Word slut

The first published study about climate change (that I am aware of-- feel free to point out if there's an older one) is an 1896 paper by Svante Arrhenius. He pointed out the link between the greenhouse effect and changes in atmospheric CO2.

Plate tectonics, which the geoscience community now recognizes as near indisputable, was a fringe theory until about the 1960s.

*unmutes*

I think she should:

1. eat more

2. Feed babies more

3. Leave babies where they are

She thinks she should:

1. Eat only the choicest delicacies

2. Move babies to closet

Pictured: unrepentent mother of five willing to steal meat milkshake from her own children.

One baby still isn't putting on weight, so when she tried moving him to the closet last night I helped her, then sat down with them and encouraged her to stay. I tricked her into nursing him solo, for longer than she wanted (she tried too leave three times, but settled with gentle encouragement).

(Picture me, sitting on the floor, legs sticking out of closet, hanging clothes in my face, messing cat and kitten pressed against my thigh. This is coparenting).

Then I brought him back to the playpen.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/06/sin-is-when/#you-treat-people-as-things

I'm sure that working in social media – dealing with people as mass statistical abstractions – is a cognitohazard, the sort of thing that could make anyone a little solipsistic, convinced that everyone else is a kind of stimulus-responding automaton lacking the interiority that you yourself experience.

But when it comes to Mark Zuckerberg, I'm increasingly convinced that he didn't acquire his worldview through the self-inflicted brain damage of his long exposure to the back-end of a vast social media system. I think the causal arrow points in the other direction: I think that Zuck founded Facebook because he doesn't really believe that other people are truly real, at least not as real as he is.

We see this in Facebook's very earliest days, as we see it today, as we see it at every critical juncture in Facebook and Zuckerberg's history.

Consider Facebook's origins, founded by a young Zuckerberg in his dorm as a means to nonconsensually rate the fuckability of his fellow Harvard undergrads:

https://mashable.com/article/mark-zuckerberg-lying-about-facebook

The boy Zuck was delighted and surprised that so many of his fellow students entrusted him with their data but even then, he had no inkling as to why they would do so. Privately, he jeered at his users for trusting him, calling them "dumb fucks":

https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/2010/05/14/facebook-founder-called-trusting-users-dumb-fcks/294365

Zuck has since prosecuted history's most ruthless war on privacy, a surveillance campaign that would put the Stasi to shame and make Orwell scoff at the hacks butchering his work with over the top absurdities.

Zuck doesn't think you deserve any privacy, but boy does he ever value his own. This is a guy who bought the four houses surrounding his San Francisco home and left them empty in order to form a buffer zone:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/10/us/mark-zuckerberg-palo-alto.html?unlocked_article_code=1.3VA.4Avp.cVm3LUnvajRK&smid=url-share

When a single candid photo of Zuck and his family in their kitchen leaked (from Facebook!), Zuck, his lawyers, and his operatives treated it as a three-alarm fire:

https://abc7news.com/archive/8933289/

Zuckerberg's acquired a vast Hawaiian acreage and left most of it undeveloped, fenced off and patrolled by guards to prevent anyone from catching a glimpse of his private life. In order to acquire this acreage, Zuck exploited a dirty legal tactic called "heirs property," which leverages the informal basis of indigenous land claims by locating a single person with a colorable claim to their distant relatives' territory in order to force an auction of the ancestral land:

https://www.wired.com/story/mark-zuckerberg-secretive-hawaii-compound-burial-ground/

If Zuck thought other people are as real as he is, he wouldn't spy on them in ways he himself could never tolerate. He certainly wouldn't pay fancy white-shoe lawyers to steal their land out from under them. At heart, Zuck is a billionaire solipsist to beat all other examples of the form – a billionaire social media solipsist who sees others as manipulable collections of statistical abstractions, and not as people at all:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/18/seeing-like-a-billionaire/#npcs

When Zuck is forcibly reminded that other people do indeed exist, he takes it very badly. He's insisted that Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former FB exec turned whistleblower, must pay him $111,000,000 as punishment for her excellent tell-all memoir Careless People. His lawyers say that Wynn-Williams violates the non-disclosure and non-disparagement "agreement" of her old Facebook employment contract merely by standing motionless and silent for an hour on-stage:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/27/zuckerstreisand-2/#autodisparagement

Once you realize that Zuck doesn't really think other people exist, "the metaverse" starts to make a lot more sense. Why would Zuck light $61b on fire in a bet that we will all stand still while he converts us and everyone we love into legless, sexless, low-polygon, heavily surveilled cartoon characters that he imprisons in a virtual world he stole from a 25 year old satirical dystopian cyberpunk novel? It's easy to understand if we're all non-player characters – if that's true, then the metaverse is surely our native habitat.

For Zuck, people aren't co-equals with needs that are as real and important as his own. For Zuck, people are problems to be solved. He embodies Terry Pratchett's maxim (voiced by Granny Weatherwax) that "sin is when you treat people like things."

Nowhere is this sin more on display than in Zuck's relationship to the social connections that bind together the users of his platforms. Zuck has benefited enormously from the fact that you love your friends more than you hate him, but (because hell is other people), you can't all agree on when to leave and where to go next, so you stay put on Facebook and Instagram:

https://locusmag.com/feature/commentary-cory-doctorow-hell-is-other-people/

For Zuck, the fact that you and your friends have trapped one another in a mutual hostage-taking is maddening, because those friends who've tied you to his platform refuse to organize their social contact with you to "maximize your engagement" with Facebook and Insta, which would let him maximize the number of ads he shows you. Rather, these friends just want to be your friends, which means that they don't want to get into stupid endless fights to keep you replying or stage little entertaining skits to keep you scrolling.

Not even that. A virtual world he ripped off from a spunky (fnarrr) little company named Linden Labs, except violently shoved into bleached and starched underpants in order to be pitched as a companion app for the VR hardware in order to sell it to the least interested people for least suited purposes.

If you ever used Second Life, you know what I mean. If you didn't, maybe that's for the better.

The teeny little problem with that enterprise was that people weren't keen on coughing up five hundred bucks for one-trick hardware that's as much of a curiosity as it was thirty years ago, but with less hype (if you remember things like The Lawnmower Man, Johnny Mnemonic, The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest and the music video for Queen's The Invisible Man, you know what I mean). So Suckerbug took the costs up the ass and pivoted to AI.

Which was an even dumber idea.