Mark Zuckerberg will never understand why we don't love him
Two men, one gold chain, and a three hour search for validation
Top note: Hey friends. In my last essay, I highlighted LA Mutual Aid’s efforts to coordinate a web of support in response to the LA County fires. Since publishing the piece, I learned that a friend, Katie Clark, lost her apartment in the Eaton fire. I got to know Katie when she took a Barnraisers class— she is one of the most thoughtful organizers I’ve ever met, both in her home of Altadena and nationally (she’s a public library trustee who organizes librarians against fascism). Shortly before the fires, she had volunteered to help build a community of Southern California-based Barnraisers alums. That’s the kind of person she is— always looking for more opportunities to connect. There’s currently a gofundme to support her and her partner. The goal is $15,000 and I truly believe that we can get there.
Speaking of places to support, another pal, the indomitable
, put together one heck of a compendium in her newsletter. If you or your loved ones are in need of support, please let me know. I’m happy to get the word out.“You only believe in starting one of these companies if you believe in giving people a voice.”
-Mark Zuckerberg
This weekend, I cleaned my house and listened to one of the most powerful men in media interview one of the most powerful men in the field of making us miserable.
I’m stretching the truth there. I couldn’t take the three hour Joe Rogan Experience in one fell swoop, so I spread it out over the course of a weekend. Grocery shopping? Joe and Zuck. Making blueberry pancakes both for my own children as well as the other two children who slept over our house on Saturday night? You already know. Helping reassure somebody else’s child that they would get to sleep eventually and that everything would be all right? No, I was completely present for that part. That’s my commitment to you, fellow parents: If your child is staying over at my house and needs “I can’t sleep” reassurance at midnight, I will give that situation my full and undivided attention.
The best part of Joe Rogan’s interview with Mark Zuckerberg was the ad for Den of Thieves 2: Pantera. I haven’t seen the first Den of Thieves, but ad-read Rogan assured me that “Gerard Butler and O’Shea Jackson Jr. are back, but this time there’s a twist— Butler’s cop character is switching teams and joining the heist!” Sounds sick. I’m in.
The rest of the interview was fascinating but not interesting, if that makes any sense. The major headlines have already been aggregated. Zuck wore his “why do people keep asking if I’m having a mid-life crisis?” chain and reiterated Meta’s brave new policy on letting people bully trans kids even harder. He said some try-hard stuff about how corporations need “masculine energy” and promised his libertarian brother-in-arms that the only reason he ever wavered from his deep passion for free speech was because the Biden administration was mean to him. There was some profoundly silly feigned ignorance about the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (“I don’t even know what [the CFPB] stands for,” claimed the cool aggrieved billionaire who wishes the haters would just mellow out, man) and no small amount of intra-Silicon Valley peacocking.
The second best part of the interview was when Rogan complimented Zuckerberg’s neck. Apparently it’s way bigger than the last time they saw each other. Rogan was impressed. “You need a neck. It’s a weapon,” he solemnly intoned. This was during the jiu-jitsu portion of the conversation. I don't know the first thing about jiu-jitsu, but I do know a whole lot about male insecurity. Rogan’s been a mixed martial arts guy for much longer than Zuckerberg. He’s also long been criticized as being an intellectual lightweight. Throughout the jiu-jitsu conversation, Rogan kept name-checking “geniuses” that are into the sport. That’s why he respects Zuckerberg now. It’s not enough that Rogan’s favorite hobby brings him joy, nor even that it provides him the (apparently very important) sense of satisfaction that comes from knowing that he “can kill someone.” As somebody who desperately wants to be considered smart, he needs nerds to love the things that he loves.
“I think I can speak for the martial arts community. We’re very happy you’re on board. It makes it fun that somebody who is a prominent intellectual has really gotten fascinated by it.”
Mark Zuckerberg, noted prominent intellectual, nodded appreciatively.
Barely-concealed insecurity is a two way street, especially in most male friendships, which is why Zuckerberg came on Rogan’s show in the first place, why he was fumbling his way through bro talk if bro talk was generated by an AI. “The masculine energy I think is really good.” Right on, Zuck. That’s what me and the fellas at the bar are always saying to each other, verbatim. Also, “I think that whole cultural elite class needs to get repopulated with people who people actually trust.” We can’t stop saying that either, us fellas. In our hearts, we too are weird billionaires whose understanding of populism is wishing that other rich people told us that we are very cool and smart and attractive more often.
