* edit of shame: it's satire. Confirmation bias is a hell of a drug.
> 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
That is an absolutely bananas read of Zuck's place in American culture.
It's true for technology in the sense that anytime Congress wants to bring in someone for a hearing about anything tangentially related to being online, Zuckerberg will be invited.
Being the cause of widespread despair, hate and fear, and so, the one most often called upon to be held accountable (at least from an optics perspective) is dramatically different than being "'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" which is a completely delusional take.
But that does beg the question - what is it about our current system (western civilisation) that seems to reward the incredibly stupid.
Though I do wonder if you looked at all people with a net worth of over say 100M whether the proportion of incredibly stupid people would be the same as the general population or whether we just have so many incredibly stupid people some of them will get lucky.
Is it really satire? If so, I'm genuinely angry this was not flagged as such. But there is no indication on the website, and they have some older emails which sound familiar as authentic.
This is not satire. This is a website that has been around for years that has an email archive from emails released in lawsuits against tech companies. The page literally sites the specific case ("Tennessee v. Meta (2024)") that this came from and is easily verifiable.
Not satire. They really are just that up their own asses.
I remember perhaps a decade ago, a coworker and I were watching a clip of Zuckerberg walking up to a group of employees and they started clapping for him. I mentioned how odd it was to see, and he thought it was perfectly natural to applaud the CEO of your company. We never applauded when our boss showed up, and I've never really been sure where the line is for which authority I'm supposed to cheer for merely from being in their presence. I haven't thought about it too much since then, but obviously it's stuck with me.
As a society, we've all had our lips pretty firmly pressed onto the asses of the oligarchs for quite awhile, so it seems pretty natural that they think it's the natural order of things.
Whoopsie. Bizarre that it's this plausible but it shows how prone I am to confirmation bias. I'm adding an edit to the comment but leaving it up as a reminder.
The most striking thing about this exchange for me is how abstract it is: until the last email from Clegg, there's no reference to any of Facebook/Meta's products. It sounds more like political strategists trying to find out how to appeal to Millennials, but by pandering to Millennials' pre-existing political views rather than trying to push a political view.
Even in back in 2019 I have a hard time believing this was true. As a millennial, my facebook feed was overtaken by my parents generation in the early 2010s and the handful of peers I know who still use it regularly use it to communicate with that generation.
Maybe he's counting Instagram usage as part of Facebook?
Isn't Thiel the one that believes democracy and freedom are incompatible and also a co-founder of Palantir? Why do we give these people any legitimacy? Because they have money?
Sorry, this song has been in my head since I saw the South Park episode. Highly recommend anyone to watch the 2nd Trump era episodes, they sure rid these people of any legitimacy they might have.
We don't give them legitimacy. The people who govern us do; they don't actually care about democracy, the second it causes them to lose elections. Look at Trump: lost an election, incited a riot to overthrow the peaceful transfer of power, pardoned those who were complicit in it.
The sad thing is, because the Dem playbook is now "fight fire with fire" (cf. the gerrymandering wars), it is only a matter of time until they stoop to the same level of overthrowing legitimate elections, in the name of fighting fire with fire...
> When Mark and Priscilla commit to giving away 99% of their wealth during their lifetimes
I hadn't heard this before but googling it seems like a genuine commitment at the time[0]. I mostly feel like Zuck isn't making the world a better place, but this sounds really impressive as a commitment - any idea if this commitments been stuck to now we're around 10 years on?
That's so interesting- I'd assumed from the name that it was a charity for allocating donations, but legally it's a regular company?
Seems like its activities are mostly charity based at least.
It's a confusing thing, and I still don't really understand what 99% of wealth over the course of a lifetime actually means in real terms. Is that of lifetime wealth? 99% of Zuck's wealth from 2015 over the course of his life?
Yep. All are valid questions. I would rather have Zuckerberg donate to charitable causes than not. But this kind of bullshit indicates me that it's mainly for show.
How kind of him to give his wealth away after intentionally using his company to fracture society as much as he could to earn the money in the first place
I get it, meta has caused a huge amount of societal damage, and we wouldn't need philanthropists if we fairer economies.
But people are complicated, and if Zuckerberg really is giving away 99% of his wealty to causes, that's a positive and worth discussing. Even if it doesn't make up for other harm.
No, Zuckerberg did not set out consciously trying to "fracture society". He started out trying to provide a way to rate women at Harvard by how attractive they were, then by just trying to optimize revenue without any consideration for unintended consequences. Then kept going.
Not understanding the failure mode is going to just lead to repeating the same mistakes at even grander scales, like what's happening now with AI. Nerds obsessed with creating "AGI" without the capability or willingness to think through the potential consequences.
This is like the oil companies that hid the internal climate change studies for as long as they could. Zuck knew what he was doing long before everyone else did. Acting like he was just dumb and uninformed is wrong. When they started he might not have realized how bad optimizing for engagement was but it doesn't take a genius to realize what was happening with the data they have. He's not some starry eyed kid who accidentally made a monster, he found out he could become one of the richest men in the world if he made his monster vicious enough. This is a guy that started buying the land for his survival bunker 10 years ago.
I didn't know that. I encountered these emails recently from the Tech Emails X account and figured I'd share here because 1) it's very timely considering the NYC mayor elections and 2) HN is a great place to read about people's thoughts on topics like these outside of where I usually hangout.
"One example of such an "iron grip" from my colleague Eric Weinstein: Of the 67 top research universities in the US, 62 have Baby Boomer presidents (three are Silent Generation and only two are Generation X). Today, the median age of these 67 university presidents is 65 years-old... And this is very different from the recent past. Only thirty years ago, in 1990, the median age of these same university presidents was a much lower 52-years old;"
Got to admit that's very interesting. That was January 5, 2020, I wonder how it looks today.
I asked chat:
Boomers: ~13 of 20 (~65%)
Examples: Princeton (Christopher Eisgruber, 1961), MIT (Sally Kornbluth, 1960), Harvard (Alan Garber, 1955), Duke (Vincent Price, 1957), Brown (Christina Paxson, 1960), Johns Hopkins (Ron Daniels, 1959), Columbia’s acting leaders across 2024–25 were also Boomers.
Gen X: ~7 of 20 (~35%)
Examples: Stanford (Jonathan Levin, 1972), Yale (Maurie McInnis, 1966), Dartmouth (Sian Beilock, 1976), Rice (Reginald DesRoches, 1967), Vanderbilt (Daniel Diermeier, 1965), WashU (Andrew D. Martin, 1972), Notre Dame (Rev. Robert A. Dowd, 1965).
Millennials/Silent: 0 in this Top-20 (today).
