A woman's opinion on these alpha (alfalfa?) boys. Rebecca Shaw: I knew one day I’d have to watch powerful men burn the world down – I just didn’t expect them to be such losers https://www.theguardian.com/comment...wn-i-just-didnt-expect-them-to-be-such-losers Mark Zuckerberg is a different kind of cringe – but cringe all the same. His cringe moments drip through more sparingly but, when they do, my body tries to turn inside out at my bellybutton,’ Rebecca Shaw writes. I don’t know if anyone else has noticed this but everything seems to be going down the tubes quite fast. And not fun tubes, like at a waterpark. The “ending in shit” kind. The issues are complicated, the reasons diverse, but there are a few culprits who have been making themselves extremely visible. Alongside those holding political office, tech gragillionnaires (I had to invent a new number) like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg obviously wield huge global influence with their computers and numbers and whatnot. There has been a lot written about them and there will be more, as they continue to shape the world and win favour with Donald Trump. Big, scary, probably ruinous things lie ahead. But I’m here to discuss the smaller part. The insult to injury, the sprinkling of salt in the wound. Whether I am engaging with the news, or with Musk tweeting constantly like a man with no job or friends, or with Zuckerberg sending out weird videos and appearing on Rogan, I am in pain. Not just because I don’t like what they are doing but because they are so incredibly, painfully cringe. I knew that one day we might have to watch as capitalism and greed and bigotry led to a world where powerful men, deserving or not, would burn it all down. What I didn’t expect, and don’t think I could have foreseen, is how incredibly cringe it would all be. I have been prepared for evil, for greed, for cruelty, for injustice – but I did not anticipate that the people in power would also be such huge losers. I’ve always been someone who cannot tolerate embarrassment. I hate being embarrassed more than just about any other emotion and I’ve always skipped content based on cringe humour like Meet the Parents, Borat or Nathan for You. It makes my skin crawl and it makes the contents of my stomach try to crawl out of my mouth. But I cannot skip world events. Nor can I skip Musk’s clear desperation, even as he holds this much wealth and power in his hands, to be thought of as cool. There are endless examples of him embarrassing himself while attempting to be funny or to gain respect. Unfortunately, while you may be able to buy power, it’s impossible to buy a good personality. Watching his Nigel-no-friends attempts to be popular, his endless pathetic tweets that read as though they come from the brain of an 11-year-old poser, has made me start to believe we should bring back bullying. If yet another humiliating report in the last couple of days is to be believed, he appears even to have lost the respect of some of his gamer audience, who the report claims suspect that he may have been lying about his achievements in hardcore gaming (cursed sentence). Zuckerberg is a different kind of cringe – but cringe all the same. His cringe moments drip through more sparingly but, when they do, my body tries to turn inside out at my bellybutton. His physical makeover for Maga reasons, performing music because no one will stop him, trying to look cool on a surfboard – all these are extremely difficult to watch. He has been trying to suck up to Trump, going on Joe Rogan’s show to say society has been “neutered” and companies need “more masculine energy”. Putting on what is clearly a bro disguise to join the boys’ club and sit at the big boy table – it should feel humiliating. This came as Zuckerberg rolled back hate speech and factchecking rules at Meta, in a clear swerve to the right before Trump’s inauguration. What could be more masculine and cool than selling out vulnerable communities and women to impress the alpha male? Climate crises keep coming, genocides continue, women keep getting murdered, art is being strangled to death by AI, bigotry is on the rise, social progress is being rolled back … AND these men insist on being cringe? It’s a rotten cherry on top. This combination of evil and embarrassment is a unique horror, one that science fiction has failed to prepare us for. The second-hand embarrassment we have to endure gets even more potent when combined with other modern influences on young men, like Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate. Peterson is a big voice in men’s rights – well, a small Kermit’s voice in men’s rights – and he’s also an embarrassment. So much so that he has his own Know Your Meme page, which covers that time he reportedly retweeted an image from a fetish film, apparently believing it was a Chinese communist “sperm extraction” facility. He deleted it shortly afterwards. Tate is facing human trafficking charges but rose to fame as a voice for young men, a misogynist in bad outfits who does really cool things like smoking cigars, wearing sunnies inside and trying to drag human rights back 100 years. Living your life to impress other men by hating women is one of the most embarrassing things I can imagine. Looking up to any of these men for how to live your life is even sadder. I’ve worked hard to keep these kinds of men out of my personal life, to keep them away from me, out of my goddamn sight. Now they are in my face daily, not only influencing the world for the worse but making me nauseous at how uncool and pathetic they are, on top of their other sins. It’s too much, I can’t take it, there needs to be a change. It’s time for us to start getting revenge on the nerds.