Mark Zuckerberg, you have more money than you could spend in a thousand lifetimes. Your products have inspired an untold number of mental breakdowns and at least one incident of ethnic cleansing. After I finish writing this essay, I’m going to post it to Instagram because I’m one of millions of people whose professional lives are now tied up in yours. You’ve won, damnit. You have enough. You don’t have to lie to yourself. You can admit that you originally invented FaceMash because your chosen skill set (coding) wasn’t sufficient to make the alpha bros at Harvard think you were cool. You thought making a website where guys could be jerks to girls might do the trick. And in one sense it did, but in a deeper sense it didn’t at all. You’re still chasing that same dragon you were back in college. You’re a middle-aged man now, and not only are you still seeking approval from the frattiest guys in the world, but now you also have a fiduciary responsibility and a VC-mandate to grow, grow, grow, whatever the psychic cost.
What’s your end-game here, my guy? The chain’s not working, but that’s beside the point. Discussing whether or not the chain is working implies a world in which the chain could work, a world in which the performance of masculinity is actually a game to be won.
The third best part of the interview was when Rogan and Zuckerberg talked about hunting wild boars with bows and arrows. This was where Rogan was supposed to return the favor. Just as the jock needed the nerd to validate his intelligence, so too did the nerd need the jock to proclaim that he had in fact arrived in the halls of masculine Valhalla— that he had genuflected in all the right ways with Trump-flattering content policies and thicker necks and cool guy talk about how all the gals from the typing pool had messed up the business vibes. Zuck needed the Rogan seal of approval as protection from both an incoming MAGA FCC as well as whatever football guys might still be lurking in the stairwell waiting to wedgie-up the AV dorks.
And man, for the majority of the podcast, the world’s soft-balliest interviewer almost pulled it off. He yelped about how much he loved the new content policies. He affirmed that Zuckerberg’s decision to add UFC Chair Dana White to the Facebook board was a home run. He nodded along, even dropping his trademark interjection (“whoa, that’s crazy”) when Zuckerberg talked about how he had no idea why the U.S. government would want to regulate a company with a world historic ability to influence public life and information flow.
But even after Zuckerberg assured him that yes, they were both very smart for having the same hobby, Rogan couldn’t fully stick the landing. Zuck needed Rogan to also think that it was super rad and manly that he hunts wild boars at his ranch in Hawaii. And Rogan tried, but it mattered more to him that the world knows that he, not Zuck, knows the proper way to kill hogs with a bow. So for over ten minutes, the world paused so that the podcaster who can now sway elections could alpha dog the CEO of All Of Our Time And Attention on his bow hunting form. Apparently, Zuck lacks a “surprise shot.” It’s a classic tell of somebody who was taught wrong, you see. What a sucker.
That’s the thing about the masculinity game. It doesn’t matter how hard you play it. It doesn’t matter if you have literally all the money in the world. The house always wins. Somebody with bigger biceps and an equally low sense of inherent self-worth will always be there to put you in your place, lest there be any risk to their own spot in the imaginary pecking order.
At some point, the interview was over. I played and lost a game of Uno and then played and won a game of Pokemon. I made chili for dinner and put a couple of kids to bed. I thought about the first time I opened a Facebook account. I remembered that it was big news when it had worked its way through all of the Ivies and I could finally access this supposedly perfect website. I remembered that no matter how early an adopter I was, I already felt like I was behind. I remembered watching the likes roll in for birth announcements and political screeds. I remembered refreshing the page, over and over again.
Of course a narcissistic man built a narcissism machine. He was always like this. The fact that it’s been so successful is proof, one could argue, that that’s all there is to any of us. That’s why we wake up and check our notifications. That’s why we keep logging on, long after we’ve figured out the game. That’s why, in a different corner of the Internet, the last name standing in American media is a guy whose message to other guys is that life is mostly about getting swole and distrusting the government.
We are told that Zuck and Rogan have won. They’ve helped deliver us a Trumped up America. But if that’s the case, why do they still sound so empty? Why do they desperately need each other’s affirmation? Why do they buy ranches just so that they have something new to kill?
