January 11, 2025

"His Name Was Robert Paulson!"

On convenience, hypocrisy and doing the right thing.

Almost simultaneously with my sitting down to start writing this essay, Axios and others, published reports that Meta had cancelled all DEI programs1 and initiatives across the entire company. Of course Meta is not the first or the only company to do so, the rollback is global - for example National Retail Federation in their annual conference this year have zero sessions on DEI topics, four years ago, there were at least 26 sessions.

Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement2 earlier3 this week about changes at Meta should be the last reminder that oligarchy and fascism are intimately intertwined and we must never forget that. It’s gotten to the point where the New York Times, yes I know I can’t believe it I am typing this myself, published Meta goes MAGA Mode earlier today. The bloody New York Times!!!

Zuckerberg announced he was getting rid of Meta's fact-checking program. Fact-checking itself is important but Meta's program was very bad. It was always just a PR operation. When it stopped serving that purpose, it was killed. Zuckerberg said that "fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created." Zuckerberg didn't mention that Meta hand-selected the fact-checkers it worked with. It decided to partner with low-quality far-right websites like The Daily Caller. Some of Meta's partners were better. But, over the years, Meta ensured its fact-checking program was ineffective.

IT BANNED ALL FACT CHECKS OF POLITICIANS at one point!!

Meta's investment in fact-checking was very small and, as a result, fact-checks were only conducted on a tiny fraction of the content posted to its platforms. Popular Information estimated that, overall, Meta devoted 0.003% of its 2019 revenue to fact-checking4. But wait, there is more. Meta also overruled its own factcheckers and removed a fact-check from a viral article with false information about climate change.

We need to be keenly aware that huge changes across Meta’s platforms are coming soon. The recent elections "feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech... We're going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with community notes, similar to X, starting in the U.S," Zuckerberg stated, asserting that "the fact-checkers have just been too politically biased, and have destroyed more trust than they've created, especially in the U.S." That’s ostensibly why he is moving the Trust and Safety teams from California to Texas5, as Meta will also "get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse," Zuckerberg says. Under Meta’s quietly updated hateful conduct policy to allow users to refer to "women as household objects or property," among other offensive language like being able to say that "immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of shit;" "gays are freaks who have mental problems,” or "I'm a proud racist and Black people are more violent than whites6."

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Again, none of this is new. NYT, I can’t believe this is second time I am giving them credit in a single essay, is reporting that Zuckerberg overhauled Meta’s hate speech policy in November after conversations with Marc Andreessen about progressives allegedly policing speech. Internally at Meta:

• trans and nonbinary themes stripped from Messenger

• enforcement policy now allows for the denial of trans people's existence

• tampons removed from men's restrooms

In his announcement, Zuckerberg described this as "mainstream political discourse.7"

Moreover, in his Rogan interview, Zuckerberg is basically dumping years of anger and pent up frustrations at the media, the government, etc. He is allowing himself to say it publicly because he feels empowered. As Jamelle Bouie writes, “every single one of these guys is an incel loser who thought that being rich would make them popular and well-liked and when it didn't happen they lost their minds even further.8”

I’ve read this online and wholeheartedly agree with: “I’m not the first to make this point but the idea Facebook needs to make a pivot now to anti wokeness is like saying Billy Joel needs to pivot away from other instruments and towards the piano.”

While some think that Mark Zuckerberg is a surrender monkey, Jared Yates Sexton writes:

Zuckerberg and the other tech oligarchs aren’t bending the knee to Trump and Musk. All these “moderation programs” and “statements of principles” were just PR campaigns meant to hide their antidemocratic actions. They’re not scared, they’re overjoyed.

We’ve been sold a whole host of lies. The oligarchs were never troubled by Trump. They read the room and saw they needed to pretend to oppose authoritarianism when they desired it all along. It’s time to recognize class solidarity at the oligarch level. They’re on the same side. Always have been.

It’s a convenient story to believe all these oligarchs giving money to Trump are scared, but the truth is they recognize he’s their puppet and they have the opportunity to stop pretending to care about any of this stuff and get to the real business of further consolidating wealth and power. The tech oligarchs have worked hand in hand with dictators around the world, providing tools for oppression and profiting off slave labor.

