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With the technology, economics, and markets for computers having changed so drastically over the last quarter century, individuals now have very few reasons for building their own computers. Will that ever change?

In the last week we've seen the emergence of the true Meta — and the true Mark Zuckerberg — as the company ended its fact-checking program, claiming that (and I quote) "fact checkers have been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created" on both Instagram and Facebook, the latter of which was shown in a study from George Washington University to, by design, "afford antivaccine content producers several means to circumvent the intent of misinformation removal policies." Meta has also killed its diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

Shortly after announcing the policies, Zuckerberg went on the Joe Rogan Experience and had a full-scale pissfit, claiming that corporations are "culturally neutered" and that companies should have both "more masculine energy" and "[have a culture] that celebrates the aggression a bit more," adding that said culture would "[have] its own merits that are really positive." Zuckerberg believes that modern corporate culture has somehow framed masculinity as bad, something he does not attempt to elaborate upon, frame with any kind of evidence (after all, it's Joe Rogan), or really connect to anything besides a sense of directionless grievance.

This means that Meta has now "[gotten rid of] a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity and gender that are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate," which in practice means that Meta now allows you to say that being gay is a mental illness or describe immigrants as "filth." Casey Newton at Platformer — who I have been deeply critical of (and will be later in this piece!) — has done an excellent job reporting on exactly how horrifying these policies are, revealing how Meta's internal guidelines allow Facebook users to say that trans people are both mentally ill and don't exist (to be clear, if you feel this way, stop reading and take a quick trip to the garage with your car keys), and included one of the most wretched things I've ever read: that Alex Schultz, Meta's CMO, a gay man, "suggested in an internal post that people seeing their queer friends and family members abused on Facebook and Instagram could lead to increased support for LGBTQ rights."

This is the kind of social network that Mark Zuckerberg wants — an unrestrained, unfiltered, unrepentantly toxic and noxiously heteronormative, one untethered by the frustrating norms of "making sure that a social network of billions of people doesn't actively encourage hate of multiple different marginalized groups."

Finally, Mark Zuckerberg can do whatever he wants, as opposed to the past 20 years, where it's hard to argue that he's faced an unrelenting series of punishments. Zuckerberg's net worth recently hit $213 billion, he's running a company with a market capitalization of over $1.5 trillion that he can never be fired from, he owns a 1400-acre compound in Hawaii, and while dealing with all this abject suffering, he was forced to half-heartedly apologize during a senate hearing where he was tortured (translation: made to feel slightly uncomfortable) after only having six years to recover from the last time when nothing happened to him in a senate hearing. 

Sarcasm aside, few living people have had it easier than Mark Zuckerberg, a man who has been insulated from consequence, risk, and responsibility for nearly twenty years. The sudden (and warranted) hysteria around these monstrous changes has an air of surprise, framing Meta (and Zuckerberg's) moves as a "MAGA-tilt" to "please Donald Trump," which I believe is a comfortable way to frame a situation that is neither sudden nor surprising.

Mere months ago, the media was fawning over Mark Zuckerberg's new look, desperate to hear about why he's wearing gold chains, declaring that he had "the swagger of a Roman emperor" and that he had (and I quote the Washington Post) transformed himself from "a dorky, democracy-destroying CEO into a dripped-out, jacked AI accelerationist in the eyes of potential Meta recruits." Zuckerberg was, until this last week, being celebrated for the very thing people are upset about right now — flimsy, self-conscious and performative macho bullshit that only signifies strength to weak men and those credulous enough to accept it, which in this case means "almost every major media outlet." The only thing he did differently this time was come out and say it. After all, there was no punishment or judgment for his last macho media cycle, and if anything he proved that many will accept whatever he says in whatever way he does it.

Yet I want to be clear that what you're seeing with Meta — and by extension Zuckerberg — is not a "sudden" move, but the direct result of a man that has never, ever been held in check. It is a fantasy to describe — or even hint — that these changes are the beginning of some sort of unrestrained Meta, rather than part of the intentional destruction of the market leader in growth-at-all-costs Rot Economics.

As I wrote in the middle of last year, Meta has spent years gradually making the experience of using its products worse in pursuit of perpetual growth. When I say "intentionally," I mean that product decisions — such as limiting the information in notifications as a means of making users and heavily promoting clickbait headlines as a means of keeping people on the site longer — have been made for years, at times in broad daylight, that have led to the deterioration of the core experiences of both Facebook and Instagram.

