* edit of shame: it's satire. Confirmation bias is a hell of a drug.
> there is a certain sense in which Mark Zuckerberg has been cast as 'the spokesman' for the Millennial generation — as the single person who gives voice to the hopes and fears and the unique experiences of this generation, at least in the USA
That is an absolutely bananas read of Zuck's place in American culture.
Till I figured u likely slightly mistyped flattering, haha.
But beyond that, yeah.
It’s flattery. Consider the audience for the emails. These were not intended for the public.
Though I do wonder if you looked at all people with a net worth of over say 100M whether the proportion of incredibly stupid people would be the same as the general population or whether we just have so many incredibly stupid people some of them will get lucky.
Not satire. They really are just that up their own asses.
Even in back in 2019 I have a hard time believing this was true. As a millennial, my facebook feed was overtaken by my parents generation in the early 2010s and the handful of peers I know who still use it regularly use it to communicate with that generation.
Maybe he's counting Instagram usage as part of Facebook?
Sorry, this song has been in my head since I saw the South Park episode. Highly recommend anyone to watch the 2nd Trump era episodes, they sure rid these people of any legitimacy they might have.
The sad thing is, because the Dem playbook is now "fight fire with fire" (cf. the gerrymandering wars), it is only a matter of time until they stoop to the same level of overthrowing legitimate elections, in the name of fighting fire with fire...
Zuck is Thiel's mouthpiece, through and through. And it explains everything about Meta.
I hadn't heard this before but googling it seems like a genuine commitment at the time[0]. I mostly feel like Zuck isn't making the world a better place, but this sounds really impressive as a commitment - any idea if this commitments been stuck to now we're around 10 years on?
Giving away to their own LLC, not to a non-profit [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chan_Zuckerberg_Initiative
Seems like its activities are mostly charity based at least.
It's a confusing thing, and I still don't really understand what 99% of wealth over the course of a lifetime actually means in real terms. Is that of lifetime wealth? 99% of Zuck's wealth from 2015 over the course of his life?
But people are complicated, and if Zuckerberg really is giving away 99% of his wealty to causes, that's a positive and worth discussing. Even if it doesn't make up for other harm.
No, Zuckerberg did not set out consciously trying to "fracture society". He started out trying to provide a way to rate women at Harvard by how attractive they were, then by just trying to optimize revenue without any consideration for unintended consequences. Then kept going.
Not understanding the failure mode is going to just lead to repeating the same mistakes at even grander scales, like what's happening now with AI. Nerds obsessed with creating "AGI" without the capability or willingness to think through the potential consequences.
This exchange is cited as:
[This document is from Tennessee v. Meta (2024).]Sorry this just reads way too much like fiction and if I have two hypotheses about its origin:
1. Real court document that I can’t find the source for and have to trust a random substack is telling me is real.
2. AI generated conversation for views.
I’m inclined to the second these days.
But if it’s real: the fact that guys real life conversations read like satire is telling…
Got to admit that's very interesting. That was January 5, 2020, I wonder how it looks today.
I asked chat:
Boomers: ~13 of 20 (~65%) Examples: Princeton (Christopher Eisgruber, 1961), MIT (Sally Kornbluth, 1960), Harvard (Alan Garber, 1955), Duke (Vincent Price, 1957), Brown (Christina Paxson, 1960), Johns Hopkins (Ron Daniels, 1959), Columbia’s acting leaders across 2024–25 were also Boomers.
Gen X: ~7 of 20 (~35%) Examples: Stanford (Jonathan Levin, 1972), Yale (Maurie McInnis, 1966), Dartmouth (Sian Beilock, 1976), Rice (Reginald DesRoches, 1967), Vanderbilt (Daniel Diermeier, 1965), WashU (Andrew D. Martin, 1972), Notre Dame (Rev. Robert A. Dowd, 1965).
Millennials/Silent: 0 in this Top-20 (today). (A few large publics just outside the USNWR top-20 have Boomer or Gen-X chancellors as well; e.g., UC Berkeley’s Rich Lyons, 1961.)
The boomers are still holding on to power. Amazing!
What's it like in the private sector?