Marina Hyde: Move fast, break things – sprint to kiss Trump’s ring. It’s the tech bros inauguration derby https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jan/14/zuckerberg-musk-bezos-trump-inauguration Zuckerberg, Musk and Bezos are falling over themselves to suck up to the incoming president. And he’s just as keen to let them Over the past month, we’ve learned that Donald Trump’s inauguration fund has received million-dollar donations from, among others, Google, Meta overlord Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Apple boss Tim Cook. Hard to know whether it’s encouraging or quite the opposite to find them being so public about it. Traditionally when industrialists have made knee-bending gestures to incoming self-confessed authoritarians, they’ve preferred to do it in a back room somewhere, rather than on a publicly available list that also risks implying they like Carrie Underwood’s music. So let’s deal first with the entertainers. Underwood will perform at Trump’s inauguration, having previously insisted it was absolutely impossible to put her in some kind of ideological box. “I feel like more people try to pin me places politically,” she mused a few years ago. “I try to stay far out of politics if possible, at least in public, because nobody wins. It’s crazy. Everybody tries to sum everything up and put a bow on it, like it’s black and white. And it’s not like that.” Update: it now is like that. Also singing the president-elect into office will be the Village People, which sounds like a mad idea chucked out at an improv night, but turns out to be a thing that will actually happen multiple times during the inauguration celebrations. The Village People confirmed the news in a post beginning with the words “We know this won’t make some of you happy to hear …”, seemingly at least aware that this could be viewed as the biggest betrayal of a fanbase since Michael Jackson claimed he was simply building a fairground to entertain his. Anyway: to the organ grinders. Who will run the country while Trump is cheating at golf, with any number of wingnuts and our post-moral tech bros jockeying for position? You have to feel almost impressed at Trump for alighting on the only people who could do a less appealing job of it than him, like Ellen DeGeneres getting the emperor Tiberius to do her holiday cover. Even before it makes landfall, the incoming regime is host to weirder bedfellows than a Mos Eisley brothel. The likes of would-be health secretary Robert Kennedy Jr was an environmental lawyer for decades, but his oil-based anger is currently only permitted to be misdirected at seed oils, while Trump prepares to drill, baby, drill. Arguably the most eye-catching face-off, however, is the feud between Trump’s new best friend, Elon Musk, and his old best friend, Steve Bannon, who days before last November’s election emerged from a federal jail as one of the few inmates in history to have got less ripped during incarceration. Last week Bannon declared that Musk was “a truly evil guy … I’m not prepared to tolerate it any more”. Strong words, if not attached to any discernible levers of control. Bannon also inquired of Musk, Trump’s crypto and AI tsar, David Sacks, and the Palantir chair, Peter Thiel: “Why do we have white South Africans, the most racist people in the world, commenting on everything that happens in the United States?” Regrettably this was not a question answered the next day in a truly spellbinding Financial Times column by Thiel. To read it was to feel like you were stuck at 2am in the tightest corner of the house party kitchen with a guy who had done enough cocaine to float the acronym DISC – the “Distributed Idea Suppression Complex”, apparently – but sadly not quite enough to immediately fatally overdose. Meanwhile, days out from Trump’s inauguration and it feels a little late for Zuckerberg to be trying to be the fairest tech bro of them all. And yet: the Meta boss is really, really trying. Last week he announced he would be getting rid of factcheckers and recommending much more political content across his platforms, perhaps partly in response to Trump’s previous threat that if he made trouble for him, Zuckerberg would “spend the rest of his life in prison”. People talk a lot about how angry they are that Zuckerberg has shown no backbone, which means even more when they say it on their Facebook accounts. But even considering Zuckerberg in terms of principles is a category mistake, like trying to work out what friction or gravity “believes in”. In retrospect, the writing was on the wall the second Mark commenced his aesthetic reimagining of himself. For his frequent Washington committee summonses under the Biden administration, Zuckerberg used to dress like a boy playing Patrick Bateman in a middle-school musical version of American Psycho. But last year, something changed. He’s been de-manscaped and now wears obnoxiously sloganed baggy black T-shirts and fuck-you watches. Mark’s the only mega-rich person in the world to have deliberately got himself a glow-down. Strange to remember all the batshit plotlines of the past couple of years. Not so long ago, it was Musk scrambling to retain power over the conversation. “I’m sure Earth can’t wait to be exclusively under Zuck’s thumb with no other options,” wrote Elon, who then spent the next 18 months positioning himself as American democracy’s “other option”. But his angst back then was prompted by the fact that Meta had launched Threads – too Twitter-like a product, apparently. And so it was that Elon challenged Mark to a cage fight. Zuckerberg accepted the challenge, with efforts to stage the fight made by UFC chief Dana White. Who, inevitably, is now a Meta board member and feature of the incoming president’s inner circle. In the end, though, it ended up being a lot of talk that came to nothing. And on the basis of all the above and so, so much more … I sincerely hope I’m going to be typing those words a lot over the next four years.
Maga wants to break big tech, Trumps's ok with being a 50% partner. Notice those overachievers are desperate to belong (mindless collectivism) to any dominant tribe. Goons doing whatever to get over is the problem. It's a social engineering problem. Labor unions in theory, help individuals push back against irrational organizations. Whistle blowers are hung out to dry by corporations and gov't in order to defeat the individual's rationality.
Can we get notagain's posts automatically deleted to save space? Say after a few minutes. He won't even notice.