Zuck's 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 ads 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.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
pluralistic.net/2025/05/07/rah…
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
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.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
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.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
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.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
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:
businessinsider.com/mark-zucke…
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Mark Zuckerberg's shirt says 'All Zuck or All Nothing' in Latin
Katie Notopoulos (Business Insider)Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
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:
slate.com/technology/2018/10/f…
The "boy genius" story is an example of Silicon Valley's storied "reality distortion field," pioneered by Steve Jobs.
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The Real Lie About Online Video Runs Deeper Than Facebook’s False Metrics
Will Oremus (Slate)Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
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."
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Zuck lost more than $70b on metaverse, but, as a boy genius Texas marksman, he still inspires confidence from credulous investors. Zuck's AI initiatives generated *huge* interest in Meta stock, with investors betting 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.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
This makes the old dotcom economics of "losing money on every sale, but making it up in volume" look positively rosy:
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:
finance.yahoo.com/news/the-ai-…
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Reality Check
Edward Zitron (Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At)Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
This narrative is especially galling because it's *literally the same story* Zuck has been telling for decades: "Facebook has built a mind-control out of Big Data, and we can sell anything to anyone":
pluralistic.net/2021/09/30/don…
This is a facially absurd proposition. After all, everyone who's ever claimed to have perfected mind-control - Rasputin, Mesmer, MK-ULTRA, neurolinguistic programming grifters and pathetic "pick up artists" - was a liar.
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Pluralistic: 30 Sep 2021 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Either they were lying to themselves, or to everyone else. Or both.
But many of tech's critics helped sell this narrative (and thus helped Meta sell ads). Many critics have fallen prey to the sin of "criti-hype," Lee Vinsel's term for critiquing the claims of your adversary without bothering to ask whether they are true:
pluralistic.net/2021/02/02/eut…
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Pluralistic: 02 Feb 2021 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
The project of convincing investors that tech's "dopamine hackers" had perfected mind-control with warmed over, non-replicable Skinnerian behavior-mod and mass surveillance sold a *hell* of a lot of ads. After all, if there's one kind of person the advertising sector has *always* been able to sell to, it's advertising executives, who are the easiest of marks for a story about how easy it is to trick the public into buying whatever you're selling:
pluralistic.net/2020/10/05/flo…
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Pluralistic: 05 Oct 2020 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Every ad-tech sales-bro who takes a meeting with an advertising executive finds himself pushing on an open door. Advertisers *desperately* wants to believe in mind-control rays. Think of the department story magnate John Wannamaker, who said, "half my advertising spending is wasted - I just don't know which half." Imagine: some advertising exec convinced John Wannamaker that he was only wasting *half* of his advertising spending!
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
I've long maintained that the threat from AI to workers isn't that AI can do your job - it's that an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that *can't* do your job:
pluralistic.net/2025/03/18/asb…
The corollary here is that it doesn't matter if AI can design ads that work, not so long as an AI ad salesman can sell this proposition to an advertisers, and not so long as a tech CEO can sell it to investors.
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Pluralistic: AI can’t do your job (18 Mar 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
AI keeps passing the worst kinds of Turing tests - for example, it's great at helping people who are prone to life-destroying hallucinations that they are talking to God:
rollingstone.com/culture/cultu…
Zuck kept up his growth story with this mind control narrative for more than a decade, got caught committing a string of spectacular frauds, and then lured investors back into his stock offerings by telling the *same story*.
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AI-Fueled Spiritual Delusions Are Destroying Human Relationships
Miles Klee (Rolling Stone)Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
This isn't just an indictment of Zuck, it's a stinging rebuke to the whole idea that markets are a kind of infallible computer for assessing and operationalizing information. The market's "thought process" demonstrably lacks the object permanence that most babies acquire by the time they are a year old.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
You can tell when your child has acquired object permanence by the fact that they cease to enjoy "peek-a-boo" (object permanence means they understand where you have gone when your face is hidden).
In claiming that AI will give him an infinite growth mind-control ray, Mark Zuckerberg is challenging the market to a game of peek-a-boo - and he's winning.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel *Picks and Shovels*.
Catch me in #PITTSBURGH at White Whale Books on May 15:
whitewhalebookstore.com/events…
and then in #PDX with BUNNIE HUANG at Barnes and Noble on Jun 20:
More tour dates (#London, #Manchester) here:
martinhench.com
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White Whale Bookstore
whitewhalebookstore.comCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Image:
Cryteria (modified)
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil…
CC BY 3.0
creativecommons.org/licenses/b…
eof/
File:HAL9000.svg - Wikimedia Commons
commons.wikimedia.orgAlexandradal
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •For my part, I've acquired "publicity permanence", I immediately switch in mode "not interested".
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Alex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UK
in reply to Alexandradal • • •@Alexandrad1 Meta/FB ads are the most useless of all of them, and it seems even social marketing teams who make them aren't putting in effort - for instance a UK tool brand doesn't even have a correct clickthrough to the advertised products, and the product pictures themselves haven't even been curated (for instance a torque wrench is shown as a poor-quality photo alongside ratchet spanners rather than separate photos for each.
