Among Silicon Valley’s moguls, the spotlight has been hogged by Elon Musk. His ever more enthusiastic appearances at Donald Trump rallies and his vocal support for Right-wing causes on his platform X come as the Valley trades in its Democrat-aligned stances from the Obama years for a more subversive and conservative-coded “tech bro” politics. Less visible in this election cycle is Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, now the world’s third richest man, who seems to be gingerly embracing the new zeitgeist. But is that all he is doing?
The Washington Post has called it the “bro-ification” of Zuckerberg, drawing attention to his new UFC fighter’s physique and curly Gen Z-like hairstyle. In keeping with his claim to be “done with politics”, most of his recent antics have been largely apolitical. But make no mistake: without openly declaring support for the Republican candidate, he has dropped hints as to which side of the party divide Meta is trending. He has praised Trump as a “badass” after his near-brush with martyrdom, expressed regret at toeing the Biden Administration’s line on content moderation, and, recently, started to ban accounts that track the private jets of billionaires like himself, the former president, and Musk. Gone is the soft-spoken computer nerd with close-cropped hair as depicted in 2010’s The Social Network, replaced with a noticeably more flamboyant incarnation.
This repositioning only makes sense for Meta, as it does for Silicon Valley as a whole. The last decade’s liberal orthodoxy saw social media as a benign tool to foster democracy and progressive values at home and abroad, in the context of events such as the 2008 “Facebook” election and popular uprisings across the Middle East. This was a time when Zuckerberg and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey were routinely feted at receptions in Obama’s White House. Then came the epoch-shattering election of 2016 in which Facebook played a most conspicuous part. What followed was a scandal-tainted half-decade in which Zuckerberg’s firm was blamed for enabling misinformation, conspiracy theories, and foreign interference. After being hauled before Congress to answer for these, Meta’s founder saw the writing on the wall: his (and the tech world’s) alliance with the reigning establishment was effectively over.
A 2020 email from Zuckerberg’s mentor and Facebook angel investor, Peter Thiel, counselled him to consider a deeper cultural break with the system: no longer should he be “a Baby Boomer construct of how a well-behaved Millennial is supposed to act”. The advice made sense. After all, the current climate now favours alignment between the Right’s embrace of free speech and laissez-faire online — sharing a common enemy in the establishment’s drive to combat disinformation (seen by many as scarcely-veiled censorship).
But both instances of Zuckerberg’s political signalling — whether towards Hope-and-Change Democrats once upon a time or MAGA Republicans today — arguably had less to do with ideological principles and more to do with raw interests: or what would allow the company to realise its aim of gaining mastery over “the future of human communications”. So far, this narrative may allow Zuckerberg (and the other tech billionaires) to claim that it’s the other side that’s changed and that he, in fact, has remained true to the liberatory promise and idealism of Facebook’s early days. When he borrows from Caesar to say Aut Zuck Aut Nihil or “All Zuck or All Nothing”, he seems to be uttering a liberationist promise, telling aspiring founders: follow Zuck and you, too, can be a Caesar!
However, Meta’s recent policy decisions to use personal data to feed algorithms and train generative AI point to the real heart of the tech giant’s project. Meta’s advertising speaks of self-expression even as the resulting output ruthlessly invalidates those very things. Automating the production of creative work and instrumentalising users’ most intimate digital footprints, while causing untold damage on people’s mental health — that doesn’t seem to be all in the name of fostering genuine connections. Children who grew up on Facebook and Instagram now report having stunted personal development. A federal child safety case against Meta and Senate hearings earlier this year in which Zuckerberg apologised to parents (without having to change much of his corporate policy) are cases in point.
Unlike the partisan Russia-gate charges, Zuckerberg’s deleterious impact in this case cuts across political lines, alienating Americans from each other regardless of party — all while Meta turns in handsome profits.
If Silicon Valley does succeed in hijacking the Republican Party as it did the Democrats a decade ago, and if a future GOP administration manages to give the moguls their desired regulatory regime, will it really represent a moment of liberation for mankind? The tech discourse has tipped over from mere libertarianism toward something far more grandiose and sinister, namely accelerationism, predicting (and encouraging) the agglomeration of all intelligence into a post-human singularity.
The race to see who will bring about — and therefore wield the power of — such a singularity is what motivates the moguls. And Zuckerberg, though less vocal in articulating this messianic ambition than say Musk or Open AI’s Sam Altman, is no exception. It tracks with the worldview of the Valley’s intellectual guru Thiel, who endorses monopoly as the natural, healthy endpoint of all competition, which he says “is for losers”. In light of this, Zuckerberg’s identification with Caesar takes on a different meaning. It becomes less about individual emancipation and more about individual submission to a single fount of technological power and authority. That’s the thing about Caesars (and monopolies), there can only really be one.
There is, therefore, something more significant at stake than whether Republicans or Democrats get to benefit from the largesse of Silicon Valley. Its continuing domination over society heralds nothing less than a reckoning over the role and agency of human beings in a world of ceaseless technological saturation and collectivisation.
Conscientious voices across the Right and Left have raised many compelling arguments against the broader social ills caused by Meta’s platforms. Rather than taking a side in the reductive and overly partisan fight between free speech maximalists and anti-disinformation crusaders, opposition to Zuckerberg’s empire-building could instead rally around a more capacious standard, namely the common defence of our humanity against the brazen accelerationist schemes imposed by Meta and the other tech titans. Just as the American revolutionaries of 1776 likened George III to Caesar (“is not Britain to America what Caesar was to Rome”), so too should today’s citizenry see Zuckerberg and his fellow moguls as the agents of a great dehumanising tyranny. Against this would-be Caesar of the algorithm, their own refrain could be: Aut Homo Aut Nihil or “All Human or All Nothing”.
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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/