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   Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Wednesday, 07-May-2025 23:49:53 JST Cory Doctorow

   Zuck's told investors how he plans to make back the tens of billions he's spending on AI: he's going to use it to make ads that can bypass our critical faculties and convince anyone to buy anything. In other words, Meta will make an AI mind-control ray and rent it out to grateful advertisers.

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   If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

   https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/07/rah-rah-rasputin/#credulous-dolts

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   • Paul Cantrell repeated this.
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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Wednesday, 07-May-2025 23:52:07 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     This narrative is especially galling because it's *literally the same story* Zuck has been telling for decades: "Facebook has built a mind-control out of Big Data, and we can sell anything to anyone":

     https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/30/dont-believe-the-criti-hype/#ordinary-mediocrities

     This is a facially absurd proposition. After all, everyone who's ever claimed to have perfected mind-control - Rasputin, Mesmer, MK-ULTRA, neurolinguistic programming grifters and pathetic "pick up artists" - was a liar.

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Wednesday, 07-May-2025 23:52:08 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     This makes the old dotcom economics of "losing money on every sale, but making it up in volume" look positively rosy:

     https://www.wheresyoured.at/reality-check/

     Now, Zuck has finally described how he's going to turn AI's terrible economics around: he's going to ask AI to design his advertisers' campaigns, and these will be so devastatingly effective that advertisers will pay a huge premium to advertise on Meta:

     https://finance.yahoo.com/news/the-ai-revolution-is-an-advertising-revolution-morning-brief-100001467.html

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     Rich Felker repeated this.
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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Wednesday, 07-May-2025 23:52:09 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Zuck lost more than $70b on metaverse, but, as a boy genius Texas marksman, he still inspires confidence from credulous investors. Zuck's AI initiatives generated *huge* interest in Meta stock, with investors betting Zuck would find ways to keep Meta's growth going, despite the fact that AI has the worst unit economics of any tech venture in living memory. AI is a business that gets more expensive as time goes on, and where the market's willingness to pay goes *down* over time.

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Wednesday, 07-May-2025 23:52:10 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Like Jobs, Zuck is a Texas marksman, who fires a shotgun into the side of a barn and then draws a target around the holes. Jobs is remembered for his successes, and forgiven his (many, many) flops, and so is Zuck. The fact that pivot to video was well understood to have been a catastrophic scam didn't stop people from believing Zuck when he announced "metaverse."

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Wednesday, 07-May-2025 23:52:11 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     If Zuck is a boy genius, then Zuck's pronouncements take on the character of prophesy. When Zuck announced the "pivot to video," investors poured tens of billions into Facebook stock *and* into video-first online news production, despite the fact that Zuck was obviously lying:

     https://slate.com/technology/2018/10/facebook-online-video-pivot-metrics-false.html

     The "boy genius" story is an example of Silicon Valley's storied "reality distortion field," pioneered by Steve Jobs.

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Wednesday, 07-May-2025 23:52:12 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     This is why Zuck keeps telling stories. The most important story Zuck tells is about himself, the boy genius who converted a tool for nonconsensually rating the fuckability of Harvard undergrads into a social media monopoly with four billion users. Zuck's cult of personality isn't the product of mere narcissism - it's a tool for creating the material conditions for ongoing investor confidence:

     https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-shirt-latin-what-does-it-say-explained-words-2024-9

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Wednesday, 07-May-2025 23:52:13 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     After all, Zuck's key employees and top managers all take much (or even most!) of their compensation in Meta stock, which means that the instant the company stops growing, those workers' pay will plummet and they will seek employment elsewhere, depriving Meta of the workers it needs to successfully create or conquer a new market and once again become a growth stock.

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Wednesday, 07-May-2025 23:52:14 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     This premium represents a bet by investors that Meta will continue to grow, which means that the instant Meta *stops* growing, the value of its shares will plummet, to reflect the fact that it is a "mature" company, not a "growth" company.

     So Zuck needs to do everything he can to keep investors believing that Meta will continue to grow.

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Wednesday, 07-May-2025 23:52:16 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Here, Zuck is fulfilling the fundamental duty of every CEO of every high-growth tech company: explaining how his company will *continue* to grow. These growth stories are key, because growth stocks trade at a huge premium relative to the stocks of "mature" companies. Every dollar Meta brings in boosts their share price to a *much* greater degree than the dollars earned by companies with similar rates of profit, but slower rates of growth.

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Wednesday, 07-May-2025 23:52:27 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     The project of convincing investors that tech's "dopamine hackers" had perfected mind-control with warmed over, non-replicable Skinnerian behavior-mod and mass surveillance sold a *hell* of a lot of ads. After all, if there's one kind of person the advertising sector has *always* been able to sell to, it's advertising executives, who are the easiest of marks for a story about how easy it is to trick the public into buying whatever you're selling:

     https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/05/florida-man/#wannamakers-ghost

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     Rich Felker repeated this.
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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Wednesday, 07-May-2025 23:52:28 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Either they were lying to themselves, or to everyone else. Or both.

     But many of tech's critics helped sell this narrative (and thus helped Meta sell ads). Many critics have fallen prey to the sin of "criti-hype," Lee Vinsel's term for critiquing the claims of your adversary without bothering to ask whether they are true:

     https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/02/euthanize-rentiers/#dont-believe-the-hype

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     Rich Felker repeated this.
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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Wednesday, 07-May-2025 23:52:42 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Every ad-tech sales-bro who takes a meeting with an advertising executive finds himself pushing on an open door. Advertisers *desperately* wants to believe in mind-control rays. Think of the department story magnate John Wannamaker, who said, "half my advertising spending is wasted - I just don't know which half." Imagine: some advertising exec convinced John Wannamaker that he was only wasting *half* of his advertising spending!

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     Rich Felker repeated this.
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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Wednesday, 07-May-2025 23:53:05 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     I've long maintained that the threat from AI to workers isn't that AI can do your job - it's that an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that *can't* do your job:

     https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/18/asbestos-in-the-walls/#government-by-spicy-autocomplete

     The corollary here is that it doesn't matter if AI can design ads that work, not so long as an AI ad salesman can sell this proposition to an advertisers, and not so long as a tech CEO can sell it to investors.

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