Some are touting Zuckerberg's current move as some sort of master plan to appease Trump and conservatives, suggesting that this is a "MAGA-fication" of these platforms, where conservatives will somehow be given preferential treatment, such as, say, Facebook's recommendation engine promoting dramatically more conservative media than other sources.

Which is something that already fucking happened!

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In 2020, journalist Kevin Roose created an automated Twitter account called "Facebook's Top 10," listing the top-performing (as in what posts were shared, viewed and commented on the most) link posts by U.S. Facebook pages on a daily basis, something he was able to do by connecting to Facebook's "CrowdTangle" data analytics tool, a product created for researchers and journalists to understand what was happening on the world's largest social network.

Roose's reporting revealed that Meta's top-performing links regularly skewed toward right wing influencers like Dan Bongino, Ben Shapiro and Sean Hannity, outlets like Fox News, and the page of president-elect Donald Trump. Internally, Meta was freaking out, suggesting to Roose that "engagement" was a misleading measurement of what was popular on Facebook, suggesting the real litmus test being "reach," as in how many people saw it. Roose also reported that internal arguments at Meta led it to suggesting it’d make a Twitter account of its own that had a more "balanced" view based on internal data.

Meta even suggested the obvious answer — sharing reach data — would vindicate its position, only for CrowdTangle's CEO to add that "false and misleading news stories also rose to the top of those lists."

These stories danced around one important detail: that these stories were likely recommended by Facebook's algorithm, which has reliably and repeatedly skewed conservative for many years. A study in The Economist from September 2020 found that the most popular American media outlets on Facebook in a one month period were Breitbart and Fox News, and that both Facebook page engagements and website views heavily skewed conservative.

While one could argue that this might be the will of the users, what a user sees on Facebook is almost entirely algorithmic, and thus it's reasonable to assume that said algorithm was deliberately pushing conservative content.

At this time, Meta's Head of Public Policy was Joel Kaplan, a man whose previous work involved working as George W. Bush's Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, as well as handling public policy and affairs for Energy Future Holdings, which involved three private equity firms buying Texas power company TXU for $45 billion and immediately steering it into bankruptcy due to the $38.7 billion in debt Energy Future Holdings was forced to take on as a means of acquiring TXU.

Jeff Horwitz reports in his book Broken Code that Kaplan personally intervened when Facebook's health team attempted to remove COVID conspiracy movie Plandemic from its recommendation engine, and Facebook only did so once Roose reported that it was the most-engaged link in a 24 hour period.

Naturally, Meta's choice wasn't to "fix things" or "improve" or "take responsibility." By the end of 2021, Meta had disbanded the team that ran CrowdTangle, and in early 2022, the company had stopped registering new users. In early 2024 — months before the 2024 elections — CrowdTangle was officially shut down, though Facebook Top 10 had stopped working in the middle of 2023.

Meta hasn't "made a right-wing turn."  It’s been an active arm of the right wing media for nearly a decade, actively empowering noxious demagogues like Alex Jones, allowing him to evade bans and build massive private online groups on the platform to disseminate content. A report from November 2021 by Media Matters found that Facebook had tweaked its news algorithm in 2021, helping right-leaning news and politics pages to outperform other pages using "sensational and divisive content." Another Media Matters report from 2023 found that conservatives were continually earning more total interactions than left or non-aligned pages between January 1 2020 and December 31 2022, even as the company was actively deprioritizing political content.

A 2024 report from non-profit GLAAD found that Meta had continually allowed widespread anti-trans hate content across Instagram, Facebook, and Threads, with the company either claiming that the content didn't violate its community standards or ignoring reports entirely. While we can — and should — actively decry Meta's disgusting new standards, it's ahistorical to pretend that this was a company that gave a shit about any of this stuff, or took it seriously, or sought to protect marginalized people.

It's a testament to the weak and inconsistent approach that the media has taken to both Meta and Mark Zuckerberg that any of these changes are being framed as anything other than Meta formalizing the quiet reality of its platforms: that whatever gets engagement is justified, even if it's hateful, racist, violent, cruel, or bigoted.

