🔒 The Warlord Internet

It’s kind of funny how the trajectory of the internet wound up following the plot of the Mad Max movies in an analogy that’s only a little bit silly.

 Those movies are often used as a reference for a lawless post-apocalyptic anarchy, but the story only started off that way. The roving marauders who inhabited the wasteland eventually congregated into gangs and townships and societies where everyone could live closer to each other and nearer the essentials that made life possible. Those townships were, more often than not, ruled by some kind of warlord who dressed in a way he thought looked intimidating but actually came off as ridiculous.

 Each township was subject to the specific laws and whims of its overlords, some of them brutal and some of them senseless but thanks to the increasingly siloed nature of civilisation it was difficult to escape whichever walled city you wound up in. If you did leave, you were on your own.

 As time moved on further, and Mel Gibson started aging strangely into Tom Hardy instead of a twitchy old hairy racist who smells like nicotine, those warlords started forming alliances and their own visions for the world started to converge. It wasn’t a vision in which the common people they ruled over had much of a role except as pale anonymous bloodbags for the ruling class.

Eventually it didn’t even matter whether you lived in Gastown, the Bullet Farm, or the Citadel. The warlords were more or less on the same page about their designs for their world and how you are going to help them achieve it. 

Saturday Night Live genuinely could not have outparodied real life when Mark Zuckerberg, wearing the lamest, most awkward gold chain and ‘fro combo, sat down in Joe Rogan’s studio the other week and started waxing redpilled about bringing masculine energy back to the workforce. 

Zuck’s new image as the Pokemon who evolves into Macklemore is a bizarre and sudden turn away from the image he’s cultivated his entire life: the antisocial robotic hate-nerd who only owns one T-shirt and cuts his own fringe using a Wahl clipper and a ruler.

 It’s packaged with a full rebrand of Meta’s entire slate of social media companies: Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads. Effective almost immediately, all of these products are following Elon Musk’s lead and abandoning most content moderation, eliminating its Trust and Safety division, and switching off any and all safeguards against foreign propaganda and domestic disinformation.

 Zuckerberg, you see, has suddenly decided that he’s a “free speech absolutist” in the same mould of his former adversary Ser Musk, and that the mandate established by Donald Trump’s landslide presidential victory has finally broken his Nutty Professor Jordan Peterson persona free of the plain grey tee prison that Barack Obama locked him in. (Strangely, his reputation as the most strict and censorial of the social media czars survived four entire years of Trump between 2017-2020, but we don’t discuss that).

 Until last week the hate speech filters on Facebook were so strict that you could lose your account if you called a redhead a ranga, but the new rules of Meta officially classify both homosexuality and transgenderism as controvertible “mental illnesses” and permit, arguably encourage, referring to them as such. Racial vilification is also now fully permitted. Strangely, religious vilification is still against the rules. Really makes you wonder (not really) who Zuck is pre-emptively trying to appease with that particular carve-out in his new free-for-all abuse rules. (Hint: It’s not Zoroastrians).

 Zuck’s sudden 180 on social media moderation isn’t based on any market metric. Flooding Facebook, Instagram and Threads with bigots and worse ideologies who can only aspire to mere bigotry is a Three Mile Island advertising partnership disaster to match Elon Musk’s Twitter Chernobyl. Nor is it based on any kind of sudden reawakening of ideological integrity.

 No, this is a pledge of fealty. Elon Musk was the first to prove that the Russian model of oligarchy is possible in the United States, and both legal immunity and immense financial rewards await those who kiss the ring of an authoritarian president.

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