Gen X: ~53% (Microsoft/S. Nadella 1967; Alphabet/S. Pichai 1972; Amazon/A. Jassy 1968; Tesla/E. Musk 1971; Eli Lilly/D. Ricks 1967; Walmart/D. McMillon 1966; Tencent/Ma Huateng 1971; Visa/R. McInerney 1975; Mastercard/M. Miebach 1968; ExxonMobil/D. Woods 1965; plus Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters 1970.)
Boomers: ~43% (Nvidia/J. Huang 1963; Apple/T. Cook 1960; Saudi Aramco/A. Nasser 1958; Broadcom/Hock Tan 1951/52; TSMC/C.C. Wei 1953; JPMorgan/J. Dimon 1956; Oracle/S. Catz 1961; plus Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos 1964.)
Millennials: ~5% (Meta/Mark Zuckerberg 1984.)
Silent Generation: ~5% (Berkshire Hathaway/Warren Buffett 1930 — slated to hand CEO role to Greg Abel, b. 1962, at year-end 2025.)
A little better, but my gosh they are really holding on. I'm sure it is unprecedented. Certainly heath is better than any time in history, but this seems extreme.
It looks like there has been some turnover at the universities since the quote from Eric Weinstein. I quick survey (could be incorrect!) says it is now more around 63.
That's still high but not as high as what Eric Weinstein was quoting.
Would be a great time series.
That entire paragraph is mind bending. I really wish he had enumerated for a wider audience what was there because you could read something quite profound into it.
Fucks sake... that is an absolutely bananas read of Zuck's place in American culture.
"This document is from Tennessee v. Meta (2024)" ain't cut it in the age of LLMs anymore
They really are up their own asses so much in this thread. Just the arrogance of these people absolutely kills me.
Whether that is from not ever being told no once they got rich enough or whether it's pathological to even seek out that dimension of wealth is not clear, but the result is worrying either way.
Like, call Thiel an idiot with stupid ideas that are dumb, fine, but trying to cancel someone from the "public sphere" just reeks of passive aggression.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Millennials/comments/1g1gw7v/famous...
Zuckerberg thinks he’s more well-known than Taylor Swift, Justin Bieber, Ed Sheeran, Scarlett Johansson, Adele, Lady Gaga, Cristiano Ronaldo, Beyoncé…
The guy may be arrogant, but nothing about his statement was arrogant. He was stating facts.
I’m not agreeing, but I’m hard pressed to find another person that is from the millennial generation that has been a persistent “public figure” as long and persistently than Zuck. He has been persistently in the news more or less daily since 2006.
Can you name another millennial that has a wider and longer lasting notoriety?
Does that mean that people respect him, or think of him as an ideal person or whatever?
No
but that’s not what Zuckerberg is saying - he’s saying “well known”
I’m not sure I could name another millennial that is as well known globally for as long - maybe Ronaldo or Taylor Swift
Prince William and Prince Harry have him beat on that front, surely? They've been persistent public figures since birth.
And if we limit it to modern times, Taylor Swift has got to be way more well known. Even my young kids know who Taylor Swift is. They have no clue about who Zuckerberg is.
I would imagine Swifties see a lot more Taylor Swift news than Zuckerberg news. For someone on HN, they're going to see a lot more Zuckerberg news than average.
Excuse me while I throw up in my mouth, I never liked Clegg much even when he was in office but bleh.
Amd millennials found their replacement for housing bubble with the stocks / crypto bubble.
And democracy is good for boomers, because they are too many and outnumber everyone else in battle. So millennials and genz are not unsympathetic to less democracy (a view that Thiel shares).
Thiel in this context could be considered a boomer, and his interests lie with them
The whole thing stinks of the same foul reek as big tobacco. When their reckoning comes we will wonder how we could have let one megalomaniac’s scam go so far.
> They trust me. Dumb fucks.
> Zuck aut nihil.
He never changed.
- They're going to run Zuck for president to beat the millennial socialist zeitgeist.
- They're going to use generational warfare to stage an institutional coup.
> we need to do better than simply dismiss them by saying that they are stupid or entitled or brainwashed
Classy.