(A few large publics just outside the USNWR top-20 have Boomer or Gen-X chancellors as well; e.g., UC Berkeley’s Rich Lyons, 1961.)
The boomers are still holding on to power. Amazing!
Boomers: ~43%
(Nvidia/J. Huang 1963; Apple/T. Cook 1960; Saudi Aramco/A. Nasser 1958; Broadcom/Hock Tan 1951/52; TSMC/C.C. Wei 1953; JPMorgan/J. Dimon 1956; Oracle/S. Catz 1961; plus Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos 1964.)
Millennials: ~5%
(Meta/Mark Zuckerberg 1984.)
Silent Generation: ~5%
(Berkshire Hathaway/Warren Buffett 1930 — slated to hand CEO role to Greg Abel, b. 1962, at year-end 2025.)
A little better, but my gosh they are really holding on. I'm sure it is unprecedented. Certainly heath is better than any time in history, but this seems extreme.
It looks like there has been some turnover at the universities since the quote from Eric Weinstein. I quick survey (could be incorrect!) says it is now more around 63.
That's still high but not as high as what Eric Weinstein was quoting.
Do these dweebs ever let up on huffing their own farts? I can only hope that the actual measurements of their declining platform influence and use are true and we see FB peter out at some point. Sadly, it'll be replaced by something even more banal, but at least Zuck will fade away, here's hoping Thiel does as well.
> 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!
That entire paragraph is mind bending. I really wish he had enumerated for a wider audience what was there because you could read something quite profound into it.
> 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
Fucks sake... that is an absolutely bananas read of Zuck's place in American culture.
> 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.
They really are up their own asses so much in this thread. Just the arrogance of these people absolutely kills me.
It is also (and it surprises me that this ancient observation is so little cited), a highly visible example of
"Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely".
Watching at these people accumulate and hoard hundreds of billions of wealth, in a capitalist society where wealth equals power, and become ever more corrupt as they do so, simply demonstrates the point yet again. And we must suffer the consequences as they choose to corrupt the govt so they can accumulate more power instead of doing works to benefit all.
Just for some perspective, I once calculated what it means to be rich. I called it at spending at a constant average of USD$2500/day. With 'only' $20million yielding 5%, you have $2700/day without even touching principle. There is no level of basic and even luxury needs that cannot be met with that kind of spending. OK, you want more, how about spending $25,000 per day, EVERY day for the rest of your life? That takes 'only' $200 million.
Those people have hundreds of times the amount of money that could ever make a difference in their standard of living.
The point is that once you reach past these levels, more money literally makes no material difference in your standard of living. Hoarding more money is only about one thing, power.
As a society, we need to be doing something different.
We must understand that all of our industries leaders are deeply mentally ill and dangerous people.
Whether that is from not ever being told no once they got rich enough or whether it's pathological to even seek out that dimension of wealth is not clear, but the result is worrying either way.
Understanding isn't going far enough (though it's a nescessary first step), We should all be demanding that our governments reign these idiots in before they do something we can't undo.
That Clegg is in these emails is particularly onerous.
What the fuck is the "public sphere" and who decides who does or does not get a membership card?
Like, call Thiel an idiot with stupid ideas that are dumb, fine, but trying to cancel someone from the "public sphere" just reeks of passive aggression.
If it was not a guy who regularly engages with and thus gives platform to neo-Nazi accounts on X I might've considered giving him the benefit of doubt.
It is very easy to find specific accounts that Musk brings readers to (or you can just be on X and follow him):
Are you aware that Ed Sheeran is one of—and was not that long ago the—best selling music artist in the world?
The fact you only nitpicked a single name from that list is, I think, quite telling. We know who Zuckerberg is. Non-tech-nerds just going on with their lives don’t for the most part, even if they use apps from Meta. If they even heard the name, it was due to some negative news related to Facebook or Meta.
Zuckerberg is 49, Sheeran is 169 (Taylor Swift is on 4; Bieber, Lady Gaga and Beyoncé are also more famous than Zuckerberg; the rest in the list are less famous)
Which, by definition, is incomplete when we’re talking about the world. If we examined by country, it would fluctuate wildly. For example, in any country with soccer as the national sport, Ronaldo would crush Zuckerberg in popularity.
Either way, the point (in which I think we’re all mostly in agreement) is that Zuckerberg’s comment falls somewhere between the absurd and the delusional. If you want to pick a different list of names, go right ahead. I’d say Tailor Swift is indisputable, though.
The Millennial age group is 29 to 44 years and most of these people used FB in college and saw the social network.
It's true, I picked him because he was the obvious laggard in that list of celebrities (he is by far the least talented of everyone else in the list) . The poll someone else posted shows in the US, Zuckerberg is more well known than Sheeran.
People don't buy Facebook ads or make Facebook accounts because Mark Zuckerberg is there, but they do buy Ed Sheeran music because it has the name "Ed Sheeran" written on it.
That said, I'm not into music and assumed he was a footballer.
> That said, I'm not into music and assumed he was a footballer.
Same (minus the footballer part). When I was made aware of Ed Sheeran, he was already the biggest artist in the world. But that says something about me and my general disinterest for music and pop culture, not Sheeran’s popularity.
100%. I think people are way more likely to know the name of one of their favorite artists versus the owner of an online platform, no matter what that platform is.
To be fair, knowing someone's name is only one property of many when it comes to knowing them. It is technically possible — although perhaps unlikely — for someone to be more well-known than another even without having a recognizable name.
Zuckerberg probably is more well-known than Ed Sheeran. "Ed Sheeran", the name, may be more familiar, but what do typical people really know about the details of his life? Zuckerberg, on the other hand, had a movie made about him. At least everyone knows about Taylor Swift's dating life, if we want to compare to music celebrities.
Still, imagine Prince William or Prince Harry have to be most well-known. They've been chronicled since birth. Especially when you look past an Americentric view and turn to the world stage.
That Meta/facebook had a special role in the lives of his generation is not up for debate. It's a fact. Also, zuckerburg probably meant he was the "most well-known person in tech" of his generation, which is true. But expanding it beyond tech, he definitely is as well-known as anyone else in his generation. Everyone in his generation knows what facebook is. Everyone in his generation knows zuckerburg.
The guy may be arrogant, but nothing about his statement was arrogant. He was stating facts.
> You literally had to rewrite the meaning of the statement
No I didn't because the context of the statement was up for debate.
> He didn't say "in tech", he said what he said.
The email thread about about tech though. Besides, I also wrote "But expanding it beyond tech, he definitely is as well-known as anyone else in his generation."
My comment was in good fath and addressed both scenarios : "tech" and "non-tech"
Your original comment and not surprising your reply was not in good faith because have an agenda.