What's even more daft its its a well known brand, anyone who does maintenance work knows of them and they needn't even bother with these adverts..
Ozzelot
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Pteryx the Puzzle Secretary
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Investors' obsession with "AI" is so extreme that even so simple a free tool as Down For Everyone Or Just Me seems to have undergone a "pivot to AI".
Seriously, I used it a couple of days ago and instead of getting a plain-English result of a connection attempt, it said that there were "no reports" of the payment processor being down, and hey, if you're sick of payment processors being down, why don't you try this ✨chatbot✨? 🤢
Cory Doctorow reshared this.
Seiðr
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Cory Doctorow reshared this.
Peter Cohen
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •the older I get the more Blank Reg I feel.
#MaxHeadroom
youtube.com/watch?v=AnvJREBGy8…
- YouTube
www.youtube.comCavyherd
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Huh. Who knew Grigori Rasputin + virtual Zuck = creepy Mona Lisa?
::shudder::
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your auntifa liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •OMG i just realized what this image is and ihatechu you magnificent freak LOL
@pluralistic
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zetabeta
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •friendly reminder:
meta inc owns, facebook, instagram, threads and whatsapp.
what kind of manipulation whatsapp will start to do !?
btw, is alphabet inc next !?
modris
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sabrina Web 📎 reshared this.
FeralFeminist
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •reshared this
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The Turtle
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •the root flaw with most advertisers is their complete lack of interest in "selling" people what they want and need, but only what the advertiser happens to sell, which they delude themselves into believing that that is what people need and want.
It usually isn't.
Preston MacDougall
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •reshared this
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tessarakt
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Robin Barton
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Toni Aittoniemi
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Maggie Maybe
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •it doesn’t seem like a great investment for them when most of us won’t have any money to spend even if we want to.
All the money in the world poured into ads isn’t going to help them if people can’t buy the bullshit they’re trying to sell us anyway.
But I guess if they want to waste their money making rich people more poor, let them.
What kind of person still uses Meta products anymore anyway?
IceQbe
in reply to Maggie Maybe • • •@maggiejk The network effect stops my family from dropping whatsapp. So I have to be the crazy one pushing forward and being left out of communication or I'm the one forcing them to have 2 messaging apps. Or I'm the coward and accept the status quo.
And Instagram is so easy. And it's 'fun' (ingesting the brain rot) *shiver*. They don't really seem to care that their thoughts are steered by a black box algorithm and not just their subscriptions or filters.
(Same with YouTube.)
The school smartphone ban our politicians want to enforce on kids below 16 has been in the media the last few days and psychologists are asking for an algorithm ban for all teen accounts on social media. I wonder why they don't demand an algorithm ban for everyone!
bovaz
in reply to Maggie Maybe • • •reshared this
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kwayk42
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •SpaceLifeForm
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Zuck is delusional, but the investors that buy this pitch are just as delusional.
#AI #Insanity
Tony Wells
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Cory Doctorow reshared this.
Протест и сопротивление
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Mind control is unlikely, but some kind of old and tired digital fraud is quite possible. My bet would be on "enhanced" images of merchandise that looks nowhere near as attractive IRL.
Old scams still work, you just need to catch the victim off guard.
And of course, it'll lead to a lawsuit, but so did every last one of Zuck's past experiments. When a scammer knows he can always bail himself out of jail time, he'll just keep scamming.
Cory Doctorow reshared this.
Kat the Leopardess
Unknown parent • • •@RealGene @bovaz @maggiejk PayPal (and subsequently, Venmo) started bringing crypto currency into the mix. These days, I see the promotion of those crypto options within the PP interface.
(The SWer in me rolls her eyes at the hypocrisy)
Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •MBybee
Unknown parent • • •reshared this
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KevinOnEarth
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Randy "DUO" Mongenel
Unknown parent • • •Nicole Parsons
Unknown parent • • •@Dss @RandyMongenel @mbybee @RealGene @bovaz @maggiejk@zeroes.ca
These are the people who bought an election to keep their wealth & predatory capitalism:
1. Elon Musk $291,482,587
2. Timothy Mellon $197,047,200
3. Miriam Adelson $148,304,900
4. Richard Uihlein $143,498,936
5. Ken Griffin $108,402,284
6. Jeff Yass $101,128,680
7. Paul E. Singer $66,800,800
8. Marc Andreessen $42,365,113
9. Stephen Schwarzman $40,202,039
10. Timothy Dunn $35,780,200
opensecrets.org/elections-over…
Who are the Biggest Donors?
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MBybee
Unknown parent • • •(sarcasm)
NKT
in reply to Randy "DUO" Mongenel • • •Randy "DUO" Mongenel
in reply to MBybee • • •TC Won't Give In To Lies
in reply to Randy "DUO" Mongenel • • •@RandyMongenel @mbybee @RealGene @bovaz @maggiejk
The Bobs called it over 30 years ago.
Soon to come "Food to Rent"
youtu.be/RVVfYZFjh6w?feature=s…
- YouTube
youtu.be