Like many of us, I have long been fascinated by Mark Zuckerberg. He is one of my favorite recurring characters in the storyline. Zuck’s alignment is true neutral: I don’t think he wants Trump to win the election, but I also don’t think he believes in elections as a concept.
His core goal is stability and a preservation of at least the aesthetics of the liberal order. Zuck doesn’t want to see the United States replaced by some perverted robot cult, like Elon Musk or Sam Altman. Zuck simply hopes we all get along better in the Metaverse, where as our self-appointed cyber shepherd, he will keep the wolves out, feed each of us our allotment of oats, and never allow anyone to jump the fence.
But the matter at hand is not politics — it’s about aesthetics. It’s about this culture-shattering July 4th post that I must tell you more about:
Maybe I’m a chud for thinking he looks cool here. People in my TikTok comments have pointed this out. But I think he’s cool according to a really specific metric, what
would call the “zynternet.” Zuck is looking Barstool cool here, 6mg gum pillow upperdecky ferda cool, Hawk Tuah cool, frat cool. The strongest piece of evidence for this claim is that Dave Portnoy got jealous of the photo.The zynternet is one of the most important and influential groups in contemporary culture. And personally — call me simple, call me unsophisticated, call me just negatively polarized in favor of Zuck because I hate Elon so much — surfing and drinking beer is cool and we have to admit that. If you could do this, you would post it and you would think it’s cool.
In a broader cultural sense, this post matters because Zuck is a Virgin who has become a Chad. And he isn’t just any Virgin: he was The Virgin, the culture’s archetype of nerdy computer boy. A decade ago Jesse Eisenberg played him in a movie. Now, if there was a Zuck biopic, it would be Timothée Chalamet. Zuck has quirked up, gotten goated with the sauce, and this will have major implications.
It also matters politically. Just after this image dropped, internal emails from 2020 between Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel, released as part of an ongoing court case, dropped. In them, Zuck and Thiel talk about Zuck’s image as “the most well-known Millennial” (clearly neither of them are Swifties). They talk about changing Facebook’s brand image to appeal to Millennials, since the Boomers (in their view) have ten years left in charge of America.
Peter Thiel’s alignment is lawful evil. He is the libertarian billionaire who runs Palantir, probably the most sinister of the defense contractors, and has written all these esoteric, vaguely monarchist manifestos about Leo Strauss and Rene Girard (yuck!). He also allegedly buys human blood to inject himself with.
Their conversation, which occurred over the first days of 2020, is remarkable for two reasons. First, there is no mention of profit in their analysis for changing Facebook (and Zuck’s) brand. They are thinking about influence over the direction of the ship of state. The game Zuck and the rest of them play is not about money, but about power. Second, Thiel’s view of the situation is totally wrong: the Millennials have not taken over America, our two presidential candidates are 78 and 81. We live in a gerontocracy.
Zuck believes Thiel is 100% correct in his analysis, probably because it identifies Zuck as some great man of history. I was thinking this might be Thiel manipulating Zuck, knowing that Zuck’s big weakness is ego (after all, nobody who is not a narcissist ever musingly compares himself to Augustus Caesar in front of a New Yorker writer). So here’s one possible unifying theory of Zuck: Thiel was his mentor, the first big investor in Facebook, and maybe Thiel has been in control the whole time, the power behind the throne, and Zuck was just some coding genius with no social skills that got co-opted.
But there’s another more complex and still not-good possibility: Zuck is Macron-coded.
Zuckerberg started out as a beloved boy genius, but has since faced more public criticism than any other tech oligarch. People hated on Zuck most fiercely in the wake of the 2016 elections, which he briefly flirted with running in. You could read his actions as an attempt to stop the far-right, turning down the partisan temperature and preventing 2016 from happening again: Meta stopped promoting political news content in its feeds (inadvertently leading to the layoffs of thousands of journalists and the decline of media at the moment we most need a vigorous, healthy press). Content moderation, run by automated algorithms, has gotten much more heavy-handed (just ask anyone who’s tried to post something about Palestine on Instagram). You could read many of Meta’s moves (the Oculus headset, their AI projects, Instagram Reels and Threads etc.) as adopting good ideas on the cusp of technology and trying to implement them as cheaply, rapidly, and accessibly as possible, trusting that the size of its ecosystem will be enough to support a product that isn’t as good as its competitors.
Meta’s business is administering that ecosystem more than making any product, which means Zuck’s work looks more like governance than technology. His goal is to keep that ecosystem stable and reasonably effective while expanding its scope. Zuck has prepared himself for is what Shoshanna Zuboff would call a governance play. As traditional political forms like the nation-state falter, more and more authority devolves to the platforms. Zuck sees this historical process happening. He knows new technologies are massively disruptive, that the climate is out of control, that global conflict is rising. He sees it as his duty to save the world by doing what democratic governments are too corrupt and disorganized to do, which is centralize control, get everyone on the same page, and implement what he thinks are the rational solutions to our problems. These duties have been ceded to him by a dysfunctional and collapsing system, and Zuck knows if he doesn’t take charge, someone worse than him will.
The political philosophy which most resembles Zuckism is Macronism: theirs is a highly personal, elitist, and liberal-appearing form of very soft authoritarianism. You could call it Jupiterianism, to use a Macron phrase. It all relies on faith in the genius of one man who has no discernible ideology other than “let’s all be normal, preserve the life ways of the top ten percent, and do our best to survive this apocalyptic era.” The philosophy is not necessarily opposed to democracy, but it is not really for it either.
Carrying an American flag and looking frat boy/Barstool cool represents the core of Zuck’s agenda. The image fits because Zuckerberg’s self-appointed mission is to preserve the United States of America as it looked circa 2005 from a Harvard University dorm room.
Recalls the “reformer” archetype of the late 19th / early 20th centuries. Wilson, Donovan, Elihu Root, Edward House. Or even Lippman. Technocrats who see the old problems (then, the party boss system) clearly. But it is their efforts to domesticate elite power (bringing it out of cigar choked back rooms and into institutions) which proliferates institutional bloat and stagnation while real power shifts ever diagonally upward and out of frame. The “progressive” bourgeoisie will rebuild the entire ancien regime as a series of contingent support beams to the edifice of an enlightenment state.
this rules