Those that have their names on the high score board of capitalism are truly the Einsteins of our generation and we should be so lucky to hear every thought stream that dribbles out of their heads.
I’m not agreeing, but I’m hard pressed to find another person that is from the millennial generation that has been a persistent “public figure” as long and persistently than Zuck. He has been persistently in the news more or less daily since 2006.
Can you name another millennial that has a wider and longer lasting notoriety?
Does that mean that people respect him, or think of him as an ideal person or whatever?
No
but that’s not what Zuckerberg is saying - he’s saying “well known”
I’m not sure I could name another millennial that is as well known globally for as long - maybe Ronaldo or Taylor Swift
> I’m hard pressed to find another person that is from the millennial generation that has been a persistent “public figure” as long and persistently than Zuck.
Prince William and Prince Harry have him beat on that front, surely? They've been persistent public figures since birth.
And if we limit it to modern times, Taylor Swift has got to be way more well known. Even my young kids know who Taylor Swift is. They have no clue about who Zuckerberg is.
Exactly. If Zuckerberg moved to a new home, nobody would ever know. But when Prince Harry does, it's headline news. You may have forgotten his exact name, but a name is only one property of many when it comes to knowing someone. That you know intimate details of his life is telling about how is more well-known.
Do you think that is genuinely the news in general, or just the subset of the news you personally follow?
I would imagine Swifties see a lot more Taylor Swift news than Zuckerberg news. For someone on HN, they're going to see a lot more Zuckerberg news than average.
That may be true, but that's not the news I'm exposed to. I only see him pop up every few years or so when he's announcing The Next Big Thing or trying to look/act more like a human person.
Well if the changeover happens it seems it will happen in the 2030s.
Amd millennials found their replacement for housing bubble with the stocks / crypto bubble.
And democracy is good for boomers, because they are too many and outnumber everyone else in battle. So millennials and genz are not unsympathetic to less democracy (a view that Thiel shares).
Thiel in this context could be considered a boomer, and his interests lie with them
Facebook and instagram are a disease. Time and again Meta’s properties have been shown to be detrimental to children’s (and adults’) mental health. Even by Meta’s own research!
The whole thing stinks of the same foul reek as big tobacco.
When their reckoning comes we will wonder how we could have let one megalomaniac’s scam go so far.
Granted I'm taking creative liberties reading between the lines and mapping to other context. I'd give it low odds overall, but I'm gleaning a non-zero likelihood worthy of consideration:
1. "Mark Zuckerberg has been cast as the spokesman for the Millennial generation."
2. "I am the most well-known person of my generation"
3. "we'll even see a millennial president within the next few cycles by 2032."
4. The direct comparison to Pete Buttigieg.
5. He's signaled a presidential bid in the recent past.
Some additional interpretation of mine from the exchange:
6. The expressed need to "win" in the policy arena in the next few years.
7. The imminent "transfer of value" (and power) from boomers to millennials, and the explicit urgency and intent to "position" themselves to capitalize on this "rapid shift."
Further real world context:
8. Thiel's track record of hands on political involvement with Trump, Vance, and Yarvin.
9. Thiel's recent "antichrist" lectures which articulates a fear of being "scapegoated."
> We have a team working on an ambitious long term project on loneliness/isolation which, again, has the potential to hold particular appeal to the Millennial sentiments set out in the paper. The latest plans will be presented to Mark next week.
> 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.
I do not understand the reason for assuming any successive group of old leaders to behave differently than boomers?
Millenials are going to have an even more disproportionate old age population, and presumably will seek to squeeze the younger generations even more than the boomers:
The era you experienced growing up can influence how you are when you get older quite a bit. The generation before the Great Depression tried to create a more progressive equitable world but of course that was eroded eventually. Everything goes in cycles and the next generation coming that experiences the fallout from all our recent excesses will be different as well.
Interesting perspective. Anecdotally, the people I met who lived through it were traumatized into a scarcity mentality and would spend the rest of their lives hoarding anything and using it to gain a sense of control. Certainly FOX news knew how to get to them with fear, formative fear.
The key parameter that has changed all over the world is there are more net benefit recipients than net payers in (i.e. far more old people relative to young people).
By far, the largest wealth transfer that happens is young to old, via defined benefit pensions (such as social security), healthcare, and asset price increases (via decreases in purchasing power of the currency).
In a democracy, most voters will vote for these policies, because most voters are or will soon be beneficiaries of these policies. I am betting that Millenials, once they are in their 50s, will continue voting for the same policies that Boomers have for the past 20 years, since they will have the same incentives.
Also much more addicted to service economy with little survival and self sufficiency instincts.
Anecdotally, very briefly dated a 40 year old who claimed she only ever cooked boxed food; had never even baked or microwaved a potato. Her words!
They’re the Gizmodo and Ars Technica journalist crowd exploiting slave labor while bitching about social justice. The 1984 double speak is strong with them.
America is a passive investor society. Like Trump thinking factories will just appear because he wishes it, Millennials wish to be enriched without giving a shit about externalities.
I base this entirely off their actual effort on the ground. Their "thoughts and prayers" may be cranked to 11, but my lived experience is they're even more disconnected from obligation to themselves than Boomers and GenX who at least spent some part of their life solving their ground truth problems.
They prefer socialism (which I am not against) because they realize they're screwed as individuals, they need help. Many probably expect they'll be served by it, not serving it.
Thanks for this. This helped me understand Zuckerberg’s recent change of style.
It is now clear that he made a repositioning, and not that was fruit of some psychological breakthrough or something like that.
At the same time it’s scary to think about to what extent that men can go for business and also, given his pathetic behavior at the White House dinner, who is actually controlling that man.
The thing that most surprises me in these emails are that those two people care about housing price or student debt, or millennials in general.
And cynical me can't brush of the feeling that this is satire or that I need to read between the lines.
A dude that buys all houses around him just to get privacy and "fuck off" others (Zuck) cares about housing? A guy that think Greta is antichrist and think anyone that blocks AI advancement is antichrist, somehow thinks "we should look at why millennials choose socialism" as a thought process?
A more realistic, "what they mean" interpretation of this emailing is:
"FB product have influence over millennials (Instagram) and Boomers (Facebook). Boomers are dying out, so we should double down on our grip over millennials and tune the algorithms so we can manipulate them more than ever. We should lobby and push out the boomers and set millennials in the position of institutional power, and no other cohorts, so that we have a direct pipeline of controlling the public discord and communication between this generation "
Surprisingly self-aware and empathetic from Thiel:
> 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.
But when he gives examples of the "iron grip" boomers have on power, he only talks about their control of universities and the government. He leaves out wealth and capital.
