#zuckerberg

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in PITTSBURGH on May 15 at WHITE WHALE BOOKS, and in PDX on Jun 20 at BARNES AND NOBLE with BUNNIE HUANG. More tour dates (London, Manchester) here.

Mark Zuckerberg has told investors how he plans to make back the tens of billions he's spending on AI: he's going to use it to make advertisements that can bypass our critical faculties and convince anyone to buy anything. In other words, Meta will make an AI mind-control ray and rent it out to grateful advertisers.

Here, Zuck is fulfilling the fundamental duty of every CEO of every high-growth tech company: explaining how his company will continue to grow. These growth stories are key, because growth stocks trade at a huge premium relative to the stocks of "mature" companies. Every dollar Meta brings in boosts their share price to a much greater degree than the dollars earned by companies with similar rates of profit, but slower rates of growth. This premium represents a bet by investors that Meta will continue to grow, which means that the instant Meta stops growing, the value of its shares will plummet, to reflect the fact that it is a "mature" company, not a "growth" company.

So Zuck needs to do everything he can to keep investors believing that Meta will continue to grow. After all, Zuck's key employees and top managers all take much (or even most!) of their compensation in Meta stock, which means that the instant the company stops growing, those workers' pay will plummet and they will seek employment elsewhere, depriving Meta of the workers it needs to successfully create or conquer a new market and once again become a growth stock.

This is why Zuck keeps telling stories. The most important story Zuck tells is about himself, the boy genius who converted a tool for nonconsensually rating the fuckability of Harvard undergrads into a social media monopoly with four billion users. Zuck's cult of personality isn't the product of mere narcissism – it's a tool for creating the material conditions for ongoing investor confidence:

https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-shirt-latin-what-does-it-say-explained-words-2024-9

If Zuck is a boy genius, then Zuck's pronouncements take on the character of prophesy. When Zuck announced the "pivot to video," investors poured tens of billions into Facebook stock and into video-first online news production, despite the fact that Zuck was obviously lying:

https://slate.com/technology/2018/10/facebook-online-video-pivot-metrics-false.html

The "boy genius" story is an example of Silicon Valley's storied "reality distortion field," pioneered by Steve Jobs. Like Jobs, Zuck is a Texas marksman, who fires a shotgun into the side of a barn and then draws a target around the holes. Jobs is remembered for his successes, and forgiven his (many, many) flops, and so is Zuck. The fact that pivot to video was well understood to have been a catastrophic scam didn't stop people from believing Zuck when he announced "metaverse."

Zuck lost more than $70b on metaverse, but, being a boy genius Texas marksman, he is still able to inspire confidence from credulous investors. Zuck's AI initiatives generated huge interest in Meta's stock, with investors betting that Zuck would find ways to keep Meta's growth going, despite the fact that AI has the worst unit economics of any tech venture in living memory. AI is a business that gets more expensive as time goes on, and where the market's willingness to pay goes down over time. This makes the old dotcom economics of "losing money on every sale, but making it up in volume" look positively rosy:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/reality-check/

Now, Zuck has finally described how he's going to turn AI's terrible economics around: he's going to ask AI to design his advertisers' campaigns, and these will be so devastatingly effective that advertisers will pay a huge premium to advertise on Meta:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/the-ai-revolution-is-an-advertising-revolution-morning-brief-100001467.html

Mark Zuckerberg

If you still have facebook/can't get rid of it (for any reason- we're not here to judge today) then you're going to want to clear your off-Meta activity.

You read that right, Meta tracks what you do off it's apps as well. It tracks other apps and websites that you use- whether you connected them to Facebook or not, AND places you visit IRL and when you visited. This includes not just stores and other businesses, but also allegedly includes hotels, schools and hospital/doctors offices. (I'm unfortunately unable to confirm the last three for myself as I didn't look closely at mine before deleting- and it's been years since I've graduated or stayed at a hotel, and months since I've been to a doctor. If anyone cares to confirm in the notes I'll update this post.)

This post will show you how to clear your off-Meta activity. (You'll also want to toggle off Ads data permissions, but I'll make another post about that later.)

First, go to your Profile Icon, then to Settings and Privacy to get to your Settings.

Once in Settings you're going to click See more in Accounts Center. On desktop it should be in a box on the upper-left of the page.

Once in Accounts Center you're going to click Your information and permissions, then Your activity off Meta technologies at the bottom of that window.

Once in the Your activity off Meta technologies window you're going to notice at the bottom three buttons, Disconnect specific activity, Clear previous activity, and Manage future activity.

You're going to want to first clear your previous activity and disconnect future activity. This will also automatically clear any activity that would be under the Disconnect specific activity tab, as it's just for picking and choosing what activity to delete.

An added benefit to this is that it will also clear out some of the data Meta uses for its AI programs- not all, but hey- that's something.

Also, even if you can't delete your Facebook account, I urge you to please delete/uninstall the app from your phone as that's the #1 best way to keep it from tracking you everywhere you go IRL and online. That said, if you delete no other Meta app from your phone- make sure to delete FB messenger- it's literally the worst one, but that's another post, which I'll hopefully get to after the FB ads one I promised above.