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For whatever reason, writing has been hard for me in the new year. There’s a bunch of distressing stuff going on in the world, obviously, and it’s the dead of winter which is usually a time of the year when I am naturally a bit bummed out. Beyond that, sometimes writing feels easy for me, the most natural thing in the world. At others, it’s like pulling teeth, and it can be frustrating when I’m really cruisin’ for a few months and then my brain falls out of my head. I have quarter- or half-written a bunch of pieces this month, sometimes in my notes app or on paper or even in my head, and I haven’t been able to finish any of them. Oh, and I’m working on a new podcast with my friend Yannick, which you’ll hear more about soon. In the meantime, I have resolved to Blog. Here’s something about Mark Zuckerberg, who I have heard is your best friend.

There are, occasionally, things that happen in this world that are true Media Events in the sense of the title of this blog: pieces of content, whatever they might be, that speak to larger stuff swirling around in the tangible and/or intangible world. Mark Zuckerberg appearing on Joe Rogan a couple of weeks ago was one of them (I am not linking to it because you do not actually want to watch it). This is not the most “timely” thing happening at this point — that would likely be something Trump-related, and if I really wanted “mad traffic” I could jam out a few hundred words on his new executive order restoring classical architecture to federal buildings as a move almost self-parodically in line with historical fascist obsessions. But as Zuck takes his place in the Roman senate that is the Trumpian tech overlord shadow government, it’s worth thinking about the evolution of his public image.

In The Social Network, Jesse Eisenberg plays Mark Zuckerberg as a petty, conniving little shit who moves forward and upward simply because he can — the worst kind of ambition. He is, in some ways, a man devoid of personality, leeching what he can from those around him, especially Justin Timberlake’s Sean Parker, who, perhaps due to being played by Timberlake, can’t help but ooze charisma and make dumb platitudes like “You know what’s cool? A billion dollars” sound like a Tony Robbins or Young Jeezy line. In this sense, the Zuckerberg character is not dissimilar from Donald Trump in Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice or Timothee Chalamet’s Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown, each of whom gloms onto a well-placed mentor, absorbs their persona, and then ultimately betrays them. (If you are an empty husk of a man with a predisposition for symbolically killing the father figure in your life, 2025 is your year!!!!)

The Social Network was written by Aaron Sorkin, but you can’t really hold that against the film, especially when it comes closer to articulating Zuckerberg’s true personality than anything Zuck himself will ever do. The only thing that comes close is probably the infamous goat story that Jack Dorsey, ex-CEO of Twitter, told to Rolling Stone’s Brian Hiatt back in 2019. I’ve excised Hiatt’s parts to better emphasize the anecdote’s literary qualities:

There was a year when he was only eating what he was killing. He made goat for me for dinner. He killed the goat. [...] He kills it with a laser gun and then the knife. Then they send it to the butcher. [...] I don’t know. A stun gun. They stun it, and then he knifed it. Then they send it to a butcher. Evidently in Palo Alto there’s a rule or regulation that you can have six livestock on any lot of land, so he had six goats at the time. I go, “We’re eating the goat you killed?” He said, “Yeah.” I said, “Have you eaten goat before?” He’s like, “Yeah, I love it.” I’m like, “What else are we having?” “Salad.” I said, “Where is the goat?” “It’s in the oven.” Then we waited for about 30 minutes. He’s like, “I think it’s done now.” We go in the dining room. He puts the goat down. It was cold. That was memorable. I don’t know if it went back in the oven. I just ate my salad.

Hiatt then responds, “It’s hard to find a metaphor in that.” I can’t tell if he was joking or not, but this is more like a metaphive (I’m sorry). 

Anyways, back to the Zuck/Rogan thing for a moment. You have not lived until you have witnessed a man with black eyes, like a doll’s eyes, describing how much he likes wrestling with his friends, insisting that one of the most important parts of life is simply existing in his corporeal form, joking about yelling at his wife for interrupting him when he’s coding. These are but some of the highlights of MZ’s Rogan interview, portions of which I watched while lifting weights because it felt tonally appropriate. 

Much has been made about the interview itself, as well as Zuck’s consistent piles of bullshit and yearslong tolerance and encouragement of conservative content on his platforms, but one thing I haven’t seen people talk about all that much is the degree to which his entire public persona has always been a construct. A 2019 email exchange between Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, and former British politician-turned-Meta exec Nick Clegg makes this explicit. Amid a discussion of Meta as the “millennial company par excellence,” Thiel writes the following (all emphasis mine):

As a result of this history and success, there is a certain sense in which Mark Zuckerberg has been cast as *the spokesman* for the Millennial generation — as the single person who gives voice to the hopes and fears and the unique experiences of this generation, at least in the USA. [...] More dramatically and powerfully, when Facebook connects the world, this gets cast in generational terms, e.g., that the younger generation will bridge the many divisions in our world and build a more peaceful world than past generations were able to build; and when these utopian hopes disappoint, Mark and Facebook receive a disproportionate amount of blame. [This whole arc was traced by David Kirkpatrick, whose 2011 book "The Facebook Effect" encapsulated his utopian projections for younger people generally and whose derangement in recent years can best be understood as the disappointment of these same unrealistic hopes.]