Socialism in real life = Biggest Government, Biggest Tech monopoly, forced uniformity, no self-agency, no authenticity for anyone who slightly disagrees with any aspect of the agenda, etc.
No offence but Venezuela is a political meme and one of the most corrupt country out there lol, given your natural resources you should be doing way better regardless of where the government leans.
Socialism brought a lot of good things all over Europe in the 1900s
Give me a definition of socialism that only includes the good things done in Western Europe and excludes all of the bad things that happened in Soviet Union, China, Venezuela etc.
If we want to judge financial systems based on past examples look no further than the first large implementation of capitalism via a joint stock company, the East India Company. Capitalism at it's base and purest form leads to as much pain/horrible behavior as the socialism examples.
Not offended. It is one of the most corrupt countries since socialism. It was thriving when I grew up there. But when you steal, oppress, and kill competent leaders because you resent them having more money than you, and give entire industries (steel, gold, petroleum) to the "workers" because they think collective thinking > a single phD who knows what he's doing, the industries rot and fail, like they did.
> give entire industries (steel, gold, petroleum) to the "workers"
That's one way to put it, the other way to put it is that your corrupt government seized the industries and put their cronies in charge, which I would say is more accurate.
That's literally how socialism and communism works in real life.
Radicals tell the masses what they want to hear, and then seize radical power, take their weapons, and force their will upon the people, while claiming it's for everyone's benefit. People who haven't witnessed it firsthand believe the insane pink-powder theory that "if I were in charge, I would be able to implement it correctly", daydreaming they are superior and able to handle dictator-level power. Why else would Carl Marx and others admit it has to be forced upon an unwilling population?
What you're describing is a mix of populism and plutocracy/kleptocracy/oligarchy, these can and do thrive under any type of political or economical system, they didn't wait for socialism to exist... and unless Putin and Trump are far left radical communists, they're implementing, in different ways, what you just described lmao.
you can't philosophy reality away with your academic theories. This is why research has to be validated with real life results. It's basic scientific theory.
My IQ is not 300, but it's sufficient to understand reality:
- Union of Soviet Socialist Republics: operated under the Communist Party's centralized control, with state ownership of production, suppression of dissent, and looked more like communist authoritarianism than democratic socialism.
- CCP, Cuba, North Korea: they call themselves socialists while being led by communist parties.
- Democratic socialism like Sweden, Norway, Denmark: very different from the above.
** maybe edit of un-shame: ... is it?
* edit of shame: it's satire. Confirmation bias is a hell of a drug.
> 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
That is an absolutely bananas read of Zuck's place in American culture.
I’m browsing around on this site and don’t see any indication that this is satire. I think your initial reaction is correct.
He is flattening Mark in order to keep him under his leash. Zuck has never said something generationally interesting
Was so confused on your comment cause to me it seemed like he was massively inflating the Zuck.
Till I figured u likely slightly mistyped flattering, haha.
It's true for technology in the sense that anytime Congress wants to bring in someone for a hearing about anything tangentially related to being online, Zuckerberg will be invited.
But beyond that, yeah.
Being the cause of widespread despair, hate and fear, and so, the one most often called upon to be held accountable (at least from an optics perspective) is dramatically different than being "'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" which is a completely delusional take.
I’ll say this: When you can’t distinguish reality from satire any more, you know we’re royally screwed.
> That is an absolutely bananas read of Zuck's place in American culture.
It’s flattery. Consider the audience for the emails. These were not intended for the public.
It's important to understand that Peter Thiel is incredibly stupid.
Perhaps his most benign character flaw.
But that does beg the question - what is it about our current system (western civilisation) that seems to reward the incredibly stupid.
Though I do wonder if you looked at all people with a net worth of over say 100M whether the proportion of incredibly stupid people would be the same as the general population or whether we just have so many incredibly stupid people some of them will get lucky.
Is it really satire? If so, I'm genuinely angry this was not flagged as such. But there is no indication on the website, and they have some older emails which sound familiar as authentic.
Why are main stream media reporting on this, if it's satire? It's supposedly from a court filing in Tennessee vs Meta.
It sure reads like satire but I dont think it is.
I just realized it’s satire now that I’m actually reading their thread further.
This is not satire. This is a website that has been around for years that has an email archive from emails released in lawsuits against tech companies. The page literally sites the specific case ("Tennessee v. Meta (2024)") that this came from and is easily verifiable.
Not satire. They really are just that up their own asses.
> They really are just that up their own asses.
I remember perhaps a decade ago, a coworker and I were watching a clip of Zuckerberg walking up to a group of employees and they started clapping for him. I mentioned how odd it was to see, and he thought it was perfectly natural to applaud the CEO of your company. We never applauded when our boss showed up, and I've never really been sure where the line is for which authority I'm supposed to cheer for merely from being in their presence. I haven't thought about it too much since then, but obviously it's stuck with me.
As a society, we've all had our lips pretty firmly pressed onto the asses of the oligarchs for quite awhile, so it seems pretty natural that they think it's the natural order of things.
Whoopsie. Bizarre that it's this plausible but it shows how prone I am to confirmation bias. I'm adding an edit to the comment but leaving it up as a reminder.
I’m actually not sure yet, I was more being tongue in cheek.
The most striking thing about this exchange for me is how abstract it is: until the last email from Clegg, there's no reference to any of Facebook/Meta's products. It sounds more like political strategists trying to find out how to appeal to Millennials, but by pandering to Millennials' pre-existing political views rather than trying to push a political view.
They're parasites, data parasites, political parasites, economical parasites, ...
> Millennials remain our most active users.
Even in back in 2019 I have a hard time believing this was true. As a millennial, my facebook feed was overtaken by my parents generation in the early 2010s and the handful of peers I know who still use it regularly use it to communicate with that generation.
Maybe he's counting Instagram usage as part of Facebook?
Zuckerberg as generational representative made my millennial and Gen Z kids lol
Isn't Thiel the one that believes democracy and freedom are incompatible and also a co-founder of Palantir? Why do we give these people any legitimacy? Because they have money?
Peter Thiel knows about the antichrist..
Sorry, this song has been in my head since I saw the South Park episode. Highly recommend anyone to watch the 2nd Trump era episodes, they sure rid these people of any legitimacy they might have.
We don't give them legitimacy. The people who govern us do; they don't actually care about democracy, the second it causes them to lose elections. Look at Trump: lost an election, incited a riot to overthrow the peaceful transfer of power, pardoned those who were complicit in it.
The sad thing is, because the Dem playbook is now "fight fire with fire" (cf. the gerrymandering wars), it is only a matter of time until they stoop to the same level of overthrowing legitimate elections, in the name of fighting fire with fire...