This is who they are.

The only reason they pretended otherwise is because it was beneficial to them. Now that it’s not needed, there’s no need to pretend. We are watching the emergence of a new stage of capitalism: oligarchical authoritarianism. Trump is a puppet under their control and they’re looking for full power over representative government, culture, legal systems, and the economy.

You’ll notice wealth class controlled platforms and publications treating this like Zuckerberg and other oligarchs are scared and acting against their interests, which is beneficial to them and communicates that there’s no need for reform, just a need to get past Trump. Trump is a mascot, a useful idiot. Sure, he thinks he intimidated Zuckerberg and that he’s in control. That’s how they want it.

Trump is a symptom, not the disease.

The problem is capitalism and this new evolved oligarchical state that’s coming into full being. The past eight years have been marked by corporations and institutions profiting off widespread anger toward Trump and authoritarianism. Now they don’t see a need. This is what they want and all the statements and programs were beneficial lies.

This, right now, is who they actually are.

Once again, you’re in a class war.

Politicians won’t save you. Corporations won’t save you. The media won’t save you.

They’re all on the same side. Find the people you trust, build coalitions in your communities and workplaces. Only through solidarity will we be able to fight back. It’s hard to recognize you’ve been manipulated. It was a pleasing fantasy that corporations and institutions and politicians were working for you. But that simply ain’t true. They’re loyal to their class and its goals.

Recalibrate. Organize. Prepare. Fight. Stop sitting on the sidelines.

He is, of course, absolutely right. It’s not like Facebook did not contribute to genocide in Myanmar ( and why it will not be held accountable). None of these from Zuckerberg and Meta (or really any of techno-fascists) should be surprising. Michael Harriot, as always is profoundly correct - there is a technofascist hub in Austin, Texas and it is all connected to Joe Rogan.

The information landscape in the world and especially the United States has reached a crisis point. Billionaires are using their control of critical mass platforms to normalize and strengthen the fascist authoritarian control. Social media platforms already consumed by AI garbage are copying the ideas of other social media platforms that too are in the process of enshittification9 and the process of being consumed by AI garbage. Social media companies are disposing of all the fig leaves they used to avoid regulation now that they've got an easily manipulated narcissistic baby in charge.

The problem with community notes is it just creates another layer of social media that can be gamed or barraged by communities and individuals with their own biases. It boggles the mind to think that Zuckerberg watched what Elon Musk has done to Twitter, and thought: "Yeah, we should do that to Meta products (Facebook, Instagram, Threads, etc...).”

All of this in the age of global decline in literacy.

This is a key defining attribute of the far right. They loathe historians, actual history, facts, archives, libraries and books, even the actual truth, but they value the immense rhetorical power that history can possess for the public. Thus, they pervert history, lie and obfuscate. Mike Johnson's fake "Jefferson prayer" was not an honest mistake, but a deliberate provocation. Fake history is a linchpin weapon of Christian nationalists.

Facebook is currently censoring 404 Media stories about Facebook's censorship. Such a meta headline about Meta.

The leaders of major social media platforms — X, Facebook, Instagram, Threads — are operating as extensions of the Trump administration. We need Bluesky, but also independent accountability journalism. What is significantly worse is that if we look where the teens are in the online landscape we can see why we are experiencing the onslaught of fascism and authoritarianism10:

Meanwhile, SCOTUS is performing a perfect interpretation of rope-a-dope by ostensibly making the correct decisions in regard to Trump’s appeal11 in the election interference case12 and now the TikTok ban (and you should see some of the oral arguments used in front of the Justices).

As many have pointed out, it is NOT a free speech issue, at all, this is strictly a data access, collection, ownership, etc. issue13. Why do you think you now have to enter your birthday in order to log into X14?

A few days ago I’ve wondered if I am becoming a luddite due to the proliferation of AI and the abhorrent negative impact it is having across climate change15, knowledge and intellectual property theft, etc. In that essay I mentioned that Meta is creating AI users to “boost engagement.”