Of course, there are numerous ways in which this role (Mark as Millennial spokesman) is both pretty unfair and highly inappropriate. It is unfair because this much of a burden should not be placed on any single person; and it is inappropriate because Mark is a highly *unrepresentative* example of the Millennial generation, for a whole range of reasons that we do not need to enumerate. But even with these caveats, I believe that we might be better served by understanding that something like this is going on and trying to think about what it would mean for Mark to think of himself as a Millennial spokesman... and perhaps to contrast this with what I take to be our current policy (at least implicitly) — of Mark as a Baby Boomer construct of how a well-behaved Millennial is supposed to act. If forced to make a choice, I would always rather win popularity contests with Millennials than with Boomers!

[You can think of Pete Buttigieg as a (political) example of what Mark absolutely should *not* be: Buttigieg is very popular with older Baby Boomer voters and shockingly unpopular with Millennial voters of his age and younger. Buttigieg's basic message is that the system is working reasonably well and this is precisely why younger voters do not like him — he is the sort of super annoying Millennial who tells the Boomers what they want to hear and thereby glosses over the many ways in which the generational compact in our society has been badly broken.]

It’s notable, but not super germane to the point that I’m trying to make here, that Zuckerberg and Thiel were thinking in such generational terms, especially vis-a-vis the delayed, albeit inevitable power handoff from the Boomers. This is something my good friend, the academic Kevin Munger, wrote a whole-ass book about. Zuck then chimes in, emphasis again mine:

Peter and I have had a number of conversations about what we expect the world to look like in 2030 so we can plan and position our future work accordingly. One theme we've discussed is that many important institutions in our society (eg education, healthcare, housing, efforts to combat climate change) are still run primarily by boomers in ways that transfer a lot of value from younger generations to boomers themselves. Our macro prediction for the next decade is that we expect this dynamic to shift very rapidly as more millennials + gen Zers can now vote and as the boomer generation starts to shrink. By the end of this decade, we expect more of these institutions to be run by and for the benefit of millennials and younger generations. I would bet we'll even see a millennial president within the next few cycles by 2032. This outlook for the future puts our current tone and positioning in stark contrast and has convinced me that we should shift the center of gravity in our messaging to be more focused on millennials.

From a policy perspective, even if boomers are still defining the policies right now, we should make sure we're setting ourselves up to win the debates over the next 5+ years and not just today. We want to be on the side of the future. So this still feels relevant.

From a marketing and comms perspective, this discussion also helps answer a question I've struggled with for some time: who is our core demographic? In trying to build a service for everyone, it often feels like we're not focused on anyone in particular. But because our service is built primarily by millennials, there has been a clear evolution where as our employees and I age and have kids, for example, our products evolve and get better for people in their 30s with kids. If we embrace that we are a company that is playing a disproportionate role in defining the experience of this generation as we grow and evolve, that could also be clarifying in terms of how we talk and who we're talking to.

Beyond how we talk, there's also a question of which issues we focus on and try to provide solutions for. For example, we work a lot on housing, but perhaps there are specific things we could do to make housing more affordable with an emphasis on younger people who don't have large families yet. Or given that so many people graduate college today burdened with crazy amounts of debt, perhaps we should have a larger program for hiring people who didn't go to college to help show that that's a reasonable path as well.

Finally, I think there's also some distinction between me and the company here. While our company has a special role in the lives of this generation, this is likely particularly important for how I show up because I am the most well-known person of my generation. That's why Peter and I have spent some timing discussing things like my philanthropy and commencement speech beyond just FB policies and products. I think this overall shift is something we should consider for how our company communicates and shows up more broadly, but it's something I'm definitely going to think about more in terms of how I communicate.

Thiel again: 

I certainly would not suggest that our policy should be to embrace Millennial attitudes unreflectively. I would be the last person to advocate for socialism. But when 70% of Millennials say they are pro-socialist, we need to do better than simply dismiss them by saying that they are stupid or entitled or brainwashed; we should try and understand why. And, from the perspective of a broken generational compact, there seems to be a pretty straightforward answer to me, namely, that when one has too much student debt or if housing is too unaffordable, then one will have negative capital for a long time and/or find it very hard to start accumulating capital in the form of real estate; and if one has no stake in the capitalist system, then one may well turn against it.

