The tech titans have picked up the phone and called the ex-president. Plus: AI chatbots and sharing your baby’s photos * Don’t get TechScape delivered to your inbox? Sign up here Welcome back. Today in the newsletter: tech executives play phone tag with Donald Trump, the liability of AI chatbots, and talking through sharing your baby’s photos online with your family. Thank you for joining me. The CEOs of the biggest tech companies in the world are looking at the neck-and-neck polls, picking up their phones, and putting their ducks in a row for a potential Donald Trump presidency. The former US president has never shied away from threatening revenge against his perceived enemies, and tech’s leaders are heading off retributive regulatory scrutiny. Continue reading...

The megalomaniacs who control X and Facebook are only able to pollute the public sphere and undermine democracy because of our deference to money There are two kinds of aphrodisiac. The first is power. A good example was provided by the late Henry Kissinger, who could hardly be described as toothsome yet was doted upon by a host of glamorous women. The other powerful aphrodisiac is immense wealth. This has all kinds of effects. It makes people (even journalists who should know better) deferential, presumably because they subscribe to the delusion that if someone is rich then they must be clever. But its effects on the rich person are more profound: it cuts them off from reality. When they travel, writes Jack Self in an absorbing essay: “The car takes them to the aerodrome, where the plane takes them to another aerodrome, where a car takes them to the destination (with perhaps a helicopter inserted somewhere). Every journey is bookended by identical Mercedes Vito Tourers (gloss black, tinted windows). Every flight is within the cosy confines of a Cessna Citation (or a King Air or Embraer)… The ultra-rich never wait in line at a carousel or a customs table or a passport control. There are no accidental encounters. No unwelcome, unapproved or unsanitary humans enter their sight – no souls that could espouse a foreign view. The ultra-rich do not see anything they do not want to see.” Continue reading...

The assistant, which has sparked privacy concerns, can also be accessed on £299 Ray-Ban Meta sunglasses Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, has launched its artificial intelligence assistant in the UK, alongside AI-boosted sunglasses modelled by Mark Zuckerberg. Meta’s AI assistant, which can generate text and images, is now available on its social media platforms in the UK and Brazil, having already been launched in the US and Australia. Continue reading...

Mark Zuckerberg’s new revamp is a far cry from the zip-up hoodies and suits emblematic of earlier eras of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg is revamping his public image with new threads. With a trio of bold shirts worn in recent appearances, he’s communicating that he came, he saw, he conquered and he will win again at any cost. The fits might be sick, but we would do well to beware. During a live, packed-auditorium podcast interview last week, the CEO of Meta wore a drop-shouldered black shirt reading “pathei mathos”, Greek for “learning through suffering”. At his 40th birthday party in May, he donned a black tee with the motto “Carthago delenda est,” which translates from Latin to “Carthage must be destroyed.” He wore a black shirt with black text that read “Aut Zuck aut nihil” during Meta’s Connect product demonstration on Wednesday. Continue reading...

Mark Zuckerberg is embracing both AI and full-on imperial monomania. As for petty gripes about elections and teen mental health, so what? The good news is that Mark Zuckerberg has become bored of looking like an answer to the AI prompt “efit of a teen villain”. The bad? While the Meta overlord has grown out the Caesar hairstyle that has sustained him since 2016, he is now leaning in to open imperial monomania. This week’s Meta Connect conference saw Mark take the stage in a T-shirt reading Aut Zuck Aut Nihil. Either Zuck Or Nothing. The original was Aut Caesar Aut Nihil and was enthusiastically adopted as a motto by one of the worst Borgias (tough field) … but look, I’m sure it’s ironic. Mark’s such a gifted ironist. We’ll get to the magic glasses and AI feedspam he was pushing at this week’s event in a minute – but before we do, let’s recap. Easily the most significant thing Mark Zuckerberg has said this year was that he isn’t sorry any more – in fact, that he wished he’d never said sorry for most of what he’d ever said sorry for. I paraphrase only slightly. A couple of weeks ago, Zuckerberg appeared on stage for a podcast and called Facebook’s willingness to offer stakes-free apologies for things he wasn’t to blame for – like election manipulation or the effect of social media on teen mental health – “a 20-year mistake”. Continue reading...

Meta boss regrets bowing to government power and says he would not make the same choices today The Meta boss, Mark Zuckerberg, has said he regrets bowing to what he claims was pressure from the US government to censor posts about Covid on Facebook and Instagram during the pandemic. Zuckerberg said senior White House officials in Joe Biden’s administration “repeatedly pressured” Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, to “censor certain Covid-19 content” during the pandemic. Continue reading...

Facebook founder shares photo of sculpture of Priscilla Chan, rendered in green with a large silver cloak Mark Zuckerberg has raised eyebrows by commissioning a giant sculpture of his wife, Priscilla Chan. In a photo of the statue, posted to Instagram, the Facebook CEO and co-founder said he was “bringing back the Roman tradition of making sculptures of your wife”. Continue reading...

It’s not that the outfits are necessarily bad, although many of them are. Have we lost something in the transition away from the coat-and-tie? The business casual revolution of the 1990s and rise of tech billionaires in the early aughts supposedly ushered in a new era that freed employees from the shackles of dress codes. Mark Zuckerberg turned hoodies and jeans into a symbol of New Economy meritocracy, the uniform of whiz kid hackers shaking up the coat-and-tie aesthetic of traditional industries back east. In the digital economy, many imagined, the most successful companies would allow talented employees to wear whatever they wanted as they jumped around in colorful ball pits. But as Facebook engineer Carlos Bueno wrote in his 2014 blogpost Inside the Mirrortocracy, we simply traded our hard-written dress codes for softly coded dress norms. The new world is actually not so free. The cognitive dissonance is plain to see on the faces of recruiters who pretend clothing is no big deal, but are clearly disappointed if you show up to a job interview in a dark worsted business suit. “You are expected to conform to the rules of The Culture before you are allowed to demonstrate your actual worth,” wrote Bueno. “What wearing a suit really indicates is – I am not making this up – non-conformity, one of the gravest of sins.” Continue reading...