To quote Facebook's then-Vice President Andrew Bosworth in an internal email from 2017, "all the work that [Facebook] does in growth is justified," even if it's bullying, or a terrorist attack, and yes, that's exactly what he said. One might think that Bosworth would be fired for sending this email.

He's now Meta's Chief Technology Officer.

Sidenote: On the subject of bullying, my editor just told me something. His Facebook newsfeed is now filled with random posts from companies celebrating their workers of the month, registry offices (government buildings in the UK where you can get married), and so on. These posts, which are pushed to a random global audience, inevitably attract cruelty. One post from a registry office somewhere in Yorkshire attracted hundreds of comments, with many mocking the appearance of the newly-married couple.

But hey, engagement is engagement, right?   

It's time to stop pretending that this company was ever something noble, or good, or well-meaning. Mark Zuckerberg is a repressed coward, as far from "manly" as one can get, because true masculinity is a sense of responsibility for both oneself and others, and finding strength in supporting and uplifting them with sincerity and honesty.

Meta, as an institution, has been rotten for years, making trillions of dollars as it continually makes the service worse, all to force users to spend more time on the site, even if it's because Facebook and Instagram are now engineered to interrupt users' decisionmaking and autonomy with a constant slew of different forms of sponsored and algorithmicly-curated content.

The quality of the experience — something the media has categorically failed in covering — has never been lower on either Facebook or Instagram. I am not sure how anyone writing about this company for the last few years has been able to do so with a straight face. The products suck, they're getting worse, and yet the company has never been more profitable. Facebook is crammed with fake accounts, AI-generated slop, and nonsense groups teeming with boomers posting that they "wish we'd return to a culture of respect" as they're recommended their third racist meme of the day. Instagram is a carousel of screen-filling sponsored and recommended content, and users are constantly battling with these products to actually see the things that they log on to see.

I want to be explicit here: for years, using Facebook has been a nightmare for many, many years.

Sidebar: No, really, I need you to look at this a little harder than you have been.

You log in, immediately see a popup for stories, scroll down and see one post from someone you know, a giant ad, a carousel of "people you may know," a post from a page you don’t follow, a series of recommended "reels" that show a two-second clip on repeat of what you might see so that you have to click through, another ad, three posts from pages you don’t follow, then another ad.

Searching for "Facebook support" leads you to a sponsored post about Facebook "bringing your community together," and then a selection of groups, the first of which is called "Facebook Support" with 18,000 members including a support number (1-800-804-9396) that does not work. The group is full of posts about people having issues with Facebook, with one by an admin called "Oliver Green" telling everyone that this group is where they can "discuss issues and provide assistance and solutions to them." Oliver Green's avatar is actually a picture of writer Oliver Darcy.

One post says "please don't respond to messages from my Facebook, I was hacked," with one responder — "Decker Techfix" — saying "when was it hacked" and asking them to message him now for quick recovery of an account they appear to be posting with.

Another, where a user says "someone hacked my Facebook and changed all password," is responded to by an account called "Ree TechMan," who adds "Inbox me now for help." Another, where someone also says they were hacked, has another account — James Miles — responding saying "message me privately." There are hundreds of interactions like these.

Another group called "Account Hacked" (which has 8500 members and hasn't been updated since late 2023) immediately hits you with a post that says "message me for any hacking services Facebook recovery Instagram recovery lost funds recovery I cloud bypass etc," with a few users responding along with several other scammers offering to help in the same way.

Another group with 6700 members called "Recover an old Facebook account you can't log into" offers another 1800 number that doesn't work. A post from December 5 2023 from a user claiming their account was compromised and their email and password was changed has been responded to 44 times, mostly by scammers attempting to offer account recovery services, but a few times by actual users.

Elsewhere, a group promising to literally send you money on PayPal has 24,000 members and 10+ posts a day. Another, called "Paypal problem solution," offers similarly scammy services if you can't get into Paypal. Another called "Cash App Venmo Paypal Zelle Support" has 5800 members.

This is what Facebook is — a decrepit hole of sponsored content and outright scams. Meta has been an atrocious steward of its product, it has been fucking awful for years, and it's time to wake up.

And, to repeat myself, this has been the case for years. Meta has been gradually (yet aggressively) reducing the quality of the Facebook and Instagram experience with utter disregard for user safety, all while flagrantly ignoring its own supposed quality and safety standards.

