Yes, these people are driving us at pace towards a techno-fascist dystopia, but mostly they just suck, writes Alex Foley [photo credit: Getty Images]
There’s a bit in 30 Rock in which Liz Lemon attends a high school reunion and discovers that, contrary to her self-mythologised role as the “lovable nerd” in school, she was, in fact, a vicious bully who lashed out at the perceived cool kids and left them with lasting psychological trauma.
At the time it was a nice inversion of many of the stale high school tropes, undercutting the dominant narrative since the 80’s that there is inherent virtue in social rejection.
Now it has become an improbable cipher for our cultural and political moment.
A cabal of misanthropic, asocial, emotionally stunted losers has seized power and — whether it’s making bizarre AI videos of their unpopular Gaza proposals or scolding the leader of Ukraine for his sartorial choices — their hang-ups are everyone’s problem.
Yes, these people are driving us at pace towards a techno-fascist dystopia, but mostly they just suck.
Another piece of Obama-era media, The Social Network, charts the rise of robotic Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg. By the time the film was released, Facebook had become the most popular way for people to connect and socialise online, and the stark contrast of the stated aims of a platform for connection with the alien, awkward mannerisms of its creator helped drive the film’s popularity.
It is easy to forget, with all that has happened in the intervening decades, the origins of Facebook. As a Harvard Sophomore, Zuckerberg (following a fictionalised dumping in the film account) created Facemash, a website that took photographs of female students from the university’s “face books” and prompted users to choose between two photos which student was more attractive.
In leaked Instant Messages discovered during litigation against former partners on Harvard Connection, the Winklevoss twins and Divya Narendra, Zuckerberg revealed just how disdainful he was of the fellow Harvard students who had handed over access to their data, calling them, “dumb f****s.”
Zuckerberg has tried to shake off the Machiavellian automaton image from The Social Network with several rebrands, from the Boy King of Silicon Valley, to a benevolent tech patron more palatable to Democratic oversight committees, to a more physically fit foil to Elon Musk.
Now he seems to be returning to his roots with a rightwing heel turn, aimed towards winning the admiration of a demographic who would have loved Facemash.
Revenge of the nerds
Zuck, dressed like he works in a vape shop, was recently on The Joe Rogan Experience, bemoaning things like how neutered the corporate world has become due to an excess of feminine energy and censorious interference from the Biden administration during the COVID-19 pandemic.
He has also announced that Meta will be dropping its fact-checking system in exchange for an X-style “community notes” function. The moves have led Jesse Eisenberg, who portrayed him in the film, to publicly distance himself, saying he no longer wants to be associated with Zuckerberg.
In other worrying tech news, Google’s Alphabet quietly rewrote its guidelines on its use of AI, getting rid of its ban on employing AI for the development of weapons and surveillance tools.
My friends who are much smarter than I am assure me that AI will be a revolutionary tool, breaking open fields like drug discovery to catapult humanity into the future. For me, it will always be inseparable from the systems used to slaughter Palestinians.
In my daily life, I encounter it primarily in the form of Boomer Cocomelon slop churned out by scammers to part Facebook’s remaining elderly users from their money, bizarre propaganda posted by Zionist accounts, or a pornographic wish fulfilment machine for the losers to self-insert into romances with famous women. If you are the President of the United States, it is a way of projecting hallucinatory visions of policies that will never come to be.
Trump’s thin skin and fragile ego was the subject of countless op-eds and biographies during his first term. Now he has a new magic mirror to build up his self-image.
Having made waves with his plan to ethnically cleanse and develop real estate in Gaza in early February, he seemingly walked back his comments after meeting resistance, claiming in a Fox News interview, “I’m not forcing it. I’m just going to sit back and recommend it.”
Then he released an utterly bonkers AI-generated video on Truth Social showing a vision of Trump Gaza. The video reimagines Gaza as a seaside metropolis with skyscrapers and giant golden Trump statues. It features inexplicable imagery like trans belly dancers in Hamas headbands, Elon Musk throwing money on elated crowds, Trump and Bibi lounging naked by a pool, and a child holding an enormous, golden balloon of Trump’s head.
