Max Read published an interesting piece today about Mark Zuckerberg’s move right. He reminds us that Zuck has changed up the moderation policies every election since 2016. He just rolls with flow of whatever he thinks is the political zeitgeist. But now it’s also happening at a very important time in Zuckerberg’s life. Read writes:
[This] is a useful corrective to the unfortunate framing that this announcement represents an “unapologetic” Zuck (if anything, the 2025 version is more “apologetic” than its 2021 or 2016 equivalents, just presented in a well-calibrated tone of defiance that casts his previous decisions as coerced). But I do think there’s an important and interesting difference between this video and Zuck’s previous post-election weathervane announcements: The gold chain.
It’s been clear for a while now that Zuckerberg has been Up To Something. Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal have described it as the “Zuckaissance”: Over the past eighteen months or so he grew out his hair; he replaced his hoodies with boxy tees; he got really into M.M.A. and wakeboarding. And, yes, he started wearing a gold chain. New Zuck is undeniably less off-putting than old, sweaty-hoodie, Caesar-cut Zuck. But he’s also unmistakably fratty, butch, and (to borrow an overused Twitter phrase) “right-coded,” partaking in the aesthetic and the hobbies of people you would expect to own crypto, listen to mindset podcasts, and vote for Trump (or, at least, refuse to vote for Biden).
It’s not exactly groundbreaking that a rich 40-year-old man has started wearing expensive streetwear. But usually this kind of personal journey culminates in divorce or hilarious/gruesome police body-cam footage or an announcement that you’re moving to Africa for a year, not in a video about new content-moderation guidelines. Zuck seems to have slowly transformed himself into a Dana White hanger-on who dresses like a Kick streamer in order to make to make this post-election right-wing turn seem authentic and deeply felt, rather than merely convenient.
Oh boy. But apparently friends are saying that Zuck’s hard turn right is genuine, which also isn’t too surprising considering his stage of life. And as I’ve been surmising, these allegedly machotech-bros are all engaged in a dick measuring contest, part of which is trying to get closer to power.
One answer, I think, is that Zuck’s new image is as much about a shifting political environment within Silicon Valley as it about the changing winds outside of the industry. A period of tech-industry labor unrest–walkouts and protests at tech megaplatforms over sexual harassment, racism, and defense contracts1–has given way to a “reset” marked by mass layoffs and corporate clampdowns. A looser tech labor market (and a general national atmosphere of reaction) has shifted power back to management, and a highly visible clique of tech workers with quasi-libertarian, open-to-the-possibility-of-race-science politics, clustered on Twitter in communities like “tcot” and “tpot,” has presented executives with the tantalizing (if still ephemeral) prospect of workforce free of Obama-era idealism and political consciousness.
News on Friday that Meta is ending its D.E.I. program should be seen in this context–as not just another way to cozy up to the Trump administration, but as another sally in a war against a workforce that tech management has come to see as dangerously left-wing. I’ve argued before that the hard-right turn of investors like Marc Andreessen should be seen in part as a kind of marketing strategy, an attempt to find founders and workers whose politics make them less likely to jeopardize profits with workplace action. I suspect that Zuck’s makeover functions at least in part in the same way. I don’t think Republican electeds much care if Zuck is cageside at M.M.A. matches or using right-wing slang like “legacy media” and “virtue-signaling”–but I think the kinds of employees he might like to attract probably do. (As do, from the other direction, the kinds of employees he would like to attrite)
Which leads, I think, to the other important function of Zuck’s new look. I think Roose is right that Zuck is “has clearly been studying Mr. Musk’s playbook”–not just in his rhetorical choices, but in his efforts to become more of a social-media main character in the same manner as Musk. (Note that Zuck is on Threads doing an uncanny imitation of Musk spamming single-emoji responses to Tweets thing.) For most of his career, Zuck has followed the general conventional wisdom around being a C.E.O. and attempted to appear generally nonpartisan (and when partisanship was unavoidable, to express it in the blandest ways possible). But Musk has, over the last few years, demonstrated that there are distinct advantages to aggressive and committed partisanship–specifically, the ability to command and direct swarms of protectors and apologists online.
Musk is the big kahuna but the other boys want to play too. Zuck (and Bezos to some degree) are among the richest tech bros and they’re all jostling for dominance. Part of that apparently requires licking Donald Trump’s boots which is not how I would have ever assumed such a game would be played.
It’s pathetic.
