- Today in Tabs
- Posts
- Heart of Zuckness
In keeping with the enthusiastic adoption of fascism by the rest of his cohort of American tech billionaires, a characteristically waxy and dead-eyed Mark Zuckerberg, clad in the Uncut Gems cosplay he has favored recently, announced that he’s unlocked a new slur pack for all of his company’s websites in a bizarre and unsettling video message.
Mark Zuckerberg on some extremely “exterminate all the brutes” shit.
Wearing a $900,000 watch, Zuckerberg announced that users of Facebook, Instagram and Threads are not merely permitted but affirmatively encouraged to abuse and dehumanize gay people, transgender people, immigrants, and more. As Sam Biddle reports in The Intercept:1
Examples of newly permissible speech on Facebook and Instagram highlighted in the training materials include:
“Immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of shit.”
“Gays are freaks.”
“Look at that [tr***y] (beneath photo of 17 year old girl).”
To match this new spirit of hatefulness in posting, Mike Allen and Sara Fischer report that Meta is also ending employee diversity programs. 404’s Jason Koebler reports that current employees are furious:
One reply to the thread reads “I wish I could resign in protest, but I’ve already resigned.”
[Turn to CAM 2, flip chair around backward] Meta employees, let me rap at you a minute. Sure, “You Can Always Quit,” as we like to say around here. But at this crucial juncture, you can both protect your own livelihood and do so much more good for the world by not quitting. That’s right! Don’t quit, just stop working. Show up every day, don’t complain, don’t draw attention to yourself. But don’t accomplish anything. If you are working on a project, commit in your heart to never finishing it. This will be your last project at Meta, and you will be “working on it” until they force you out. If others rely on you to get their work done, make sure they can’t. If your role involves reviewing pull requests, you and I both know you can find a reason to reject every one. In fact, wouldn’t it be fun to see how many other employees you can drive out first? If you work in an open office space, make sure you chew loudly at all times. Microwave fish in the break room every single day. Be creative! You’ll have plenty of time to think of ideas, with all the work you’re not getting done.
This advice does not apply to Alex Schultz, “the company’s chief marketing officer and highest-ranking gay executive,” who Platformer’s Casey Newton reports:
…suggested in an internal post that people seeing their queer friends and family members abused on Facebook and Instagram could lead to increased support for LGBTQ rights.
“My perspective is we've done well as a community when debate has happened and I was shocked with how far we've gone with censorship of the debate,” Schultz wrote in a post obtained by Platformer. “I personally feel that actually the shock of friends and family seeing me receive abuse as a gay man helped them understand the hatred that exists and hardened support. Most of our progress on rights happened during periods without mass censorship like this and pushing it underground I think has coincided with reversals.”
To Alex Schultz Specifically: Quit, and spend some time thinking about how many dead transgender kids your job was worth.
In case Facebook isn’t destroying your neurological system fast enough, in New York Magazine Ezra Marcus tracked down where the current boom in nitrous oxide came from.
Bucking recent trends in rich people behavior, Stack Overflow and Discourse co-founder Jeff Atwood’s “family pledges half our remaining wealth towards long term efforts ensuring that all Americans continue to have access to the American Dream,” starting with eight $1 million donations to organizations like PEN America, The Trevor Project, and Planned Parenthood.
In Status Oliver Darcy recapped alleged News Corp phone hacking coverup architect and Washington Post publisher Will Lewis’s titanic flop of a year under the outstanding headline “A One-Year Lewising Streak.”
Tom Scocca: President Dragon wants more gold.
“The world we were born into no longer exists:” The end of the long 20th Century.
Donkey from Shrek died. I didn’t even know that was possible.
Today in Extremely Niche Links for Nerds: Jimbo’s Big Naturals for Balatro. Simon Willison’s “Things we learned about LLMs in 2024.” TGeocoder—Automated parsing and geocoding of Telegram news channels.
And Finally: Kate Wagner, “what the fuck are we doing anymore”
However, while I understand this market-adaptive instinct, having suffered through many iterations of it myself, I have reached a point where there are some adaptations I am simply not willing or able to make. To be perfectly honest (irascible), I would rather kill myself if it all goes bad for me than put my ugly visage on TikTok pantomiming the very things I devoted my life and creative energies to writing about in depth because nobody reads anymore and that’s the way it has to be. To be even more frank about another thing no one wants to talk about: why should I bother anyway? People plagiarize my work on the video apps all the time and I just have to shut up and turn the other cheek because there’s no actual way — socially, legally, what have you — to deal with it. If you push back at all, you look like a sore loser, a wash-up. Times have changed, dumbass Millennial, you don’t “own” xyz idea, and so on.
Today’s Song: Ethel Cain, “Vacillator.” If you love me, keep it to yourself.
I apologize for the lack of a song on Monday, I forgot the format of my own newsletter.
Paid subscriptions to Tabs are available again, for $6 a month or $35 for your whole first year. If you missed this newsletter during the hiatus, that’s a pretty good sign that you should be a paid subscriber.
1 Redaction mine, because I do have limits on what slurs I’m willing to publish.
Reply