1. "Mark Zuckerberg has been cast as the spokesman for the Millennial generation."
2. "I am the most well-known person of my generation"
3. "we'll even see a millennial president within the next few cycles by 2032."
4. The direct comparison to Pete Buttigieg.
5. He's signaled a presidential bid in the recent past.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/alexkantrowitz/mark-zuc...
Some additional interpretation of mine from the exchange:
6. The expressed need to "win" in the policy arena in the next few years.
7. The imminent "transfer of value" (and power) from boomers to millennials, and the explicit urgency and intent to "position" themselves to capitalize on this "rapid shift."
Further real world context:
8. Thiel's track record of hands on political involvement with Trump, Vance, and Yarvin.
9. Thiel's recent "antichrist" lectures which articulates a fear of being "scapegoated."
With the goal to reduce it, right?
...right?
I do not understand the reason for assuming any successive group of old leaders to behave differently than boomers?
Millenials are going to have an even more disproportionate old age population, and presumably will seek to squeeze the younger generations even more than the boomers:
https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/2...
By far, the largest wealth transfer that happens is young to old, via defined benefit pensions (such as social security), healthcare, and asset price increases (via decreases in purchasing power of the currency).
In a democracy, most voters will vote for these policies, because most voters are or will soon be beneficiaries of these policies. I am betting that Millenials, once they are in their 50s, will continue voting for the same policies that Boomers have for the past 20 years, since they will have the same incentives.
Anecdotally, very briefly dated a 40 year old who claimed she only ever cooked boxed food; had never even baked or microwaved a potato. Her words!
They’re the Gizmodo and Ars Technica journalist crowd exploiting slave labor while bitching about social justice. The 1984 double speak is strong with them.
America is a passive investor society. Like Trump thinking factories will just appear because he wishes it, Millennials wish to be enriched without giving a shit about externalities.
I base this entirely off their actual effort on the ground. Their "thoughts and prayers" may be cranked to 11, but my lived experience is they're even more disconnected from obligation to themselves than Boomers and GenX who at least spent some part of their life solving their ground truth problems.
They prefer socialism (which I am not against) because they realize they're screwed as individuals, they need help. Many probably expect they'll be served by it, not serving it.
It is now clear that he made a repositioning, and not that was fruit of some psychological breakthrough or something like that.
At the same time it’s scary to think about to what extent that men can go for business and also, given his pathetic behavior at the White House dinner, who is actually controlling that man.
And cynical me can't brush of the feeling that this is satire or that I need to read between the lines.
A dude that buys all houses around him just to get privacy and "fuck off" others (Zuck) cares about housing? A guy that think Greta is antichrist and think anyone that blocks AI advancement is antichrist, somehow thinks "we should look at why millennials choose socialism" as a thought process?
A more realistic, "what they mean" interpretation of this emailing is:
"FB product have influence over millennials (Instagram) and Boomers (Facebook). Boomers are dying out, so we should double down on our grip over millennials and tune the algorithms so we can manipulate them more than ever. We should lobby and push out the boomers and set millennials in the position of institutional power, and no other cohorts, so that we have a direct pipeline of controlling the public discord and communication between this generation "
> I would be the last person to advocate for socialism. But when 70% of Millennials say they are pro-socialist, we need to do better than simply dismiss them by saying that they are stupid or entitled or brainwashed; we should try and understand why. And, from the perspective of a broken generational compact, there seems to be a pretty straightforward answer to me, namely, that when one has too much student debt or if housing is too unaffordable, then one will have negative capital for a long time and/or find it very hard to start accumulating capital in the form of real estate; and if one has no stake in the capitalist system, then one may well turn against it.
But when he gives examples of the "iron grip" boomers have on power, he only talks about their control of universities and the government. He leaves out wealth and capital.
Socialism in real life = Biggest Government, Biggest Tech monopoly, forced uniformity, no self-agency, no authenticity for anyone who slightly disagrees with any aspect of the agenda, etc.
Source: I fled Venezuela because I lived in it.
Socialism brought a lot of good things all over Europe in the 1900s
Just ask Poland!
That this particular of satire is nigh on indistinguishable from reality/so believable indicates how good a satire it is.