Mark Zuckerberg Finally Admits Facebook Content Is Worthless

Last week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg did an interview with The Verge outlining the company’s plans for AI, augmented reality, and wearables. Unlike Meta’s previous metaverse pivot, it seems like the company is much more confident this time that they’re building the future. Zuckerberg told The Verge’s Alex Heath that Meta’s new Orion glasses, which are still only a prototype, will overlay “holograms” in physical space and run on conversational AI.

“Just like everyone who upgraded to smartphones, I think everyone who has glasses is pretty quickly going to upgrade to smart glasses over the next decade,” Zuckerberg said. (Let’s not dwell on how inherently insane it is to assume that we’re going to be living in a world soon where everyone is just… wearing glasses all the time.)

Zuckerberg was also asked about using his platforms’ massive amount of user-generated content to train their AI models and whether or not he felt the need to compensate creators for it. To which he responded by finally saying the quiet part out loud, “While, psychologically, I understand what you’re saying, I think individual creators or publishers tend to overestimate the value of their specific content in the grand scheme of this.”

I like that he made the point of saying he understood the question “psychologically,” to remind us that he’s a human person. He also went deeper into his thinking about the inherent worthlessness of the content that props up the websites that made him a billionaire, specifically attacking news publishers, which continue to fight for some kind of compensation for all the engagement they generate on those aforementioned platforms. “A lot of folks are constantly asking to be paid for the content,” he said. “And on the other hand, we have our community, which is asking us to show less news because it makes them feel bad.”

What’s interesting about this response is that it was said almost verbatim by Instagram head Adam Mosseri during a Q&A over the weekend. Mosseri was asked why Instagram users can’t default their feeds to following-only and are forced to use Instagram’s new AI-powered slop feed. According to Mosseri, it doesn’t work. “We’ve tested it and tried it a number of times,” he said. “They actually report being less happy with Instagram more and more over time, on average.”

I don’t think Zuckerberg and Mosseri are lying here, nor do I think they’re stupid — or, at least, uninformed — but the fact both of them are so quick to cite some kind of vague user happiness metric when confronted with questions about the integrity of their products is telling.

Most tech companies of Meta’s size tend to see their own systems as the default. The current configuration made us this big, they think, so it must be correct, ignoring millions of iterations over the years that led to Facebook and Instagram prioritizing non-chronological feeds full of worthless slop. And, obviously, if you suddenly put higher quality content from real publishers into your slurry feed or organize your platform’s vast library of gas leak content in a different timeline it’s not going to work. I’ve met a lot of creators who make a living making content for Meta platforms. None of them want to antagonize old people with digital cognitohazards. But all of them have told me they feel like they have to because that’s what the algorithms that power Facebook and Instagram incentivize. Those apps want content that hacks our attention spans, whether it’s videos of beautiful women making soup in a toilets, AI-generated photos of Jesus riding a crab, or Catholic chain letters. And it seems not even Meta is able to imagine anything greater. And if the company was satisfied just running social platforms and an ad monopoly, none of this would probably matter. But Zuckerberg wants more. He wants his empire of viral ephemera to magically power the iOS of the future.

But Meta can’t actually see the future because they continue to rely on a past they refuse to properly learn from. I mean, let’s just think this through for a second. Imagine that tomorrow Orion glasses hit the shelves. An amazing piece of hardware that finally lets you interface with the internet in a new and revolutionary way. And you’re telling me the first thing I’m going to want to do with them is log into to Facebook???

Garbage Day Is Doing An Election-Themed Live Show!!!!

October 23rd! The Bell House in Brooklyn! It’s a new Garbage Day live show all about the election. It’s called “America, The Final Season”. Memes! Music! Laughs! Niche internet references! I’ve also got some great guests lined up, which I’ll be announcing soon. It’s going to be a blast.

👉👉👉 You can buy tickets here!!!

Good Megalopolis Edit

Credit to Demi Adejuyigbe who had this idea first and also made a very good edit. I have not seen Megalopolis yet, but Garbage Day researcher Adam Bumas did and tells me it’s basically “Subway Surfers vertical video brainrot, but artistic and serious.”

Our National Chappell Roan Crisis Continues

This weekend on Saturday Night Live, Bowen Yang dressed up as Moo Deng, the Thai hippo, and did a skit that compared how crowds have been acting at Moo Deng’s exhibit with Chappell Roan fans. The skit has not gone down well online. The consensus seems to be that SNL was making fun of Roan. And the backlash has been intense enough that Yang had to release a statement on Instagram saying the point was not to make fun of Roan, but support her. X user @TingusBusko succinctly summed up the issue here, writing, “If Bowen Yang intended that sketch to be pro-Chappell that’s great, but he needs to remember that, in terms of media literacy, the SNL audience is mainly comprised of people who voluntarily watch SNL.”

At least the segment was slightly better than Yang’s Charli XCX sketch, which is so bad it made me disassociate. And SNL’s somewhat confused take on Roan was definitely better than the weird middle-aged men staging fake conversations with her where they lecture her about Democratic strategy.

Roan is, of course, not the first celebrity to push back against the trappings of fame — though maybe the first Gen Z has ever encountered. And her Kate Bush speedrun is also clearly bothering people the more online they are. Which is probably worth reflecting on a bit. Why does it bother you if someone isn’t willing to erode their health, safety, and boundaries to sustain our new viral media panopticon? And more importantly, why are you?

What’s The Deal With Those Weird Debate Videos?

I’ve seen these videos all over the web this month and it turns out they’re all from a company called Jubilee Media. Their recent video, “Can 25 Liberal College Students Outsmart 1 Conservative,” featuring right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk has now been viewed over 16 million times. They also did a followup video called “Can 1 Woke Teen Survive 20 Trump Supporters,” which has been viewed eight million times.

I think these videos are so popular for the same reason they’re also kind of a worthless exercise. Whatever your political beliefs, you tend to watch them and agree with the people debating on your side. Though, I think we can all agree Charlie Kirk’s teeth are too small for his gigantic skull.

Anyways, here’s a better version:

Brazil Is Back On X

Well that was a fun couple of weeks. Brazilian courts are fining X a little under $2 million to restore service to the platform in the country. The company also owes around $3 million in previously unpaid fines. X also suspended the users the court had demanded suspended in the first place.

So, just to put this all together for folks who haven’t been following this closely. Brazilian courts wanted seven accounts suspended and for X to pay fines. Instead of doing that, Musk publicly fought with the country’s supreme court, got the app banned, and allowed thousands of users to set up accounts on competitors Threads and Bluesky only to end up suspending the accounts originally flagged, paying the fines, and also is now paying even more fines. It’s invigorating to watch a true genius at work.

It’s All Kicking Off At The Godspeed You! Black Emperor Show

Apparently, there was some kind of incident at a recent Godspeed You! Black Emperor show in London. A concertgoer posted on the band’s subreddit asking if anyone knew what happened. And another user replied, saying that, uh, basically a guy in the crowd farted over and over again until he shit himself.

The comment was, thankfully for us, screenshot, but has sadly been deleted from the original thread. Now, this could mean that it was fake. A reasonable bet. But it could also mean that the mods of the Godspeed You! Black Emperor subreddit don’t want the truth getting out.

Here’s an interesting tidbit. Another user wrote, “For Christ's sake why have I now been to two shows where someone's shit themselves (Black Midi at Village Underground last year for the other).”

A Good Charli XCX Cover

Some Stray Links

P.S. here’s “Buddy Holly” but the first word of every line is repeated.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***