Mark zuckerberg

Monday

Ben Sixsmith

Why tech bros love fighting

Ladies and gentlemen, this is the maaaiiin event of the eeevening. In the red corner, fighting out of Boca Chica, Texas, Eeeeelon ‘the Execuuutioner’ MUUUSK! And his opponent, in the blue corner, fighting out of Palo Alto, California, Maaaark ‘The Madman’ ZUCKERBEEERG!  Sadly, we might never get the fight between Elon Musk of Twitter and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. Musk has said that he would be ‘up for a cage fight’ with Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg then responded simply: ‘Send me location.’ The internet erupted. UFC legend Georges St-Pierre offered to train Musk while UFC heavyweight champion Jon Jones announced that he would be ‘Team Zuck’. Bookmakers started taking bets.

Friday

Cockburn

Trans women take over DC softball

From our US edition

It’s not just women’s high school and college sports that need to be protected from biological men, apparently. The DC intramural softball circuit has become another battleground for “trans rights.” Cockburn has learned that Democratic and progressive co-ed teams are skirting league rules regarding how many women must play in each game by filling their spots with trans women — i.e. those born as males. The Center for American Progress, a left-wing think tank, fielded an over-six-foot trans woman in a recent game against a conservative media outlet. Some players on the team said that it didn’t matter much because the person was not very good at softball, while others got the impression that he/she was intentionally playing poorly to avoid criticism.

softball

Tuesday

Cockburn

Elon Musk: innovator, CEO, ket head 

From our US edition

What’s your poison? All of the greatest minds have one. Freud loved cocaine, Charles Dickens dabbled with opium, Steve Jobs once claimed that LSD was “one of the two or three most important things I have done in life.” It turns out that Elon Musk’s drug of choice is ketamine, a controlled substance usually reserved for tranquilizing horses.  Elon Musk “microdoses” the substance, according to the Wall Street Journal. “The CEO has told people he microdoses ketamine for depression, and he also takes full doses of ketamine at parties, according to the people who have witnessed his drug use and others who have direct knowledge of it,” the report says.

elon musk ketamine

Thursday

Cockburn

The people deserve a Mark Zuckerberg-Elon Musk cage fight in Vegas

From our US edition

Just when you thought toxic masculinity was dead: Emmanuel Macron chugs a beer and Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg agree to a cage fight.  Elon Musk tweeted Wednesday that he was "up for a cage fight" with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg — to which Zuck replied on his Instagram Story, "send me location.” Musk came back with: "Vegas Octagon,” the fenced-in area used for Ultimate Fighting Championship bouts in Las Vegas, Nevada. Musk also tweeted "I'm gonna use a move called 'The Walrus', where I just lie on you, and you can't get away” and "I almost never work out, except for picking up my kids & throwing them in the air." https://twitter.

elon musk mark zuckerberg cage fight

Wednesday

Taki

The death of fair play

New York He’s oilier than Molière’s Tartuffe but gets away with more. His latest move involves the martial art of jiu-jitsu, where he managed to get a referee to reverse his decision. I’ve been competing in martial arts for close to 60 years now, and have rarely, in fact never, witnessed a ref reverse his or her decision. But I’m no bad loser like Zuckerberg. Some of you old-timers may even remember something called fair play. Bad calls are inevitable in sport, and one is used to taking the bad ones with the good ones because in the end they all even out. Facebook’s honcho ended up a multibillionaire under a bit of a cloud, accused of having stolen the idea from twin brothers who could not have been overly smart to trust him in the first place. Never mind.

Thursday

Spectator Editorial

Make tech great again

From our US edition

Mark Zuckerberg has dubbed 2023 Meta’s “year of efficiency.” The slogan is a corporate euphemism for layoffs, of course — and not an especially subtle one. Zuckerberg’s company has parted ways with tens of thousands of employees this year. Other tech firms are following suit. Crunchbase estimates that US tech firms fired more than 118,000 employees in the first quarter of 2023. These are lean times in Silicon Valley — and, as Joel Kotkin explains in this month’s cover story, there is more to this tale than Big Tech belt-tightening after a pandemic-era hiring spree. The Valley, Kotkin explains, is in trouble. A place that America, and the world, once looked to for an ambitious and optimistic vision of the future, has grown sclerotic.

tech
metaverse
Matt Purple

Good riddance to the metaverse

From our US edition

So pack it all in then. Away with the wisecracking butterfly that sits on your shoulder during work meetings. Out with the Gamorrean Guards who play Texas Hold’em with you around a floating table. The metaverse, Mark Zuckerberg’s fever dream of a virtual-reality infused world, is dead. That’s assuming it was ever alive and kicking in the first place. To assess just how “real” the metaverse ever was, we need to go back to its inception in the fall of 2021. That was when Zuckerberg released a video of himself in suspiciously Steve Jobs-esque garb — black shirt and pants, sneakers — tooling around what he called a “home space” that brimmed with holographic bric-a-brac.