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It's a comfortable lie to say that Meta has "suddenly" done something, because it gives the media (and society at large) air cover for ignoring a gaping wound in the internet. Two of the world's largest social networks are run — and have been run — with a blatant contempt for the user, misinforming and harming people at scale, making the things they want to see harder to find as they're swamped by an endless stream of sponsored and recommended content that either sells them something or gets them to engage further with the platform with little care whether the engagement is positive, fun or useful.

Casey Newton of Platformer has done an admirable job covering Meta in the last two weeks, but it's important to note that he was cheerfully covering Zuckerberg's "expansive view of the future" as recently as September 25, 2024, happily publishing how "Zuckerberg was back on the offensive," somehow not seeing anything worrying about Zuckerberg's t-shirt referencing Julius Caesar, the historic dictator that perpetuated a genocide in the Gallic wars. 

Aside: Personally, I would have said Zuckerberg is more of a Nero type, fiddling (read: chasing AI and the metaverse, and dressing like Kevin Federline) while Rome (read: Facebook and Instagram) burned. 

Newton felt it unnecessary to mention the utterly atrocious quality of Facebook while quoting Zuck saying things like "in every generation of technology, there is a competition of ideas for what the future should look like."

Yet the most loathsome thing Newton published was this:

But it left unsaid what seemed to be the larger point, which is that Zuckerberg intends to crush his rivals — particularly Apple — into a fine pulp. His swagger on stage was most evident when discussed the company's next-generation glasses as the likeliest next-generation computing platform, and highlighted the progress that Meta had made so far in overcoming the crushing technological burdens necessary for that to happen.

And it also failed to capture just how personal all this seems to him. Burned by what he has called the 20-year mistake of the company's reaction to the post-2016 tech backlash, and long haunted by criticisms that Meta has been nothing more than a competition-crushing copycat since it released the News Feed, Zuckerberg has never seemed more intent on claiming for himself the mantle of innovator.

This is paper tiger analysis — stenography for the powerful, masked as deep thoughts. This specific paragraph is exactly where Newton could've said something about how worrying Zuckerberg modeling himself on a Roman emperor was. How this company was, despite oinking about how it’s building the future, letting its existing products deteriorate as it deliberately turned the screws to juice engagement. Casey Newton has regularly and reliably turned his back on the truth — that Meta's core products are really quite bad — in favor of pumping up various artificial intelligence products and vague promises about a future that just arrived and fucking sucks.

The reason I am singling Newton out is that it is very, very important to hold the people that helped Zuckerberg succeed accountable, especially as they attempt to hint that they've always been an aggressive advocate for the truth. Newton is fully capable of real journalism — as proven by his recent coverage — but has chosen again and again to simply print whatever Mark Zuckerberg wants to say.

I am also going hard in the paint against Newton because of something else he wrote at the end of last year — "The phony comforts of AI skepticism" — where Newton sloppily stapled together multiple different pieces of marketing collateral to argue that not only was AI the future, but those that critiqued it were doing so in a cynical, corrupt way, singling out independent critic Gary Marcus. I'm not going to go through it in detail — Edward Ongweso Jr. already did so — but I think there are far better comforts for Newton than his ambiguous yet chummy relationship with the powerful.

I also did not like something Newton said at the end of a (paywalled) blog about what he learned from the reaction to his piece about AI skeptics. Newton said, and I quote, that he was "taking detailed notes on all bloggers writing ’financial analyses’ suggesting that OpenAI will go bankrupt soon because it's not profitable yet."

I do not like bullies, and I do not like threats. Suggesting one is "taking detailed notes on bloggers" is an attempt to intimidate people that are seriously evaluating the fact that OpenAI burns $5 billion a year and has no path to profitability. I don't know if this is about me, nor do I particularly care.

I have, however, been taking detailed notes on Casey Newton for quite some time.