Days after Meta had to kill its AI-generated profiles due to backlash, some Instagram users are now being shown AI-generated images of themselves that are being automatically created by Instagram and put in their feeds. In other words, Meta AI is using your selfies to turn them into ads targeting you. We are not ready for all of the ways generative AI allows bad actors to do evil shit.

Don’t share anything personal on any of Meta’s platforms.

Nothing.

Same with X.

No engagement equals no value. Hurt them where it matters.

Zuckerberg said that he started building social media to "give people a voice" and that their roots lie in free expression but let’s not forget that he actually started building social media to rate whether women were hot or not. Pure incel behavior16.

Instagram blocked teens from searching LGBTQ-related content for months. Posts with LGBTQ+ hashtags were hidden under Meta's “sensitive content” policy which restricts "sexually suggestive content", Meta said they are fixing this “error” after reached out for comment. Don’t hold your breath.

What is the most enraging aspect of all this? People like Thiel, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk, etc. are untouchable for life; they're men whose only material consideration is their legacy of moral leadership. James Fallows writes: “I agree with this. One of my former employers talked about the concept of "F- You!" money. Enough that you could do or say whatever you wanted, and not put up with intolerable or morally compromising situations. The likes of Bezos, Musk, Thiel, Zuck have 1000x that much money. And yet...”

The top 1% of Americans have taken $50 trillion (that’s with a bloody T) from the rest 90%.

And yet they only seem to care about earning backslaps from their “bros,” like 14-year old boys17. Aparna Nair is spot on writing about Zuckerberg, “He is such a stereotype, a caricature almost, of the white man privileged tech bro--seething with resentment that his very special genius does not make him universally beloved, and determined, like a brat, to make the world feel pain for that.”

Meanwhile, governments are beginning to crack down on the use of virtual private networks while from the US to Italy, UK and Pakistan, female politicians are increasingly becoming victims of AI-generated deepfake pornography, in a troubling trend that researchers say threatens women's participation in public life. This isn't just a tech problem, it's a direct assault on women and democracy itself.

There is a superb article in the Atlantic about how Hitler destroyed the political system of the Weimar Republic between January and March of 1933. Adam Keiper writes, “An underappreciated aspect of the Nazi rise is how quickly German *society* fell into line. In early March 1933, a majority of German voters voted against the Nazis. By late spring, pretty much the whole country backed them. How did that happen?

I like this concise explanation for how Germany fell into line behind the Nazis, written by a journalist in 1939 and quoted in Richard J. Evans's The Coming of the Third Reich.

This process would look different in different times and places, of course, and a lot of what happened in German culture in the spring of 1933 is entirely unique to that setting. But some of the shifts in mindset necessary to walk away from democracy would likely be seen in other cases, too.” Of course, you don’t always turn into Nazi Germany. You turn into Russia, or Hungary, or other creaky and corrupt authoritarian states where everything is a scam and everyone is hustling to please the Dear Leader. Mind you, Putin’s Russia is a perfect amalgamation of Nazi Germany, Soviet bureaucracy, and Tsarist Russian imperialism.

Shockingly, Robert Reich writes that there is little the US can do to constrain Elon Musk. Bullshit. There's plenty that the US can still do over the next ten days to not just constrain Musk, et al. but to fully stop this project of turning the entire world into the Fourth Reich18.

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The problem is that the Biden admin and the Dem party have no desire to do anything but capitulate... The Democrats are fighting fascism through a bold new strategy some are calling "appeasement19.” They have essentially became Vichy20 Democrats and I will write about this soon.

We should have seen the Vichy turn much earlier, when we saw that no one who is part of the global fascist junta is never held accountable21 for anything - from Trump, to Netanyahu, to Elon to you name it…

No wonder there are intriguing parallels between OpenAI and Enron, as told by one of Enron's investment bankers.

It’s not just OpenAI that admits "It would be impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials" and feels the right to steal intellectual property. Apparently, Zuckerberg personally gave the OK to train Meta’s AI, Llama, of off copyrighted works, where Meta engineers wrote scripts to remove copyright info and used illegal torrents to train GAI models.

