The Mark Zuckerberg Is a Lot Less Impressive Than the Movie Version

If you think she didn’t care about the answers, you missed most of what’s going on. The process is similar to a trial: she knows full well what he’s trying to avoid admitting and was very carefully inching him into a situation where he had to either answer honestly or admit that his previous answers had not been correct. Each time he gave their usual spin rather than answering she recognized it as such and moved him on to something which highlighted the inconsistencies in his answers.

> this is a really hard problem to solve, and maybe there won't be any solution that satisfies the public

I'm not a fan of this argument. It reminds me of people saying that the big US banks are too big to fail during the sub prime mortgage crisis a decade ago. If the banks are too big to fail, then we better fix the regulation of those banks so they are less likely to fail or break the banks up.

If Facebook is too big to effectively moderate what it publishes, then reduce how much they publish (ie your Agency is going to be rate limited) or break up Facebook into pieces that can moderate their traffic.

> The only reason to have Zuckerberg there is to get camera footage of him looking shifty and to pressure him to do whatever the politicians want him to do.

Bingo.

It's a pretty classic deal, we've done these things in the US for a while when it comes to new tech and other things. Here's the terms: You get, essentially, a monopoly. In that congress leans heavily on you to write up the laws for the new fangled thingy. So, you write yourself into law such that only you can do the thingy legally. For this monopoly, you get, pretty much, guaranteed profit. Not much, 5%, something about that; but your company gets it forever.

You, your kids, your grandkids, their grandkids, however you bequeath the stocks, those rugrats will never be poor. Stupid, drunks, coke addicts, adrenaline junkies, maybe, whatever, up to you, but never poor. Dream weddings, the best colleges, vacations of legend, you name it. In exchange for this wealth, you damn well better make sure that you run this company how congress damn well wants you to run it: cheap, good, or fast (pick two).

For the robber barons, it was making sure that the trains ran on time and that you weren't trying to jack the cattle car prices just before the stock show. For Bill Gates, it was making sure the DoD could use the OS and get some damn support phone calls at 2am. For AT&T it was making sure the long distance calls went down in price. For Rockefeller it was making sure the oil kept on flowing and that those poor folks out in Billings got their heating oil for a reasonable price. For Monsanto, it was making sure they stopped suing all the farmers that I put in my campaign ads.

To leverage this power, they get you in front of both houses, have you answer questions for hours and hours, and eventually get you in a few lies. It is a super big crime to lie to congress. You go to big boy jail for as long as they fell like putting you there, maybe even for a week (the horror!).

So, you play ball. You get up there, they ask you all kinds of stuff, you lie, they now have power over you too. So you get together, write the laws, and poof, you are never poor again. Go take up painting, water skiing, scotch collecting, whatever.

That's the deal: You're perma-rich, but you do what we say.

So, it's super strange to see Zuck not playing ball here.

It's likely that he's not gotten the memo here (Hanlon's razor and all). But I think he's a tad smarter than that. I think it's because congress is asking him to shut all the grassroots rabble down, to get the Russians out of their voters' heads, to get Gramps to stop sending Cameroonian scammers $5k in Walmart gift cards. But Zuck has no clue how to go about doing that except for making the company 50x larger, and thereby crashing it. The moderation that congress is asking for, neigh demanding, as basic terms of the deal, is just not possible for what he can charge in ads. Zuck just can't moderate the whole of the thing to where Congress will sign off. Look at China, to get their moderation working they have thousands and thousands of people working at it all the time. It just plain takes a LOT of cheap eyeballs. I takes government money, not ad money.

So Zuck is stuck.

He's trying to talk to right wingers, hoping that they'll buy him some time to get the AI stuff kinda, sorta, cross-your-fingers, working. But he knows, he can't close his end of the bargain. Maybe he can persuade congress to nationalize him, like we did with lighthouses and the post office, but man alive, that's an uphill battle. So, here we are, hoping for quantum computers or some other magical thing to happen.

Perhaps you'll politely permit a pedantic impossibly pessimal lexical parallel, animal parable?

Ostrich and Possum have no awesome options for optimal animal posture, a literal posthumous aspect or optical pessimum.

If everyone knows you're in the wrong, then it's better to concede the point than stubbornly go on pretending like everything's ok. If you do the latter then it might help you in the short-term, but it's a great big red flag telling everyone that you can't be trusted.