While Newton's metaverse interview from 2021 was deeply irresponsible in how much outright nonsense it printed, arguably his most disgraceful was his October 26 2021 piece called "The Facebook Papers' missing piece" — an interview with an anonymous "integrity worker" that attempted to undermine the Wall Street Journal's Facebook Files (that revealed in that "Facebook Inc. knows, in acute detail, that its platforms are riddled with flaws that cause harm, often in ways only the company fully understands"), in a seeming attempt to  discredit (by proxy) the bravery of Frances Haugen, the whistleblower that provided the documents that led to this reporting. It's utterly repulsive corporate hand-washing, and it's important context for any criticism he has of Meta going forward, especially if he tries to suggest he's always held it to account.

I think Newton seems a little more comfortable with the powerful's messaging than he should. He's argued that while AI companies have hit a scaling wall, it's actually okay, that NFTs went finally mainstream in 2022, that Clubhouse was the future, that live audio was Zuckerberg's "big bet on creators" in 2021 due to "the shift in power from institutions to individuals" (Facebook shut down its podcast service a year later), that  — and I cannot see the full text here, because it's paywalled — "metaverse pessimists were missing something" because "Meta's grand vision [was] already well on its way" in November 2021, that Meta's leadership changed its mind about its name because "Facebook [was] not the future of the company," that Axie Infinity — a crypto/web3 Pokémon clone that has created its own form of indentured servitude in the global south backed by Andreessen Horowitz — was "turning gaming on its head" (the game sucks)...okay, I'll stop.

Casey has also, at times, had dalliances with criticisms — sometimes even of Facebook! No, really! — but it's hard to take them seriously when he writes a piece for The Verge about how "Google plans to win its antitrust trial," printing the legal and marketing opinion of one of the largest companies in the world knowing full-well that the Department of Justice would not get such an opportunity.

In emails revealed in the Department of Justice's antitrust trial against Google Search, Google specifically mentioned having briefed Newton with the intention of, and I quote, "look[ing] for ways to drive headlines on [Google's] own terms." In Newton's defense, this is standard PR language, but it is, within the context of what I'm writing, hard to ignore.

The reason I am so fucking furious at Newton is he is part of the media machine that has helped repeatedly whitewash Mark Zuckerberg and his cronies, running glossy puff-pieces with scumbags like Nick Clegg, and saying things like "the transition away from Facebook’s old friends and family-dominated feeds to Meta’s algorithmic wonderland seems to be proceeding mostly without incident."

That line, I add, was published in 2023, two years after the release of The Facebook Files, which revealed that the company knew its algorithmic timeline had a propensity to push users into increasingly-radical echo chambers.  And one year after Amnesty International published a report accusing Facebook’s algorithms of “supercharging the spread of harmful anti-Rohingya content in Myanmar” amidst a genocide that saw an estimated million displaced and tens of thousands massacred. 

Newton has spent years using his vast platform to subtly defend companies actively making their products worse, occasionally proving he can be a real journalist (his work on the acquisition of Twitter was genuinely great), only to slip back into the comfortable pajamas of "Are We Being Too Mean To Meta?"

The media — especially people like Newton — are extremely influential over public policy and the overall way that society views the tech industry. As an experienced, knowledgeable journalist, Newton has too regularly chosen to frame "fair and balanced" as "let's make sure the powerful get their say too." As I've said — and will continue to say — Casey Newton is fully capable of doing some of the literal best journalism in tech, such as his coverage of the horrible lives of Facebook moderators, yet has, up until alarmingly recently, chosen to do otherwise.

The cost, by the way, is that the powerful have used Newton and others as mouthpieces to whitewash their contemptuous and half-baked product decisions. I don't know Newton's intentions, nor will I attempt to guess at them. What I will say is that as a result of Casey Newton's work, Mark Zuckerberg and his products have received continual promotion of their ideas and air cover for their failures, directly influencing public opinion in the process.

Worse still, Newton has acted for years like nothing was wrong with the quality of platforms themselves. Had Newton written with clarity and purpose about the erosion of quality in Facebook and Instagram, Zuckerberg would have lost a valuable way to convince the 150,000+ people that read Platformer that things were fine, that the quality was fine, that Meta is an innovative company, and that there was no reason to dislike Mark Zuckerberg.

There was, and there always will be. Putting aside the horrifying person he obviously is, Zuckerberg is a career liar and a charlatan, and has deliberately made the lives of billions of people worse as a means of increasing revenue growth.

And I believe that he's about to inspire a new era of decay, where tech executives, unburdened by their already-flimsy approach to societal norms and customer loyalty, will begin degrading experiences at scale, taking as many liberties as possible.