We are witnessing in real time as the far right is building yet another propaganda campaign built on top of a horrendous tragedy with Trump, Musk, etc. spreading outright lies about LA fires and the mainstream media is already sanewashing and normalizing it.

I reported on how we are seeing a completely new existential threat to the environment from AI:

• The announced OpenAI’s o3, based on the underlying math, each task consumed approximately 1,785 kWh of energy—about the same amount of electricity an average U.S. household uses in two months.

• Elon Musk is almost done building a lithium refinery that will need up to 8 million gallons of water per day22. And it's twenty miles outside Corpus Christi, which is so dry the local water company distributes shower timers at high school football games.

• Oklahoma might become the first state to ban renewable energy. Its becoming increasingly likely. As investments from the inflation reduction act flow into the red states, we're seeing backlash. Republicans are disliking renewables *more* than before.

If that was not bad enough, a new study finds that frequent use of AI tools encourages offloading of cognitive tasks23 and reduces critical thinking. Higher AI usage correlated with lower critical thinking skills, especially in younger users. While AI can enhance efficiency in certain areas, over-reliance on these tools risks diminishing essential skills like problem-solving and analytical reasoning. We may be fostering a generation with weaker critical thinking abilities, leaving them more susceptible to manipulation in a world where mis- and dis- information is rapidly proliferating and GAI only increasing the overall amount of garbage information.

Recently, Harvard and Google AI mapped one cubic millimeter of a human brain. It took up 1.4 petabytes of storage just in pictures of the specimen. So the entire brain would take ~ 1.6 zettabytes of storage, cost $50 billion, and require 140 acres. It would be the largest data center on the planet. One human brain. I am certain that Elon, Thiel, Zuck24, etc. are already building the said data centers to ensure their own incredibly questionable immortality.

The tech bros & MAGA have many things in common, but they diverge in key ways: the tech bros are NOT loyal to the USA. They are only loyal to themselves25.

What can we do? Well, the most obvious option is to run for a public office. Organize. Engage. Prepare. Fight. Run for something, will help you.

Not everyone has the ability, means, courage, and privilege to run for a public office. For years I’ve joked about it myself, which in retrospect, I highly regret. The joking, rather than running is the regret, just to be crystal clear. Recently, I have seriously considered doing it. After all, if we want decency and humanity to win over fascism, regardless of the type and form of it, we should actively participate and what is a better way that to perform service for the public in the name of those principles? Yet, I still haven’t. I don’t have the courage to face the challenge nor do I have the mental and psychological strength. I know I can do it, but I am not willing to pay the toll it would take on my family.

This is the crux of it all though. Convenience and safety are fine choices when we have the privilege to enjoy them, especially when we are perfectly aware of the cost. The cost to other people, the cost to environment, the cost to our future. Not everyone is even capable to fully divest themselves from using the tools used to proliferate hatred by the new technofascist oligarchy. A lot of people who own small, local businesses rely on Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Twitter, TikTok, etc. to actually survive as a business as the only way to reach potential customers. Similarly, the same is true for many artists, musicians, writers, etc.

It really is an act of privilege to delete your social media type accounts. It is also an act of courage. It’s choosing to do the right things, when you know that your personal footprint on those platforms will have little to no impact on all of those people who are virtually enslaved to these platforms. I have used Facebook only since 2017 and it was mostly to share pictures, videos, updates of family happenings with parents and relatives, and to vet political and otherwise frustrations. I’ve created an Insta account (well technically three separate ones as two were to promote these blogs) when I was working on my mental health and needed to see videos of cute animals and amazing places, etc.

I’ve quit Twitter err sorry X about two months ago and am slowly deleting my footprint there. I want to delete all content and all data that I have stored on Meta accounts and then I will delete them. Similarly, I’ll be moving away from Substack to Beehive. I do not want to continue being a hypocrite by preaching to take a stand against fascism and yet continuing to enjoy the convenience these platforms provide for me.

If you can make the same choice, take the same step26, here’s how to delete Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.

If you know how else to move forward, what steps to make, please share!

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We all are in this together.

Never give up.