The answer isn’t just that Joe and Zuck worship a false God of accomplishment and dominance. It’s because guys like them don’t even understand the bigger reason that we flocked to their imperfect products in the first place. It’s not about “having a voice,” in a world-conquering, climbing-the-tower-of-Babel sense. It was always about each other. We actually do want to celebrate each other’s babies and pets and grieve together when the fires come for an old friend’s house. We want to know that we’re not the only trans kid growing up in a small town, or the only woman trapped in a dehumanizing marriage, or the only broke person who ever resented their boss. We want to fall in love with each other’s words and music and art and entire beings. We want to laugh and cry and be stupid together. We want somebody else’s voice in our ear reminding us that we’re not alone.
If they understood that, these men would have built different products. The guy who has the attention of millions of young men would say something to them other than “it’s pretty cool that I know how to kill a guy” and “the government lied about Covid.” The guy who made the world-conquering website would be satisfied with a version that made a whole lot less money but that didn’t make us hate ourselves.
They don’t get it, which means that they’ll never find what they’re looking for. They will keep offering us junk we don’t need and wondering why we don’t love them more for it.
That’s on them, though. In the meantime, I woke up Monday morning and packed some lunches and soothed a few pre-adolescent nerves. I drafted an email to everybody who has ever participated in a Barnraisers trainings saying “hey, a beautiful person who also took this class lost their home— can we help them out?” I checked in with friends and learned that the neighborhood ice rink won’t go up this year but that nobody’s too worked up about it. That’s all we want. We don’t want a billion dollars or to have world governments at our beck and call. We don’t want a “secret shot” or the ability to kill another human being with our neck. I know two guys who have all those things, and they still seem paranoid and miserable.
We want to be loved and heard and believed. We want to wrap our arms around each other as tightly as possible and never let go. Whatever we do with our Facebook and Instagram accounts, let us never forget why they exist in the first place. Yes, they bring out the worst in us. But we never logged on for that, nor for them. We were always searching for each other.
End notes:
I know I already said this up top, but if you live in the Los Angeles area and need support in any way, please let me know so that I can share with this community.
Re-upping this from last week: The next set of (free! virtual!) Barnraisers trainings (coming your way late February-early March, dates TBD) will be about how to build and sustain a community group. Info coming very soon, so if you haven’t joined the interest list, please do so. These will be a lot of fun and (I hope) very useful. Thanks also to everybody who has become a paid subscriber to this newsletter- your contribution is what enables me to keep these trainings free to all.
I rarely offer specific guardrails for discussion on these posts (you all have built and sustained one of the least toxic comment sections on the internet, thank you) but I do have one quick suggestion this time around. I find that whenever a topic is social media-adjacent, there can be a bit of one-upmanship (“I deleted all the apps;” “Well I was never on them in the first place”) that can bring the conversation to a standstill. These sites have transformed our world, regardless of whether we boycott them or not, and I think the more that we’re vulnerable with each other about how all our lives are different because of them, the more interesting and useful we can be for each other.
Thanks to Joe Rogan’s recommendation, I have now watched the trailer for Den of Thieves 2: Pantera. I’m all in. Apparently they are going to rob something called the “World Diamond Center” which makes sense. That’s where they keep all the diamonds.
Would you say that the real World Diamond Centre was the friends we made along the way?
Thank you for taking the fall and listening to the bad interview for us, and I applaud your judgment in briefly pausing it to reassure a scared child, who probably would not have benefited from it. I find great solace in what miserable dorks these guys are, I would in no way trade anything about my life for theirs, and it is such clear, bracing, hilarious proof that absolutely no amount of money can make you cool or lovable or happy.
I will say, not in defense of FB but just realistically, that for many years after I first got on there (Ack! More than 16 years ago.) it allowed me as a person living in a much smaller, more rural community than the city I grew up in, to feel like my daily existence and sense of the world was much larger. I was 7 years into living here and had the ITCH, like this place was way too small for me. But I had kids by then, a husband, a steady job, and a mortgage, so I knew I had to find a way to make here work. For a bunch of years FB did that. It allowed me to have a daily life here while simultaneously reconnecting with friends all across the country and the world, which felt expansive.
When did it become an addiction? Maybe not for four or five years, but even knowing that's what it is and has been for at least a decade I've stuck around because I still have the same need for my world to not feel so small and, so far, no other alternate platform has emerged that meets that need. BlueSky and such are Twitter replacements, and I never liked Twitter so they don't help me.
For the time being, I'm there. And it does make me feel dirty, not gonna lie. But so does so much interaction that I have with corporations. I can mostly buy local and I do focus on my local community engagement as well, but my community/emotional needs are bigger than my local community can accommodate. So, here I am, in bed with those idiots. Feh.