Séamas O'Reilly: The world is an objectively worse place because of tech-bro oligarchs
Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta, speaks during an appearance at SIGGRAPH 2024, the premier conference on computer graphics and interactive techniques, Monday, July 29, 2024, in the Colorado Convention Center in downtown Denver. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)
I am staring at the pallid torso of a tech CEO.
It is not the first time I have seen him topless. His name is Bryan Johnson and, as I’m sure you are aware, he wants to live forever. More than that, he wants us all to know about it.
He is a 46-year-old man who looks like a slightly damp 45-year-old, but I know that he has the resting heart rate of someone 20 years his junior, and the blood of a teen.
I have been told about his sleep cycles, his lung capacity, and the frequency and strength of his night-time erections.
Everything I have learned about this man has been against my will, but he is only the most extreme variant of what tech writer Karl Bode calls “CEO Said” journalism; that substrate of reporting in which some rich guy offers a pronouncement to a hall of lanyard-wearing dorks and we simply must be informed.
You know the type of coverage I mean; a header image of some bozo in a three-quarter zip fleece, mouth open with a small mic affixed to his cheek, his hands outstretched, against a backdrop of his own face that tells us he’s at a very important tech conference, below a headline like “KleenCo CEO says we should pay $4.99 every time we shower” or “Whizzz CEO says your piss belongs to him”.
But we don’t, actually, have to know anything about what these people say.
All we’ve gotten in the past decade is example after example of how little these people know about anything other than making apps that destroy something you previously loved, by hollowing it out into a subscription service that no longer works and everyone hates.
People who see the products, services, outlets and infrastructure we enjoy — and in some cases very dearly need — as sponges of money they can squeeze into their own pockets at our expense.
And those, of course, are the less poisonous CEOs in our newsfeeds. For the most feted among their class have now become proxy world leaders themselves.
For the past two weeks, Mark Zuckerberg has been trying to combine infinite financial resources with his utter lack of charisma, in the hopes they might combine to sell him in his new persona as a right-wing firebrand who can win over the incoming Trump administration.
He’s retooled Facebook’s codes of conduct so that calling gay and trans people “mentally ill” is now fine, and has promised to reduce the site’s commitment to fact-checking.
For anyone who has witnessed that site’s non-stop onslaught of AI-generated slop and conspiracy-scented garbage, this may sound a bit like your local burger van promising to reduce its commitment to salads, but I digress.
On Joe Rogan’s podcast — where male brain cells go to die — he recently decried Facebook’s old fact-checking policies as “like something from 1984”, and railed against his platform’s censorship of covid-19 misinformation.
This he did with all the easy patter of someone taking part in a memory test, reciting each buzzy talking point as if it was a mnemonic he’d been taught to remember the names of Henry VIII’s wives.
Has there ever been a less convincing agitator for his own interests than Mark Zuckerberg? Even now, dressing in XXXL tees and gold necklaces and hair his small army of stylists and design consultants have decided should make him look exactly like a Bafta, he seems as robotic and mannered as he ever did.
Even as he pontificates about masculinity and traditional values, he does so in soundbites as lifeless as his former paeans to gender and racial equality.
In this respect, he is greatly different to Elon Musk, inarguably the world’s premier “CEO Said” figure.
A man so obsessed with people knowing what he thinks about things that he bought the very opinion factory that had radicalised him into a far-right psychopath, and has proceeded to let it kick him a few extra rungs down the ladder of sense, while propelling him to unparalleled geopolitical influence in the process.
Musk speaks like a man who believes his own insane conspiratorial guff, because he does. For years, we’ve watched as the most malodorous portions of the internet have fully infected his brain and transformed his entire personality.
Zuck avoided this fate by not having a personality to begin with. It is difficult to imagine him holding a strong view on anything, for much the same reason it is difficult to imagine him enjoying a poem or a sandwich. It would be like attributing sentiment to a set of venetian blinds. There is simply nothing there.
Last week, when Musk agreed with the leader of the German far right party AfD that Adolf Hitler was a communist, no part of me thought he was putting on a front, or saying what his handlers thought was necessary for him to say. He has poster’s brain, which is to say he is intellectually curious when it comes to some things — wondering if racism is good, for example, or devising new ways for cars and rockets to explode — but not others — world history, or actually playing the computer games he claims to be good at — and this has always been painfully apparent.
In such light, a tech CEO who simply wants to tell us that he regularly administers electric shocks to his genitals in order to reverse the age of his penis, seems almost quaint.
The more I see of the degradation and commodification of everything around us, the more I feel like wishing Bryan Johnson good luck with his diet of bonemeal and pine-cone rinds, and the constant monitoring of his night-time erections.
He’s welcome to eternal life. Personally, I can’t help thinking that if there was ever a world in which I wanted to live forever, it wouldn’t be this one.