Meta has fired the starting gun of the Slop Society.

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In an interview with the Financial Times from December 2024, Meta's Vice President of Product for Generative AI (Connor Hayes) said that Meta "expect[s] AIs to actually, over time, exist on [Meta's] platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do," each one having their own bios and profile pictures and the ability to "generate and share content powered by AI on the platform." This came hot off the heels of Zuckerberg saying in a quarterly earnings call that Meta would "...add a whole new category of content, which is AI generated or AI summarized content or kind of existing content pulled together by AI in some way," effectively promising to drop AI slop into feeds already filled full of recommended and sponsored content that gets in the way of you seeing real human beings.

This led to a scandal where users discovered what they believed to be brand new AI profiles. Karen Attiah of the Washington Post wrote a long thread on Bluesky (and a piece in the post itself) about her experience talking to a bot she (fairly!) described as "digital blackface," with Meta receiving massive backlash for bots that would happily admit they were trained by a bunch of white people. It turns out these bots had been around for around a year in various forms but were so unpopular that nobody really noticed until the Financial Times story, leading to Meta deleting the bots, at least for now.

I am 100% sure that these chatbots will return, because it's fairly obvious that Meta intends to fill your feeds with content either entirely generated or summarized by generative AI, be it with fake profiles or content itself. AI-generated slop already dominates the platform, and as discussed earlier, the quality of the platform has fallen into utter disrepair, mostly because Meta's only concern is keeping you on the platform to show you ads or content it’s been paid to show you, even if the reason you're seeing it is because you can't find the stuff you actually want to find.

That's because all roads lead back to the Rot Economy — the growth-at-all-costs mindset that means that the only thing that matters is growth of revenue, which comes from showing as many ads to you as possible. It's almost ridiculous to call us "users" of Facebook at this point. We are the used, the punished, the terrorized, the tricked, the scammed, and the abused, constantly forced to navigate through layers of abstraction between the thing we are allegedly using and the features we'd like to use. It's farcical how little attention has been given to how bad tech products have gotten, and few have decayed as severely as Facebook thanks to its near-monopoly on social media. I, personally, would rather not use Instagram, but there are people I know that I only really speak to there, and I know many people who have the same experience.

As Zuckerberg and his ilk are intimately aware, people really don't have anywhere else to go, which — along with a lack of regulation and a compliant media — has given them permission to adjust their services to increase advertising impressions, which in practice means giving you more reasons to stay on the platforms, which means "put more things in the way of what you want to see" rather than "create more compelling experiences for users."

It's the same thing that happened with Google Search, where the revenue team pushed the search team to make search results worse as a means of increasing the amount of times people searched for things on Google — because a user that finds what they're looking for quickly spends less time on the site looking at ads. It's why the Apple App Store is so chaotically-organized and poorly-curated — Apple makes money on the advertising impressions it gets from you searching — and why so many products on the App Store have expensive and exploitative microtransactions, because Apple makes 30% off of all App Store revenue, even if the app sucks.

And I believe that Zuckerberg loosening community standards and killing fact checking is just the beginning of tech's real era of decay. Trump, and by extension those associated with him, win in part by bulldozing norms and good taste. They do things that most of us agree are bad (such as being noxious and cruel, which I realize is a dilution) and would never do, moving the Overton window (the range of acceptable things in a society) further and further into Hell in the process.

In this case, we've already seen tech's Overton window shift for years — a lack of media coverage of the actual decay of these products and a lack of accountability for tech executives (both in the media and regulation) has given companies the permission to quietly erode their services, and because everybody made things shittier over time, it became accepted practice to punish and trick customers with dark patterns (design choices to intentionally mislead people) to the point that the FTC found last year that the majority of subscription apps and websites use them.

I believe, however, that Zuckerberg is attempting to move it further — to publicly say "we're going to fill your feeds with AI slop" and "we're firing 5% of our workers because they suck" and "we're going to have AI profiles instead of real people on the site you visit to see real people's stuff" and "we don't really give a shit about marginalized people" and "people are too mean to men" knowing, in his position as the CEO of one of the largest tech companies in the world, that people will follow.