It is a blatant projection from a vindictive man-child incapable of taking no for an answer (there is precedent here with the AI digital trading cards he previously hocked to his fans). Unfortunately for him, the AI video hijinks cut both ways.
Hackers managed to gain access to screens at the Department of Housing and Urban Development in late February to display a short AI video of President Trump kissing the feet of the wealthiest man in the world and head of the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. The video was captioned, “Long live the real king.”
How Silicon Valley captured US government
Musk, from the moment he carried a sink into the offices of Twitter HQ after acquiring the social media platform to his current perch in the Oval Office, has subjected us all to a series of indignities, forced to watch as his pathological need to be loved clashes with his fundamental lack of charisma.
He is desperate to be funny (“I am become meme”) but lacks the instincts needed to make even the simplest joke land. He was reportedly on the verge of needing an SFPD “wellness check” following a surprise appearance at a Dave Chapelle standup show where he was met with boos from the audience.
Never before have I seen someone so uncomfortable in his own skin. His flesh leaps away from his body in an impossible geometry. His movements are stilted and tortuous. What goodwill he had built with the public through his ostensible projects for humanity has been squandered. Even the fairly offline have cottoned on; an older man at my gym recently said to me, “Well, what chance did he have to be normal with a father who married his own stepdaughter?”
The result is that Musk has been increasingly pandering to a demographic of equally abject freaks on Twitter — sorry, X — promoting and engaging with some of the nastiest, most toxic users in the ecosystem.
Many of the changes he has made to the platform (and indeed US governance), such as hiding users’ likes, seem geared towards these crybullies. The constituency with the most direct line to the White House now is men who watch 45-minute YouTube videos on why women are ruining Star Wars.
Even Musk’s forays into overt fascist signalling have been cringeworthy. His Nazi salute at a Trump inauguration rally was tepid and awkward, obviously designed to be denied. It led to a series of slovenly imitations, a humiliation ritual for the world’s worst club. It is difficult to feel adequately concerned when it is all this stupid.
There was one brief moment when it felt like our current reality could have been avoided. During the US election campaign, Democratic vice presidential candidate and Minnesota governor Tim Walz called Trump and his VP pick JD Vance weird. “These are weird people on the other side,” he said in an interview with Morning Joe. “They want to take books. They want to be in your exam room.” His face is regularly photoshopped online, both by his supporters and his haters, to flatter and mock respectively.
The adjective immediately struck a chord with the electorate and reinvigorated the opposition to Trump. Suddenly voters seemed to remember these people are total weirdos.
JD Vance is a charisma sink who makes buying doughnuts painful to watch. He makes off-putting comments about women without children. His best defence against Tim Walz’s comments was to call him a “schoolyard bully,” which really just served to cement his place in the dynamic.
Ultimately, Democratic operatives decided to move away from this line of attack and, instead, court an endorsement from Liz Cheney. The rest is history.
For the author of much of this story, Peter Thiel, the weirdness is part of the plan. Thiel — who has had a hand in the success of Zuckerberg, Trump, Musk, Vance, and OpenAI’s Sam Altman — wrote in his book Zero to One, “The lesson for business is that we need founders. If anything, we should be more tolerant of founders who seem strange or extreme. We need unusual individuals to lead companies beyond mere incrementalism.”
Thiel himself has been described as, “a strange, strange boy.” The anecdotes from Max Chafkin’s biography of Thiel, The Contrarian, paints the picture of a lonely childhood, and an adolescence and young adulthood marked by social ostracisation.
Other students may have been “in awe” of his intellect, but he lacked close friends and was bullied mercilessly, receding into the fantasy worlds of Dungeons & Dragons and The Lord of the Rings (the source of the names for his companies). His classmates repeatedly describe him in the book as being haughty, intense, and competitive.
As the power dynamic between Silicon Valley and the state shifts, the question that hovers is how any of these personalities will endure one another long enough for the emergent alliances to hold. Already Musk and Altman have been trading barbs, with the former offering to buy OpenAI in an attempt to humiliate the latter. Where will other cracks form?
Alex Foley is an educator and painter living in Brighton, UK. They have a research background in molecular biology of health and disease. They currently work on preserving fragile digital materials related to mass death atrocities in the MENA region.
Follow them on X: @foleywoley
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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.