This entire exchange is super revealing. Zuckerberg, in addition to having an insanely oversized sense of his own importance, basically gives the game away by being like “I have to act as an avatar for how the Millennial generation sees itself.” While he and Thiel clearly thought the world was going more socialist and woke even a few years ago, it’s way easier to understand Zuck’s newfound attempts at bro-ness if you remember that his entire public persona is built around reactive pandering. 

With all of what’s happening now, you can just replace talk of redistribution or social justice with Mad Gains Mentality and you understand the turn. Meanwhile, there’s clearly an opening in the social media sphere with the uncertainty around TikTok — who better to step in than a guy who self-consciously pretends to be the voice of his generation and/or a reflection of it?

This is all especially interesting in the context of the recent kerfuffle over the Chinese AI company DeepSeek, whose announcement that they were able to do AI better and cheaper than the American goons currently clogging up the Mar-A-Lago powder room have been able to sent the stock market into a tizzy and threatens to reveal the up-and-coming AI industry as the house of cards that it is. 

AI has to be the future, the tech industry’s logic goes, because we’ve put so much money into it. And just as the FAANG stocks once propped up the entire S&P 500, well, the FAANG stocks are basically still doing that but they’ve been joined by Tesla, which is an honorary AI company because of Elon stuff, and NVIDIA, a company whose value is based on the assumption that its chips will only become more necessary to power the increasingly complex AI models that we will all soon rely on for everything all of the time. That this isn’t true in the least is immaterial; it’s the “investment thesis” currently driving the market upwards, and people are willing to give grifters like Sam Altman the gobs of money he asks for because they believe him when he says this stuff is expensive. If it sounds like I’m just writing out bits of circular logic and dead end thoughts, that’s because I am talking about the AI industry.

This is not the first time the Chinese tech industry has eaten our lunch, in part because the Chinese tech industry does not have the same sense of pearl-clutching about intellectual property rights. In China, it is perfectly fine for me to take your product apart, recreate and ideally iterate upon it, and then undercut your price since you’ve already done by R&D for me. For example, in 2018 the US government accused the Chinese tech company Huawei of packing its devices full of malicious spy software and even went so far as to have one of its executives — whose father had founded the company — arrested on suspicion of fraud involving our sanctions against Iran. 2018 was also the year that Huawei released a computer called the MateBook Pro, which looked exactly like a MacBook Pro and cost half the price. Basically every spying allegation made against Huawei has turned out to be bullshit, and the Justice Department eventually dropped the case against the Huawei executive, but Huawei’s products are no longer available in the States. 

Allegations of spying are a big part of the government’s justification of its continual game of whack-a-mole against TikTok, as well. Lawmakers were all but assuredly made aware of the significant risk that the Chinese-owned TikTok might pose to Americans’ data as a result of the unprecedented sums of money that Meta spent on lobbying in 2024, and Mark Zuckerberg was almost — almost! — rewarded with a whole-ass TikTok ban. I wonder if he understands the irony inherent to the fact that Reels, his rival service that lives inside of Instagram, is simply an optimized dupe, not unlike the MateBook Pro. 

But even if he doesn’t get TikTok kicked out the paint, I wonder if this whole DeepSeek thing might present him with another chance to put himself and his services front and center. The hand-wringing in the media currently going on is likely a precursor to more vague and bullshitty allegations of Chinese data-hoarding (as if data and its derivative products and services have had any beneficial impact to anyone ever and are not simply an asset to be traded) and general Cold War, But Make It Tech scare-mongering, which will in turn be a precursor to DeepSeek being 86’d from the American internet. 

And when that happens, which All-American titan of industry shall step in to fill the AI void? Probably not Elon, because he’s gonna end up pissing Trump off soon*, and likely not Sam Altman, because OpenAI is going to run out of money at some point and it’ll either have to be acquired or go down as the modern Pets.com. Verily, nay: It shall be Mark Zuckerberg, the once and future boy king of Silicon Valley, who in the past few days has suddenly, coincidentally, gotten really excited about Meta’s Llama AI model and is posting like hell about it over on Threads. Where Altman has to scrounge for money, Zuck has it in spades: he’s spending $65 billion in AI this year, and is building a ginormo data center in Louisiana to power it all with “compute” (have still never figured out what AI dudes mean when they say this).

This is the perfect counter-narrative to the DeepMind embarrassment: it reinforces the deeply American ideal of keeping our economy running on vaporware in exchange for returns that quite never come. Agh I’m so mad about all of this, I’m going to lift some more weights.

*I had no idea where to put this in the text, but did y’all notice that Elon recently admiringly retweeted a potentially apocryphal screenshot which claimed that “famous rocket scientist Werner von Braun” said the leader of Mars would be named Elon? Either he is too dumb to know that Werner von Brain was a Nazi, doesn’t care, or is intentionally comparing himself to Nazis for attention. Regardless, he is proving himself to be too personally awkward and strange, as well as too explicitly 2015-style alt-right, to stay in Trump’s good graces.