Tech has already taken liberties with the digital experience and I believe the Slop Era will be one where experiences will begin to subtly and overtly rot, with companies proudly boasting that they're making "adjustments to user engagement that will provide better business-forward outcomes," which will be code for "make them worse so that we make more money."

I realize that there's an obvious thing I'm not saying: that the Trump administration isn't going to be any kind of regulatory force against big tech. Trump is perhaps the most transactional human being ever to grace the earth. Big tech, knowing this, has donated generously to the Trump inaugural fund. It’s why Trump has completely reversed his position on TikTok, having once wanted to ban the platform, now wants to give it a reprieve because he “won youth by 34 points” and “there are those that say that TikTok has something to do with that.”  Tech knows that by kissing the ring, it can do whatever it wants. 

Not that previous governments have been effective at curbing the worst excesses of big tech. Outside of the last few years, and specifically the work done by the FCC under Lina Khan, antitrust against big tech has been incredibly weak, and no meaningful consumer protections exist to keep websites like Facebook or Google functional for consumers, or limit how exploitative they can be.

The media has failed to hold them accountable at scale, which has in turn allowed the Overton window to shift on quality, and now that Trump — and the general MAGAfied mindset of "you can say or do whatever you want if you do so confidently or loudly enough" — has risen to power again, so too will an era of outright selfishness and cruelty within the products that consumers use every day, except this time I believe they finally have permission to enter their slop era. I also think that Trump gives them confidence that monopolies like Facebook, Instagram, Microsoft 365 (Microsoft's enterprise monopoly over business productivity software), Google Search, and Google Advertising (remedies will take some time, and the Trump administration will likely limit any punishment it inflicts) will remain unchallenged.

What I'm describing is an era of industrial contempt for the consumer, a continuation of what I described in Never Forgive Them, where big tech decides that they will do whatever they want to customers within the boundaries of the law, but with little consideration of good taste, user happiness, or anything other than growth.

How this manifests in Facebook and Instagram will be fairly obvious. I believe that the already-decrepit state of these platforms will accelerate. Meta will push as much AI slop as it wants, both created by its generative models and their users, and massively ramp up content that riles up users with little regard for the consequences. Instagram will become more exploitative and more volatile. Instagram ads have been steadily getting more problematic, and I think Meta will start taking ads from just about anyone. This will lead to an initial revenue bump, and then, I hypothesize, a steady bleed of users that will take a few quarters to truly emerge.

Elsewhere, we're already seeing the first sign of abusive practices. Both Google and Microsoft are now forcing generative AI features onto customers, with Google grifting business users by increasing the cost of Google Workspace by $2-per-user-per-month along with AI features they don't want, and Microsoft raising the price of consumer Office subscriptions, justifying the move by adding Copilot AI features that, again, customers really don't want. The Information's Jon Victor and Aaron Holmes add that it's yet to be seen what Microsoft does with the corporate customers using Microsoft's 365 productivity suite — adding Copilot costs $30-per-user-per-month — but my hypothesis is it will do exactly the same thing that Google did to its business customers.

I should also be clear that the reason they're doing this is that they're desperate. These companies must express growth every single quarterly earnings or see their stock prices crater, and big tech companies have oriented themselves around growth as a result — meaning that they're really not used to having to compete for customers or make products they like. For over a decade, tech has been rewarded for creating growth opportunities empowered by monopolistic practices, and I'd argue that the cultures that created the products that people remember actually liking are long-dead, their evangelists strangled by the soldiers of the Rot Economy.

You are, more than likely, already seeing the signs that this is happening. The little features on the products you use that feel broken — like when you try and crop an image on iOS and it sometimes doesn't actually crop it, when the "copy link" button on Google Docs doesn't work, when a Google Search gives you a page of forum links that don't answer your question — and I expect things to get worse, possibly in new and incredibly frustrating ways.

I deeply worry that we're going to enter the most irresponsible era of tech yet — not just in the harms that companies allow or perpetuate, but in the full rejection of their stewardship for the products themselves. Our digital lives are already chaotic and poisonous, different incentives warring for our attention, user interfaces corroded by those who believe everything is justified in pursuit of growth. I fear that the subtle little problems you see every day will both multiply and expand, and that the core services we use will break down, because I believe the most powerful in big tech never really gave a shit and no longer believe they have to pretend otherwise.