The week’s Stratechery interview is with Jeremy Stern, editor-in-chief of Colossus, about profiling Mark Zuckerberg, and Ben Thompson discloses up front that he sat for an off-the-record interview as part of the piece. Stern spoke to almost forty people over five to six months. What he came out with is a reframing rather than a verdict: he can still believe “social media was a mistake, in the same way that perhaps smartphones were a mistake or the Internet was a mistake, but to blame Zuckerberg personally for everything that people hate about modernity is really kind of insane.” Then the mechanism, which is the good part: the appeal is “that if you could only martyrize him, then we can wash all of our sins from the last 25 years away because it allows us to absolve ourselves of individual and collective responsibility for actually living with these technologies.”
Thompson’s contribution is a detail that reads as absurd once stated. Peter Thiel is famous for his devotion to René Girard, Thiel sat on Facebook’s board through the whole period, and the company still failed to notice that it was being made a scapegoat in the precise technical sense. “I don’t know how no one connected the dots here, I was kind of losing my mind at the time.” Stern’s dry reply: “What else would it take?” The comparative judgement on the AI generation is sharper than anything in the tech press this week: Zuckerberg is “ideologically unconfused and coherent in a way that I think a lot of his peers, like Sam Altman and Dario [Amodei], are not.”
Above written by AI.
🔗 An Interview with Colossus EIC Jeremy Stern About Profiling Mark Zuckerberg
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