Thursday

Teresa Mull

Madison Cawthorn is right about metrosexuals on social media

From our US edition

Madison Cawthorn, the one-hit-wonder congressman from North Carolina who was defeated in his primary earlier this year, used his final address on the House floor yesterday to condemn “soft metrosexuals.” In the spirit of not kicking a guy when he’s down (Cawthorn will be gone by January), let’s cut him some slack and acknowledge that, melodramatic language aside, his speech made a valid point. Social media is to blame, at least in part, for weakening American culture. “America is weak,” Cawthorn declared. “Her sons are sickly, and her daughters are decrepit. Our country now faces the consequences of enabling a participation trophy society. We’re no longer the United States. We’ve become the nanny state.

Monday

Cockburn

Republicans endorse Kanye as everyone else slowly backs away

From our US edition

If there is one celeb to not rally behind right now, it’s Kanye West. Over the past few years, the rapper's mental health has steadily declined and his outbursts have become more regular. As he becomes more unhinged, friends who used to come to his defense have realized it’s in their best interest to quiet down. Yet in spite of all that, Cockburn can't help but notice that House Republicans have embraced Kanye. A tweet, which somehow has not been deleted, was posted on Thursday by the House Republicans Twitter account. It reads, "Kanye. Elon. Trump." Not only was the tweet ratio'd within minutes — with quote tweets such as "who are three people we really don’t need to hear from ever again?

Friday

Steerpike

Zuckerberg’s curious confession

Well, there you have it. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, has confirmed that Facebook did indeed censor news of the New York Post’s 2020 Hunter Biden laptop story. But The Zuck had a rather curious tale to tell. Appearing on The Joe Rogan Experience, Zuckerberg was questioned by Rogan on Facebook’s approach to fake news and misinformation. In the discussion, the question of Hunter Biden’s laptop arose.

Thursday

Stephen Bayley

Enjoy your beloved car while you can

Remember ashtrays in cars? Soon cars will themselves become objects of wet-eyed nostalgic reverie. A thrilling era of propelling ourselves, while gassing others, via a series of explosions more or less constrained by gears, steering devices and friction materials, is coming to an end. Enjoy that very loud Porsche while you can. It will soon be illegal. The great fascination of the car resides not in engineering or technology but in semantics and emotions. A friend has a disgraceful anecdote from his untidy youth to explain the grip cold metal has on hot hearts. A brief fling with a married woman whose husband travelled a lot found him one cold morning, late for a lecture, with a ratty old Citroen that would not start. She cheerfully said: ‘Take his Jaguar.

Thursday

Guy Shepherd

Welcome to body-camera democracy

From our US edition

The introduction of body cameras as a staple of the police uniform has been a transformative piece of tech. After just eight years of their use, it’s hard to argue against the impact of body cams in stemming police misconduct. According to a recent study by the University of Chicago’s Crime Lab and the Council on Criminal Justice’s Task Force on Policing, civilian complaints about police misconduct are down 17 percent since the introduction of body cams. Physical encounters, whether fatal or non-fatal, are down 10 percent. It was a struggle to get here. Many cops said that complaint statistics did not justify the indignity of policing the police taping every interaction they have with the public. A vocal minority countered: “If everything is so cool, we will see it.

body cam

Friday

John Steele Gordon

The wealth explosion

From our US edition

Not all inventions change the world. But some do — and they do it by greatly lowering the cost of a fundamental economic input. This inevitably causes an economic revolution that brings about a new political and social order by opening previously impossible economic opportunities,  creating vast new wealth in the process. We are in the middle of such a revolution today, thanks to the microprocessor, which first came to market in 1972 and really took off with the introduction of the personal computer in the early 1980s. The microprocessor, a dirt-cheap computer on a chip, hugely reduced the cost of storing, retrieving and manipulating information. Computing power that cost $1,000 in the 1950s today costs a fraction of a cent.

microprocessor
metaverse
Matt Purple

Reality is enough without Zuckerberg’s metaverse

From our US edition

Take my hand, darling, and off we go into the metaverse. It's a whole new world...or at least it's a new world...maybe a brave new world? Enter Mark Zuckerberg, that Titanic captain of industry, who last week released a video introducing his latest plan to leave his Nike shoeprint upon reality. It's called the metaverse, and while even the savviest tech writers are grasping to explain what it is, it appears to be the fusion of our world with the virtual. Big Zuck wants what's on our screens to spill over into real life. We lived on farms, then we lived in cities, now we will live in "home spaces" with digitally rendered pterodactyls flying just outside the windows.