It's extremely telling that as Thiel is talking about Zuck's speech at Harvard, he is using the pronoun "we", as if Thiel was also giving the speech.
Zuck is Thiel's mouthpiece, through and through. And it explains everything about Meta.
> When Mark and Priscilla commit to giving away 99% of their wealth during their lifetimes
I hadn't heard this before but googling it seems like a genuine commitment at the time[0]. I mostly feel like Zuck isn't making the world a better place, but this sounds really impressive as a commitment - any idea if this commitments been stuck to now we're around 10 years on?
[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-34978249
> giving away
Giving away to their own LLC, not to a non-profit [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chan_Zuckerberg_Initiative
That's so interesting- I'd assumed from the name that it was a charity for allocating donations, but legally it's a regular company?
Seems like its activities are mostly charity based at least.
It's a confusing thing, and I still don't really understand what 99% of wealth over the course of a lifetime actually means in real terms. Is that of lifetime wealth? 99% of Zuck's wealth from 2015 over the course of his life?
Yep. All are valid questions. I would rather have Zuckerberg donate to charitable causes than not. But this kind of bullshit indicates me that it's mainly for show.
How kind of him to give his wealth away after intentionally using his company to fracture society as much as he could to earn the money in the first place
I get it, meta has caused a huge amount of societal damage, and we wouldn't need philanthropists if we fairer economies.
But people are complicated, and if Zuckerberg really is giving away 99% of his wealty to causes, that's a positive and worth discussing. Even if it doesn't make up for other harm.
Sigh.
No, Zuckerberg did not set out consciously trying to "fracture society". He started out trying to provide a way to rate women at Harvard by how attractive they were, then by just trying to optimize revenue without any consideration for unintended consequences. Then kept going.
Not understanding the failure mode is going to just lead to repeating the same mistakes at even grander scales, like what's happening now with AI. Nerds obsessed with creating "AGI" without the capability or willingness to think through the potential consequences.
This is like the oil companies that hid the internal climate change studies for as long as they could. Zuck knew what he was doing long before everyone else did. Acting like he was just dumb and uninformed is wrong. When they started he might not have realized how bad optimizing for engagement was but it doesn't take a genius to realize what was happening with the data they have. He's not some starry eyed kid who accidentally made a monster, he found out he could become one of the richest men in the world if he made his monster vicious enough. This is a guy that started buying the land for his survival bunker 10 years ago.
Is “techmails.com” a trustworthy source? This seems like a made up thread. Although plausible enough to seem real.
Yes, this site usually publishes emails released into the public record via court cases.
This exchange is cited as:
And where is that document? I can claim this document is from wherever if there is no way to find that document.
Sorry this just reads way too much like fiction and if I have two hypotheses about its origin:
1. Real court document that I can’t find the source for and have to trust a random substack is telling me is real.
2. AI generated conversation for views.
I’m inclined to the second these days.
But if it’s real: the fact that guys real life conversations read like satire is telling…
https://www.tn.gov/attorneygeneral/news/2024/1/10/pr23-03.ht...
https://www.tn.gov/content/dam/tn/attorneygeneral/documents/...
Previously (2024-07-07; 136 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40898654
I didn't know that. I encountered these emails recently from the Tech Emails X account and figured I'd share here because 1) it's very timely considering the NYC mayor elections and 2) HN is a great place to read about people's thoughts on topics like these outside of where I usually hangout.
"One example of such an "iron grip" from my colleague Eric Weinstein: Of the 67 top research universities in the US, 62 have Baby Boomer presidents (three are Silent Generation and only two are Generation X). Today, the median age of these 67 university presidents is 65 years-old... And this is very different from the recent past. Only thirty years ago, in 1990, the median age of these same university presidents was a much lower 52-years old;"
Got to admit that's very interesting. That was January 5, 2020, I wonder how it looks today.
I asked chat:
Boomers: ~13 of 20 (~65%) Examples: Princeton (Christopher Eisgruber, 1961), MIT (Sally Kornbluth, 1960), Harvard (Alan Garber, 1955), Duke (Vincent Price, 1957), Brown (Christina Paxson, 1960), Johns Hopkins (Ron Daniels, 1959), Columbia’s acting leaders across 2024–25 were also Boomers.
Gen X: ~7 of 20 (~35%) Examples: Stanford (Jonathan Levin, 1972), Yale (Maurie McInnis, 1966), Dartmouth (Sian Beilock, 1976), Rice (Reginald DesRoches, 1967), Vanderbilt (Daniel Diermeier, 1965), WashU (Andrew D. Martin, 1972), Notre Dame (Rev. Robert A. Dowd, 1965).
Millennials/Silent: 0 in this Top-20 (today). (A few large publics just outside the USNWR top-20 have Boomer or Gen-X chancellors as well; e.g., UC Berkeley’s Rich Lyons, 1961.)
The boomers are still holding on to power. Amazing!
What's it like in the private sector?
Gen X: ~53% (Microsoft/S. Nadella 1967; Alphabet/S. Pichai 1972; Amazon/A. Jassy 1968; Tesla/E. Musk 1971; Eli Lilly/D. Ricks 1967; Walmart/D. McMillon 1966; Tencent/Ma Huateng 1971; Visa/R. McInerney 1975; Mastercard/M. Miebach 1968; ExxonMobil/D. Woods 1965; plus Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters 1970.)
Boomers: ~43% (Nvidia/J. Huang 1963; Apple/T. Cook 1960; Saudi Aramco/A. Nasser 1958; Broadcom/Hock Tan 1951/52; TSMC/C.C. Wei 1953; JPMorgan/J. Dimon 1956; Oracle/S. Catz 1961; plus Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos 1964.)
Millennials: ~5% (Meta/Mark Zuckerberg 1984.)
Silent Generation: ~5% (Berkshire Hathaway/Warren Buffett 1930 — slated to hand CEO role to Greg Abel, b. 1962, at year-end 2025.)
A little better, but my gosh they are really holding on. I'm sure it is unprecedented. Certainly heath is better than any time in history, but this seems extreme.
Update:
It looks like there has been some turnover at the universities since the quote from Eric Weinstein. I quick survey (could be incorrect!) says it is now more around 63.
That's still high but not as high as what Eric Weinstein was quoting.
Would be a great time series.
Do these dweebs ever let up on huffing their own farts? I can only hope that the actual measurements of their declining platform influence and use are true and we see FB peter out at some point. Sadly, it'll be replaced by something even more banal, but at least Zuck will fade away, here's hoping Thiel does as well.
Are we sure these guys didn’t actively contribute to creating this future?
> 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!
