What’s happening with Facebook?

Posted by Pointman on December 10, 2020 · 6 Comments 

First of all, let’s get your head straight about Mark Zuckerberg. Any big enterprise falls into one of two categories, and Facebook is no different. It either operates along the lines of a horse designed by a supposed committee of excellence, which results in a camel or it’s a pure sleek predator rapaciously growing the bottom line at any cost. The latter is always run by one man who’s effectively a dictator and that’s exactly what Zuckerberg is. Everywhere you look on the internet, you’ll find he’s lauded as a visionary, a technical genius and an all round nice guy who donates millions to various good causes.

I make it my business to study people like that because screw what the board of directors want, it’s him who’ll get his way every time, especially if they own a humongous chunk of the issued stock. Leaving aside all the PR spin, he’s actually a classically simple personality. He’s a grifter who’s always in anything only for what benefit he can get from it. Pure and simple. As a college kid, he helped out three fellow students who were developing something a lot like Facebook, but it turned out he was working on his own side project at the same time and just stealing their ideas. Years later they sued him and it was settled, but I’d bet they walked away with a nice wedge of money.

When he decided to arbitrarily fire some of his managers, they fought back and leaked a selection of his emails to them. Full disclosure of them all would happen in a courtroom but the suit didn’t progress that far since a payoff was agreed and all parties signed a stack of NDAs. To perhaps give a taster of what was in them, in one he’d referred to Facebook users as “dumb fucks” for giving him all their information for free.

So in summary, he’s a predator only interested in money, he’s personally a billionaire several times over and has the business ethics of someone creeping around a battlefield at nighttime in the aftermath of the battle with a handy pair of pliers to harvest gold teeth.

Given that basic what’s in it for me attitude, how was he persuaded to take the risk of changing the course of his money spinning flagship into the dangerous waters of politics by joining in the Steal? Patently, he’s already rich beyond several lifetimes, so what was the deal? What he got out of it was a promise of what wouldn’t happen if he cooperated and they won – he and his company would never face antitrust and monopoly proceedings. Greed is so nice and simple and because of that, eminently readable and predictable.

But alas, life is what happens to plans, as John Lennon observed. Seemingly out of the blue, the Attorneys General of 48 states have launched anti-monopoly suits against him and the cost, time and paralysis of fighting anything like that will grind down any company. Much as I love and revere the typical attorney general, getting a whole bunch of them to act in unison is akin to herding cats. Somebody with a lot of juice has put their very influential hands around the neck of his golden goose at a critical moment in the Steal and is sending a message to the wunderkind.

The question is who? It’s a two horse race with only the Swamp or Trump in it.

The Swamp have had a measure of cooperation out of him but it hasn’t been as quite full on as the soviet style censorship currently being exercised by Google and most especially Twitter. After all, he actually owns Facebook himself rather than the Swamp, so that gives him more latitude than them. Still and all though, he’s not exactly been hostile to the Steal and that’s probably good enough for their purposes at this moment.

There have though been signs of late of him slightly repositioning himself onto the fence just to be on the safe side. Small things like quietly dropping the title President Elect when referring to Biden, which only happens if the man at the top says so. As Fox news is finding out, sudden changes of course can be seriously damaging to the bottom line, so slowly slowly would to be the prudent way to renege on the deal if for some reason he’s beginning to think Trump has a better than good chance of reversing the Steal. Not being hostile to the Steal is good enough for the Swamp at this time, so on balance, I don’t think the message is coming down one of their various butt chains. After all, why risk antagonising a party who’s at least neutral?

It was sudden. Nobody expected it after years of token grumbling over Facebook’s monopoly. It was precisely targetted on an easy win monopoly, if only because of Zuckerberg’s massive share holding in the company. It was well thought out in terms of effect and it’s sent a seismic tremor the length of Silicon Valley. Who’s next, they’re wondering? The message is I’m going to be president when all this is over and I’ll savagely dismember your business, so mitigation is your best option. Trump famously tweeted before he went into politics – stalk long and quietly and then strike like a panther.

Trump’s dabs are all over it.

©Pointman

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Intentions, profiles and predictability.

What’s a butt chain?

Click here for a list of all articles in the Stop the Steal series.

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Filed under Article · Tagged with Facebook, Fighting Big Tech, Stop the Steal