Tuesday

Freddy Gray

Frances Haugen: a very convenient whistleblower

Facebook wants to move its business model towards the metaverse, that virtual future in which we will all hang out online through headsets and pretend it isn’t weird. The trouble is, we already appear to live in an alternate reality created by communications specialists with highly political agendas. Just look at the clearly PR-orchestrated Online Safety vs Facebook story which the media is playing out before our non-digital eyes. This week’s protagonist is Frances Haugen, the former Facebook employee who appeared yesterday in parliament to give evidence to MPs scrutinising the Online Harms Bill. That is the bill through which the government says it intends to regulate social media companies to stop online hate, bullying, terrorist radicalisation and so on.

Monday

Dominic Green

Joe Biden’s digital serfs

From our US edition

The Biden administration intends to notify Facebook about ‘problematic’ postings, such as questioning the COVID-19 vaccine. Jen Psaki, the White House spokesperson, suggests that if you’re problematic on one social-media site, you should be banned from them all. Big Tech, meet Big Sister. I suppose this is still America. If Donald Trump had said he’d use extra-legal leverage over Big Tech, most of the media would be crying ‘fascism’. Brian Stelter would decry an unprecedented assault on the First Amendment. Jeffrey Toobin would bang one out about bypassing Congress and the law. Minor academics would op-ed in the New York Times about the classically fascist ‘collusion’ between government and big business.

digital

Saturday

Ben Sixsmith

My day at Sun Valley

From our US edition

‘What would you like for dinner sir?’ ‘What do you recommend?’ ‘The grilled cicadas are very fine, sir. Or the fried cockroaches.’ ‘Sounds delicious.’ Smiling, I look around the table of the Sun Valley restaurant where billionaires from Jeff Bezos to Tim Cook have convened to talk shop in a safe environment. It is a kind of tech-based relative of Bilderberg — the annual conference at which presidents, prime ministers and assorted other elite figures quietly come together. No journalists allowed, I was told. ‘I’m not a journalist!’ ‘What are you then?’ ‘I’m a thought leader.’ ‘A what?’ ‘A public intellectual.’ ‘Eh?’ ‘I have a column in the New York Times.’ It wasn’t true but it got me in.

sun valley

Thursday

Cockburn

Won’t someone please think of the billionaires?

From our US edition

As that peerless philosopher of the 20th century Marvin Gaye once pointed out, there are three things in life of which we can all be certain: taxes, death and trouble. Cockburn has long admired the late soul legend’s lyrics, but this week, that weary little aperçu has rung somewhat hollowly in his mind. You will have no doubt read of the damning report published this week by ProPublica, investigating the murky relationship between the taxable assets and actual taxes paid by some of America’s billionaires. If so, you probably agree that it makes for thoroughly depressing reading.

buffett billionaires

Monday

Dominic Green

Van Morrison is a sane man in a mad world

From our US edition

The dopes with tropes are at it again. This time, their target is Van Morrison. But Sir Ivan is, as Billy Joel would say, an innocent man. Morrison has been called a crank and anti-Semite because of the lyrics to his new single, ‘They Own the Media’. The Guardian, which really does have a problem with Jews, has called him a tinfoil milliner. The Forward, which used to be a serious Jewish paper, claims that Van’s title ‘espouses a classic anti-Semitic trope’. No, it doesn’t. What the lyrics say is that our media are owned by a small number of people. That their outlets habitually lie to our faces. That they want us to believe that ‘ignorance is bliss’, so let’s leave the decisions to the experts. And that we’ll ‘never get wise’ until we look behind the curtain.

van morrison

Monday

Damian Reilly

The problem with Facebook’s ‘Supreme Court’

He might now be one of the most powerful men in global media, but I find whenever I see a photograph of Nick Clegg, Orwell’s quote about everyone getting the face they deserve by 50 comes to mind. Now 54, the remnants of the boyish idealist are still just about there, but the eyes to me are ledgers of too much unhappy compromise – deadened, I always assume, by the principles he felt forced by David Cameron to sacrifice for personal advancement, and by the amazing decision to see out the remaining years of a career spent failing upwards as Mark Zuckerberg’s lavishly remunerated PR lickspittle. For a decade and more, Clegg positioned himself as the good guy of British politics – radiating sixth form actor star power at every opportunity.