That entire paragraph is mind bending. I really wish he had enumerated for a wider audience what was there because you could read something quite profound into it.
> 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
Fucks sake... that is an absolutely bananas read of Zuck's place in American culture.
This site needs better links to sources. Hard links to the case files + Archive.org mirror too.
"This document is from Tennessee v. Meta (2024)" ain't cut it in the age of LLMs anymore
> 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.
They really are up their own asses so much in this thread. Just the arrogance of these people absolutely kills me.
Peter Thiel thinks Greta Thunberg is the antichrist. this should be disqualifying for life in the public sphere and somehow it is not.
It's always projection with those people.
Can you please express a coherent thought instead of regurgitating the same meme that appears in any discussion about anything?
Yes, it is very much projection.
It is also (and it surprises me that this ancient observation is so little cited), a highly visible example of
"Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely".
Watching at these people accumulate and hoard hundreds of billions of wealth, in a capitalist society where wealth equals power, and become ever more corrupt as they do so, simply demonstrates the point yet again. And we must suffer the consequences as they choose to corrupt the govt so they can accumulate more power instead of doing works to benefit all.
Just for some perspective, I once calculated what it means to be rich. I called it at spending at a constant average of USD$2500/day. With 'only' $20million yielding 5%, you have $2700/day without even touching principle. There is no level of basic and even luxury needs that cannot be met with that kind of spending. OK, you want more, how about spending $25,000 per day, EVERY day for the rest of your life? That takes 'only' $200 million.
Those people have hundreds of times the amount of money that could ever make a difference in their standard of living.
The point is that once you reach past these levels, more money literally makes no material difference in your standard of living. Hoarding more money is only about one thing, power.
As a society, we need to be doing something different.
We must understand that all of our industries leaders are deeply mentally ill and dangerous people.
Whether that is from not ever being told no once they got rich enough or whether it's pathological to even seek out that dimension of wealth is not clear, but the result is worrying either way.
Understanding isn't going far enough (though it's a nescessary first step), We should all be demanding that our governments reign these idiots in before they do something we can't undo.
That Clegg is in these emails is particularly onerous.
Britain's ex-Deputy Prime Minister it so happens.
Are you a licensed psychiatrist?
Are Ubers licensed taxis? Are Airbnbs licensed hotels?
So you're like an Uber psychiatrist compared to a licensed taxi psychiatrist?
Licenses don't matter in the toxic world these people are building.
What the fuck is the "public sphere" and who decides who does or does not get a membership card?
Like, call Thiel an idiot with stupid ideas that are dumb, fine, but trying to cancel someone from the "public sphere" just reeks of passive aggression.
I'd read this as "no-one should take the insane person seriously".
Well then just say that.
> What the fuck is the "public sphere"
All of us, collectively.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_sphere
> and who decides who does or does not get a membership card?
All of us, collectively.
And Elon Musk does Nazi salutes in-front of the nation and just goes back to being CEO of things.
Why the down votes? Should I not believe my own eyes?
> The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command
George Orwell, 1984
If it was not a guy who regularly engages with and thus gives platform to neo-Nazi accounts on X I might've considered giving him the benefit of doubt.
It is very easy to find specific accounts that Musk brings readers to (or you can just be on X and follow him):
https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-x-blocked-journalists-...
https://www.sacurrent.com/news/revealed-the-operators-behind...
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r/Millennials has a relevant list of Millennial celebrities.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Millennials/comments/1g1gw7v/famous...
Zuckerberg thinks he’s more well-known than Taylor Swift, Justin Bieber, Ed Sheeran, Scarlett Johansson, Adele, Lady Gaga, Cristiano Ronaldo, Beyoncé…
I mean, he is *as* well known as those people. You think more people know who Ed Sheeran than Zuckerberg?
Are you aware that Ed Sheeran is one of—and was not that long ago the—best selling music artist in the world?
The fact you only nitpicked a single name from that list is, I think, quite telling. We know who Zuckerberg is. Non-tech-nerds just going on with their lives don’t for the most part, even if they use apps from Meta. If they even heard the name, it was due to some negative news related to Facebook or Meta.
This is some data about US:
https://today.yougov.com/ratings/entertainment/fame/people/a...
Zuckerberg is 49, Sheeran is 169 (Taylor Swift is on 4; Bieber, Lady Gaga and Beyoncé are also more famous than Zuckerberg; the rest in the list are less famous)
> This is some data about US
Which, by definition, is incomplete when we’re talking about the world. If we examined by country, it would fluctuate wildly. For example, in any country with soccer as the national sport, Ronaldo would crush Zuckerberg in popularity.
Either way, the point (in which I think we’re all mostly in agreement) is that Zuckerberg’s comment falls somewhere between the absurd and the delusional. If you want to pick a different list of names, go right ahead. I’d say Tailor Swift is indisputable, though.
The Millennial age group is 29 to 44 years and most of these people used FB in college and saw the social network.
It's true, I picked him because he was the obvious laggard in that list of celebrities (he is by far the least talented of everyone else in the list) . The poll someone else posted shows in the US, Zuckerberg is more well known than Sheeran.
This absolutely does not translate into him being well-known.
People don't buy Facebook ads or make Facebook accounts because Mark Zuckerberg is there, but they do buy Ed Sheeran music because it has the name "Ed Sheeran" written on it.
That said, I'm not into music and assumed he was a footballer.
> That said, I'm not into music and assumed he was a footballer.
Same (minus the footballer part). When I was made aware of Ed Sheeran, he was already the biggest artist in the world. But that says something about me and my general disinterest for music and pop culture, not Sheeran’s popularity.
100%. I think people are way more likely to know the name of one of their favorite artists versus the owner of an online platform, no matter what that platform is.
To be fair, knowing someone's name is only one property of many when it comes to knowing them. It is technically possible — although perhaps unlikely — for someone to be more well-known than another even without having a recognizable name.
Zuckerberg probably is more well-known than Ed Sheeran. "Ed Sheeran", the name, may be more familiar, but what do typical people really know about the details of his life? Zuckerberg, on the other hand, had a movie made about him. At least everyone knows about Taylor Swift's dating life, if we want to compare to music celebrities.
Still, imagine Prince William or Prince Harry have to be most well-known. They've been chronicled since birth. Especially when you look past an Americentric view and turn to the world stage.
Yes.
They are the Bond villains of their generation.
That Meta/facebook had a special role in the lives of his generation is not up for debate. It's a fact. Also, zuckerburg probably meant he was the "most well-known person in tech" of his generation, which is true. But expanding it beyond tech, he definitely is as well-known as anyone else in his generation. Everyone in his generation knows what facebook is. Everyone in his generation knows zuckerburg.
