The New Zuck
Charting Mark Zuckerberg's path toward MAGA
Hello!
We have a new one for you we published over the weekend. If I were the best version of myself, the New Year’s resolution version of myself, the flossing-twice-daily version of myself — that’s probably when this email would’ve landed in your email inbox. Sunday at the latest.
And here we are, on Wednesday. So, the gap between who I’d like to be, and who I am … today, it’s a 4-day gap. OK. We can work with that.
Anyway, where was I? The episode.
What’s going on with Mark Zuckerberg?
He recently conspicuously pivoted toward MAGA, meeting quietly with incoming Trump officials, and complaining about the Biden administration on Joe Rogan’s podcast. This week, we trace the story of the Meta CEO, and investigate what his new persona means for the four billion people who use his products.
A larger thought here
This episode is about how to think about Mark Zuckerberg. But how should we think about Facebook, about Instagram, in 2025? We did the slightest of nods to that question in our episode. It’s one of the bigger questions really. Two decades in, are we glad we have social media? A question you might discuss in the comments. But I’ll leave you with this bit from Matt Yglesias’s column last week:
I think Mark Zuckerberg is basically correct that the “fact-checking” information control response to the problem of misinformation spreading on social media has basically been a failure. But the fact that social media sharing puts people who try to be scrupulous and accurate at a competitive disadvantage to people who try to be sensationalistic and prejudice-flattering is a real problem. I sympathized with almost everything he said about this to Ezra Klein during his lib turn in 2018, as well as with almost everything he said about it to Joe Rogan as part of his MAGA turn this winter. The underlying problem is that while technological progress is good in the aggregate, not every specific innovation is good. Zuckerberg just happens to be cursed with the reality that he became very rich at a very young age by being a pioneer in a technology that is basically harmful. He strikes me as a genuinely well-meaning person, and Meta has gone on to do lots of things that are more interesting and more promising than its core Facebook/Instagram business. But there’s no way around the fact that an information ecosystem based on virality — whether Facebook or TikTok or Twitter or anything else — exacerbates the flaws of establishment media rather than improving them.
But then there is the specific conservative angle, which is that conservatives have come to believe (accurately) that the baseline moral values of the academic expert community are hostile to them and therefore (inaccurately) that expert views should be categorically dismissed.
OK. What else. If you’d like to hear it, you should check out the Joe Rogan Zuckerberg interview, I feel like I learned something about the strange ways our country is shifting in those three hours. And if you want to hear a Zuckerberg from one iteration earlier, here he is with Ezra Klein in 2018.
Part of the reason I’d wanted to talk to Mike Isaac was this very insightful piece about Mark Zuckerberg he reported, way back in September.
And Casey has been like a house spy in Meta Castle this week, with story after story about Meta's rapid changes and the likely consequences, processed, somehow, in real time. Does Casey sleep? I hope so, we all need sleep.
That’s it for me this week. New one on Friday, if I get the newsletter out that day, my one request would be that while it’s fine to applaud, please don’t do a standing ovation.
Thanks,
PJ
PS. As always, if you like what we’re doing and want to help us keep it going, you could sign up for ad-free episodes of Search Engine. In January, for our Incognito Mode members, we’re also offering immunity from the wages of time and death. Act now!
Hey PJ, I just subscribed to incognito mode! I had been meaning to for a while and finally pulled the trigger.
On another note, the large screenshot of text you included is great to get some insight, but it is inaccessible to people who need to use assistive tech like screen readers or people who have low vision and would need to zoom in to see it (images of text get blurry when zoomed in, unlike programmed text). You did link the article that it's from—in normal circumstances I think that would honestly cover everything and I wouldn't have said anything! But when I tried to find the actual text in the linked article, it turns out I needed to pay or start a trial to the author to see that information.
A potential solution for this could be to type of all that text out in the email instead of posting a picture of it. You could also add it all as alt text, though that is not a perfect solution. Or maybe just mention that in order to see the full text, you'll have to go to the linked site and subscribe to the author's post (or whatever it was I had to do).
Anyway, this isn't meant to rag on you. I'm an accessibility professional who also happens to love search engine, and I figured I'd share my thoughts :)
It took me time to dive into this, and when I finally did...oof. It brought me right back to Naomi Klein's Doppelganger, in which she tackles how the progressive left so often unintentionally, unstrategically exiles would-be allies to the right. She writes:
"On the democratic socialist left, we favor social policies that are inclusive and caring—universal public health care, well-funded public schools, decarceration, and rights for migrants. But left movements often behave in ways that are neither inclusive nor caring. And...in practice most of us (even many who claim to be staunchly anti-police) spend a lot of time policing our movements’ borders, turning on people who see themselves as on our side, making our ranks smaller, not larger.
"When we have differences, we tend to focus on them obsessively, finding as many opportunities as possible to break apart. Important dis-agreements need to be hashed out, and many conflicts that arise in progressive spaces are over behaviors that, when unchallenged, make those spaces unwelcoming or dangerous for the people they target. But it’s not a great secret that plenty of people routinely go too far, turning minor language infractions into major crimes, while adopting a discourse that is so complex and jargon-laden that people outside university settings often find it off-putting—or straight-up absurd."
This episode made me see Zuckerberg as yet another example of this; it's hard not to feel a bit bleak about it. But in the moments of overwhelm "at-scale" (e.g. Facebook) I come back to the small (e.g. 1:1 human connection). At least we have that. At least we have Search Engine--and you, PJ. Thanks for all this, even when it's hard.