Josh Marshall

I noted yesterdat how Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is rushing to jump on the Trump tech bandwagon. He signaled this again yesterday by announcing that Meta is getting out of the content moderation…

January 8, 2025 10:53 a.m. I noted yesterdat how Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg is rushing to jump on the Trump tech bandwagon.

As a follow up to my post below I want to return to a more technical point but one which is critical to understand as the baseline for any discussion about social media and ‘platforms'. ‘Network effects' are an inherent feature of the tech industry. You can go all the way back to what now seems like the quaintly primitive tech of VHS and Betamax. They are also embedded at the core of Silicon Valley/VC business culture in which 9 out of 10 investments fail but one (you hope) has staggering returns which make up for all the rest. ‘Hockey stick growth' is another side of this many sided coin at the center of early 21st century capitalism. It is the hunt for a business proposition in which costs are chained to arithmetic growth and returns are exponential. If one of your ten bets holds something like that possibility you can afford to invest in a bunch of dry holes.

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Some of you will disagree with this. And perhaps the future will vindicate your criticism. But I don't think we should be distracted by Trump's nonsense about Greenland, the Panama Canal or bum rushing Canada into becoming a US state. We're all under the grip of that line: ‘When someone tells you who they are, believe them.' But that doesn't always work with con men and pathological liars. None of this stuff is going to happen. At a minimum we shouldn't get pulled into these outrage cycles or pretending any of this is a thing until you see the US deploying military assets in Central America or … Maine? (I'm not sure where your deploy military assets to menace Greenland but wherever that is, wait for that.)

January 10, 2025 11:53 a.m. If you delve into Greenland discourse you quickly find also sorts of degenerate weirdness.

Hello, it's the weekend. This is The Weekender ☕️ At one point during Trump's sentencing hearing on Friday, Judge Juan Merchan remarked that

| January 12, 2025 4:20 p.m. Having watched Mark Zuckerberg's weeklong roll out of the new MAGAfied Facebook/Meta, let me put my chips down on none of this aging well for his company.

January 13, 2025 1:43 p.m. There's currently a debate online about whether social media owners were always secretly or latently rightwing

There’s currently a debate online about whether social media owners were always...