The guy may be arrogant, but nothing about his statement was arrogant. He was stating facts.
You literally had to rewrite the meaning of the statement to remove the arrogance. He didn't say "in tech", he said what he said.
> You literally had to rewrite the meaning of the statement
No I didn't because the context of the statement was up for debate.
> He didn't say "in tech", he said what he said.
The email thread about about tech though. Besides, I also wrote "But expanding it beyond tech, he definitely is as well-known as anyone else in his generation."
My comment was in good fath and addressed both scenarios : "tech" and "non-tech"
Your original comment and not surprising your reply was not in good faith because have an agenda.
Well, it’s probably true only if you consider sports and media celebrities as not people, which would be a stretch.
I've never seen Zuckerberg fill up a stadium the same way Messi, Ronaldo, Taylor Swift or Beyonce have...
tbf they haven't been the villain in a movie (yet...)
So “The Social Dilemma” doesn’t count?
Not as much as "The Social Network", probably.
Musk tried that once at a Dave Chappelle show. It didn't go so well for him.
Those that have their names on the high score board of capitalism are truly the Einsteins of our generation and we should be so lucky to hear every thought stream that dribbles out of their heads.
Devils advocate here
I’m not agreeing, but I’m hard pressed to find another person that is from the millennial generation that has been a persistent “public figure” as long and persistently than Zuck. He has been persistently in the news more or less daily since 2006.
Can you name another millennial that has a wider and longer lasting notoriety?
Does that mean that people respect him, or think of him as an ideal person or whatever?
No
but that’s not what Zuckerberg is saying - he’s saying “well known”
I’m not sure I could name another millennial that is as well known globally for as long - maybe Ronaldo or Taylor Swift
> I’m hard pressed to find another person that is from the millennial generation that has been a persistent “public figure” as long and persistently than Zuck.
Prince William and Prince Harry have him beat on that front, surely? They've been persistent public figures since birth.
And if we limit it to modern times, Taylor Swift has got to be way more well known. Even my young kids know who Taylor Swift is. They have no clue about who Zuckerberg is.
Remind me which prince it was that moved to the US and is cut off from the royal family? Was that William?
Exactly. If Zuckerberg moved to a new home, nobody would ever know. But when Prince Harry does, it's headline news. You may have forgotten his exact name, but a name is only one property of many when it comes to knowing someone. That you know intimate details of his life is telling about how is more well-known.
Harry left by choice and might be reconciling, Andrew was pushed because everyone hates him, William is the one who is next in line to be king.
Do you think that is genuinely the news in general, or just the subset of the news you personally follow?
I would imagine Swifties see a lot more Taylor Swift news than Zuckerberg news. For someone on HN, they're going to see a lot more Zuckerberg news than average.
That may be true, but that's not the news I'm exposed to. I only see him pop up every few years or so when he's announcing The Next Big Thing or trying to look/act more like a human person.
I don't think this particular Satan needs or deserves an advocate.
> Thanks Peter – hugely thought provoking!
Excuse me while I throw up in my mouth, I never liked Clegg much even when he was in office but bleh.
Well if the changeover happens it seems it will happen in the 2030s.
Amd millennials found their replacement for housing bubble with the stocks / crypto bubble.
And democracy is good for boomers, because they are too many and outnumber everyone else in battle. So millennials and genz are not unsympathetic to less democracy (a view that Thiel shares).
Thiel in this context could be considered a boomer, and his interests lie with them
I would like to see a poll showing that Millennials as a whole are unsympathetic to Democracy.
Facebook and instagram are a disease. Time and again Meta’s properties have been shown to be detrimental to children’s (and adults’) mental health. Even by Meta’s own research!
The whole thing stinks of the same foul reek as big tobacco. When their reckoning comes we will wonder how we could have let one megalomaniac’s scam go so far.
> They trust me. Dumb fucks.
> Zuck aut nihil.
He never changed.
Along with every other social network.
You’re probably right. That doesn’t exonerate Zuck from his crimes.
Wow am I reading this correctly? To recap:
- They're going to run Zuck for president to beat the millennial socialist zeitgeist.
- They're going to use generational warfare to stage an institutional coup.
> we need to do better than simply dismiss them by saying that they are stupid or entitled or brainwashed
Classy.
I did not get him running for president from this. Which part made you think that?
Granted I'm taking creative liberties reading between the lines and mapping to other context. I'd give it low odds overall, but I'm gleaning a non-zero likelihood worthy of consideration:
1. "Mark Zuckerberg has been cast as the spokesman for the Millennial generation."
2. "I am the most well-known person of my generation"
3. "we'll even see a millennial president within the next few cycles by 2032."
4. The direct comparison to Pete Buttigieg.
5. He's signaled a presidential bid in the recent past.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/alexkantrowitz/mark-zuc...
Some additional interpretation of mine from the exchange:
6. The expressed need to "win" in the policy arena in the next few years.
7. The imminent "transfer of value" (and power) from boomers to millennials, and the explicit urgency and intent to "position" themselves to capitalize on this "rapid shift."
Further real world context:
8. Thiel's track record of hands on political involvement with Trump, Vance, and Yarvin.
9. Thiel's recent "antichrist" lectures which articulates a fear of being "scapegoated."
Please point me to the above quotes in the emails.
> We have a team working on an ambitious long term project on loneliness/isolation which, again, has the potential to hold particular appeal to the Millennial sentiments set out in the paper. The latest plans will be presented to Mark next week.
With the goal to reduce it, right?
...right?
> 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.
I do not understand the reason for assuming any successive group of old leaders to behave differently than boomers?
Millenials are going to have an even more disproportionate old age population, and presumably will seek to squeeze the younger generations even more than the boomers:
https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/2...
The era you experienced growing up can influence how you are when you get older quite a bit. The generation before the Great Depression tried to create a more progressive equitable world but of course that was eroded eventually. Everything goes in cycles and the next generation coming that experiences the fallout from all our recent excesses will be different as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_Era
Interesting perspective. Anecdotally, the people I met who lived through it were traumatized into a scarcity mentality and would spend the rest of their lives hoarding anything and using it to gain a sense of control. Certainly FOX news knew how to get to them with fear, formative fear.
The key parameter that has changed all over the world is there are more net benefit recipients than net payers in (i.e. far more old people relative to young people).
By far, the largest wealth transfer that happens is young to old, via defined benefit pensions (such as social security), healthcare, and asset price increases (via decreases in purchasing power of the currency).
In a democracy, most voters will vote for these policies, because most voters are or will soon be beneficiaries of these policies. I am betting that Millenials, once they are in their 50s, will continue voting for the same policies that Boomers have for the past 20 years, since they will have the same incentives.
nah, I think by the time millenials are old we'll all still be working for our boss: an 160 year old cyborg demon AI
The current oligarchs plan on dispensing all together with the need for the blood of the young by replacing them with AI and robots.
