deal that have received less focus. 🧵 1/11
— Dave Willner (@dwillner.bsky.social) 2025-01-09T20:29:00.648Z
I really, really don't want to do this, but let's do a bit (just a LITTLE BIT) of fact checking about what Zuck said on the Joe Rogan podcast, because this is something I not only followed closely, but also spent time talking to the actual people at Meta who dealt with this which WAS NOT ZUCK.
— Mike Masnick (@mmasnick.bsky.social) 2025-01-11T00:28:35.656Z
Those are a couple of detailed threads on why Zuckerberg is a turd. And I’ll save the most snarky one for the last (though it is completely true):
The replies are all wrong. They’re mocking Mark for not creating anything of note, but success isn’t a precondition for criticism. Instead they should mock Mark for being a weak willed loser coward without principles who had to hire someone to teach him to dress like popular middle schoolers in 1997 [contains quote post or other embedded content]
— Mike Rugnetta (@mikerugnetta.com) 2025-01-11T00:38:38.447Z
You can read more about his latest idiocy here.
I deleted what I considered to be a thriving Facebook account in 2010 because of Zuckerberg (I had been on since 2007, I think). His company made a decision to make all accounts public. I deleted and moved elsewhere.
I’ve never been a huge fan of Instagram, as I feel it is a place that has created a distorted sense of reality online. It’s a place where rich people post to tell you what wonderful lives they’re leading and poor people go to try to make their own lives seem extraordinary. It’s a place where businesses advertise themselves and people soften their looks in order to make themselves more beautiful instead of more human.
In 2019, I started posting my Maurice comics on Instagram. That’s where it all started for Maurice. In the time since, I have been posting on other platforms, but I was never fully comfortable with posting on Instagram, because of the endless “connections” between accounts (“post this on Facebook! post this on Threads!”), the endless advertising to get me to pay to promote my work, and the endless desire of them to get me to “pivot to video” or “promote reels” or “share your story”. It seemed like a company that was perpetually out to increase market share and profit, rather than a company that wanted to retain me as a user.
But deleting my Instagram (just as deleting my Twitter) was a sad affair. I enjoyed reading the posts of some of the people I followed. I stayed in touch with a few people only through Instagram. There were some funny videos on there and some very moving ones. My family shared videos together on there. Deleting my account has affected that.
But Instagram (and Meta as a whole) doesn’t care about that. They care only about profit; users be damned.
In my opinion, the best companies value their users. They treat them like they are special and they cater towards user interests. The best companies work to keep their users happy because if the do, those users will keep coming back and giving them their money. After all, I was posting my creative work on all of these platforms for FREE and they were making money off of me posting my work there. It’s an ugly symbiosis, but it works if the user is happy.
Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have never thought of their customers in that way. Perhaps because of their own, nerd-like mental illness, they think of their customers not as people, but as a product. And that product, according to them, is disposable. You are a number, not a human being.
The problem with capitalism nowadays is the notion that, by law, all companies must increase profits no matter what! It’s the problem with going public as a company, because once you do that, you’re beholden to the shareholders. And increasingly, those shareholders don’t seem to exist. The shareholders should be people that have a say in what a company does. But today, those shareholders are institutional investors who are beholden to the bottom line and could not care less about how a business is run in comparison to how much profit it makes.
None of this should be news to you, but capitalism is a disease. It is a cancer on society that will do anything to stay alive, even if it eats its host and assures its own demise. I don’t have a problem with a business making a profit. But I do have a problem with a business making endless profits at the cost of its users.
Were I to fix things, I would cap profits. Once a company becomes public, their profits would be capped at, say, 10%, and anything above that must be put back into the company. That would increase wages for workers, promote research and development, and perhaps make their products better. But hey, if I say something like that, it makes me a socialist according to the I-must-have-mine-and-I-must-have-yours-as-well types of folks that typically increase the gap between the rich and the poor in today’s society and that seem hellbent on feeding off of the poor. God forbid we devote our extra money to helping others. No, in this day and age, we will watch California burn while we sit back and say, Those movie stars deserve it and while we plop billionaires who serve their own interests into God-tiers of humanity, celebrating their (unearned) genius.
Right now, I make more money than I have ever made in my life. And what has been surprising to me on this journey is the notion that the more money I make, the more money I make! There’s a weird threshold where once I’ve reached a certain amount of money, it gets easier and easier to make even more. That’s how unfair this world is. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. But even on top of all of that, I know very well that I am not even close to being in the 1% and that I am only a heartbeat away from disaster, financially, because there are no social safety nets in a capitalist society.
But I digress…
The truth of the matter is that, in this world, you can only try your best to be a good person at the end of the day. You should try to do the right things and live a good life, being kind to others and trying to make choices that are not to the detriment of those around you. Me deleting Instagram isn’t going to make one iota of a difference in the world. But I know that, in the end, I am doing the right thing by not supporting such horrible human beings in either Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk (or Donald Trump, for that matter). I dropped Facebook; I dropped Twitter; I dropped Substack; and now I’m dropping Instagram and Threads.
I’m pretty happy with that.