It will be an endless whinge "the Boomers screwed us over, so we need to screw over everyone else just to get by."
Also much more addicted to service economy with little survival and self sufficiency instincts.
Anecdotally, very briefly dated a 40 year old who claimed she only ever cooked boxed food; had never even baked or microwaved a potato. Her words!
They’re the Gizmodo and Ars Technica journalist crowd exploiting slave labor while bitching about social justice. The 1984 double speak is strong with them.
America is a passive investor society. Like Trump thinking factories will just appear because he wishes it, Millennials wish to be enriched without giving a shit about externalities.
I base this entirely off their actual effort on the ground. Their "thoughts and prayers" may be cranked to 11, but my lived experience is they're even more disconnected from obligation to themselves than Boomers and GenX who at least spent some part of their life solving their ground truth problems.
They prefer socialism (which I am not against) because they realize they're screwed as individuals, they need help. Many probably expect they'll be served by it, not serving it.
Thanks for this. This helped me understand Zuckerberg’s recent change of style.
It is now clear that he made a repositioning, and not that was fruit of some psychological breakthrough or something like that.
At the same time it’s scary to think about to what extent that men can go for business and also, given his pathetic behavior at the White House dinner, who is actually controlling that man.
The thing that most surprises me in these emails are that those two people care about housing price or student debt, or millennials in general.
And cynical me can't brush of the feeling that this is satire or that I need to read between the lines.
A dude that buys all houses around him just to get privacy and "fuck off" others (Zuck) cares about housing? A guy that think Greta is antichrist and think anyone that blocks AI advancement is antichrist, somehow thinks "we should look at why millennials choose socialism" as a thought process?
A more realistic, "what they mean" interpretation of this emailing is:
"FB product have influence over millennials (Instagram) and Boomers (Facebook). Boomers are dying out, so we should double down on our grip over millennials and tune the algorithms so we can manipulate them more than ever. We should lobby and push out the boomers and set millennials in the position of institutional power, and no other cohorts, so that we have a direct pipeline of controlling the public discord and communication between this generation "
Or maybe it shows that The Bad Guys have complicated and unexpected and nuanced thoughts sometimes?
Surprisingly self-aware and empathetic from Thiel:
> 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.
But when he gives examples of the "iron grip" boomers have on power, he only talks about their control of universities and the government. He leaves out wealth and capital.
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Reminder to millennials:
Socialism in real life = Biggest Government, Biggest Tech monopoly, forced uniformity, no self-agency, no authenticity for anyone who slightly disagrees with any aspect of the agenda, etc.
Source: I fled Venezuela because I lived in it.
No offence but Venezuela is a political meme and one of the most corrupt country out there lol, given your natural resources you should be doing way better regardless of where the government leans.
Socialism brought a lot of good things all over Europe in the 1900s
Give me a definition of socialism that only includes the good things done in Western Europe and excludes all of the bad things that happened in Soviet Union, China, Venezuela etc.
Blowing pink powder in your face while telling you what you want to hear.
If we want to judge financial systems based on past examples look no further than the first large implementation of capitalism via a joint stock company, the East India Company. Capitalism at it's base and purest form leads to as much pain/horrible behavior as the socialism examples.
Why are you changing the subject?
Give me a definition of capitalism that only include the good things...
Almost as if it was a spectrum, almost as if it was a balancing act between two opposites
Almost as if we should not think in term of black and white definitions of ideological systems that cannot be 100% implemented
It really makes you think doesn't it ?
Not offended. It is one of the most corrupt countries since socialism. It was thriving when I grew up there. But when you steal, oppress, and kill competent leaders because you resent them having more money than you, and give entire industries (steel, gold, petroleum) to the "workers" because they think collective thinking > a single phD who knows what he's doing, the industries rot and fail, like they did.
> give entire industries (steel, gold, petroleum) to the "workers"
That's one way to put it, the other way to put it is that your corrupt government seized the industries and put their cronies in charge, which I would say is more accurate.
That's literally how socialism and communism works in real life.
Radicals tell the masses what they want to hear, and then seize radical power, take their weapons, and force their will upon the people, while claiming it's for everyone's benefit. People who haven't witnessed it firsthand believe the insane pink-powder theory that "if I were in charge, I would be able to implement it correctly", daydreaming they are superior and able to handle dictator-level power. Why else would Carl Marx and others admit it has to be forced upon an unwilling population?
What you're describing is a mix of populism and plutocracy/kleptocracy/oligarchy, these can and do thrive under any type of political or economical system, they didn't wait for socialism to exist... and unless Putin and Trump are far left radical communists, they're implementing, in different ways, what you just described lmao.
you can't philosophy reality away with your academic theories. This is why research has to be validated with real life results. It's basic scientific theory.
Which academic theories are you talking about?
The US and Russia aren't under any kind of socialist system right now but suffer from the things you just described as socialism shortcomings.
France was socialist for a long time and did not suffer any of what you just mentioned.
The only thing that isn't validated by reality is your over simplified mental model of what socialism is.
Pain and suffering, families thorn apart and blood of thousands of people are a meme to you? Fuck you, pull your head out of your ass
> Socialism brought a lot of good things all over Europe in the 1900s
Just ask Poland!
You should see what the first large joint stock company, The East India Company, brought the nations it operated in.
I forgot to mention that 280 iq individuals who think socialism = communism = USSR = gulags can refrain from commenting
No wonder we can't have any serious discussions on these topics...
My IQ is not 300, but it's sufficient to understand reality:
- Union of Soviet Socialist Republics: operated under the Communist Party's centralized control, with state ownership of production, suppression of dissent, and looked more like communist authoritarianism than democratic socialism.
- CCP, Cuba, North Korea: they call themselves socialists while being led by communist parties.
- Democratic socialism like Sweden, Norway, Denmark: very different from the above.
Well, socialism also includes the National Socialists of various nations ... perhaps we should clarify our terms rather than using an ambiguous word?
This article flame bait. No point in keeping it up.
Satire, by definition, is flamebait.
That this particular of satire is nigh on indistinguishable from reality/so believable indicates how good a satire it is.
It's not satire.
Reality is stranger than fiction.
How is this satire
No matter how hard I try I fail to see why would anyone mentally stable dislike Peter Thiel.
Besides hating immigrants and Palantir contributing to the surveillance state? Just like drug dealers, I guess someone else would do it if he weren't.
I think he's beyond the childish "hate" phase. He argues against unbridled immigration but why shouldn't he.