Real-life friction was valuable, too. Only a few decades ago, we had to memorize phone numbers and addresses, write letters, make phone calls. And there was a romance to this. Knowledge of another person was earned, not taken for granted.

But things are changing. Last month, Meta debuted its agentic personal assistant, Muse, largely a clone of earlier open-source Clawdbot agents, which became popular with programmers and entrepreneurs last winter. Muse can send email, book travel, fill out forms, shop, and schedule appointments. It can order from Facebook Marketplace, set goals for you, and make phone calls on your behalf.

During the rollout of Muse, Mark Zuckerberg inverted the old logic of Facebook and Instagram, which once offered to “bring people together.” Now the technology is intended to save users time and energy so that they can be better fathers, mothers, children, and friends, in real life. Let the agents handle the small stuff: finding recipes, ordering ingredients, remembering birthdays, remembering dietary restrictions, and so on. Weirdly, Meta conflates learning about people with doing more thankless and impersonal tasks like ordering plane tickets or filing quarterly taxes. Convivial tasks like cooking and being with people are conflated with trivial tasks like dealing with byzantine bureaucratic processes. Maybe for some, there is no distinction anymore. 

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How to save writing from AI

By Matthew Gasda

From a cybersecurity perspective, the mass deployment of autonomous agents poses profound risks both for individual users and for digital systems, particularly financial systems. But it is also worth questioning the new proposition, even in the ideal scenario in which these systems are totally safe and work as intended, and assuming we use them as intended. Will we actually become better friends and family members? Will society, an automated society, a frictionless one, function better than alternatives past and present?

There is reason to be skeptical. Tech companies have always promised that frictionlessness and ease would lead to more connection; and that these digital so-called connections would lead to better lives.

The release of Muse is a tacit admission that this was never true: being on a screen locks you into a screen; having a lot of digital friends doesn’t mean you have a lot of friends. The technology is merely making the same promise in a different way — you’ll be more connected if you use this. The core belief that friction and inefficiency in human relations are bad hasn’t changed, but merely the proposed solution.

Most rational people would agree that there are many small tasks that we would prefer to be automated. And most would also grant that getting away from the screen and living in the world, away from the predations of an increasingly complex digital ecosystem, is good. But we must also be aware that our reliance on digital tools often has weird secondary and tertiary effects, including dependence on the tools that are supposed to make us free. The Jevons paradox states that gains in efficiency tend to increase, not reduce, total consumption of a resource; Xerox means more incentive to copy pages; the more roads we build to decrease traffic, the more congested traffic becomes, and so on.

Meta hasn’t merely invented a nifty tool that will do some previously annoying tasks for you. Meta is suggesting that we use Muse to solve an interpersonal problem, alienation and loneliness, that has been partially caused by other Meta products.

There’s something counterproductive about giving an agent the task of reminding me who someone is or how to connect with them or what their needs are, because asking an agent to do that means I haven’t done it. It implies that I am not really willing to do that, I am not willing to internalize facts about another person. I am outsourcing that critical function to the machine; the agent performs the acts of caring, and we take the supposed credit for it.

It is true that the soul is not built up by doing comparative searching on airline tickets, but just as surely something is lost when the work of actively participating in our relationships is outsourced to an autonomous algorithm.

According to the philosopher and critic of technology Ivan Illich, technologies are disabling because they incentivize us to stop exercising physically, mentally, or both, in service of a task. Every time we adopt a tool, there is a trade-off: what we gain in speed and efficiency, we lose in terms of personal capability. In this sense, Zuckerberg’s claims are classically Illichian. He’s saying that Muse will save you time, stop you from wasting time exercising your brain on pointless tasks, and give you the freedom to connect with people — but he’s eliding that anyone with a screen and social media has already been disabled; their real-life social links are already atrophied.

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So whether we’re applying the Jevons paradox or just thinking about disabling technologies, there’s very little good reason to assume that Muse, or any other kind of autonomous agentic helper, will incentivize us to return to the world and to formal, convivial relationships, just as there’s similarly little evidence that the time saved by Uber, DoorDash, or Hinge has been meaningfully applied to anything other than more scrolling and swiping.

Zuckerberg’s promotional frame for Muse is that life has gotten too busy and complex to maintain and nourish friendships; but its hidden assumption is that most people don’t really have the personal tools for doing so anymore. Technology is presented as the solution to the disabling technology.

Autonomous agents do present some modicum of relief from the digital quotidian, but the quantitative gains in time saved will have no qualitative impact unless we acknowledge the alienated, lonely state that previous waves of digital technology have left us with and distinguish between instrumental uses for autonomous assistance and human practices that should be carried out by humans. Zuckerberg’s cozy picture of our assistants helping us know each other and socialize more likely promises to further disable us and further immiserate us; it is more dystopian than it seems on its face, as with almost all Meta products — though Meta products may already seem quite dystopian to some.

It might be useful to think of the practice of friendships and relationships as an art that can’t be gamed or optimized and can’t be handed over to an intelligent algorithm. If an assistant is handling taxes and flights, that is fine, but make it a good reason to head down to the bar or the park or the cafe to try to have a conversation with another person, leaving all screens at home. If we can still find the cafes without our phones, of course, is another question. If we can still form friendships, find romance, write letters, and fall in love with the challenging and unknown is another question as well, and of a higher order entirely.

It was obvious why he was upset. It was the news from California: his company Meta, encompassing Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, had reached a surprise settlement in a landmark lawsuit that had been expected to last for weeks. It would pay up to $18 billion and it would be forced to make its products more safe. “Today, we have secured a settlement with Meta that will make social media less dangerous for our kids and make a world of a difference for children and their families,” the attorney general of California was saying.

So it wasn’t quite a dream, I realized as the radio alarm ushered me into the land of capital and courtrooms and the Today program. But apprehending this news between conscious and subconscious thought felt somehow apt; characteristic of the neural zone that Mark Zuckerberg has made it his business to colonize. This man has been living rent-free in our brains for decades. He has haunted our holidays, our elections, our births and deaths, our graduations and house-moves — and given the level of access we have granted him, he has not been a considerate guest. 

Indeed, it was Meta’s conscious exploitation of the subconscious that formed that crux of the lawsuit. The State of California, and 28 others, were claiming something that everyone familiar with the company has long known: that Meta had deliberately designed addictive products; that it targeted them at children; that Meta knew this was having appalling effects on the children’s mental health, in some cases goading these children into killing themselves; but that it did it anyway. Indeed, it carefully surveilled these children in order to do this more effectively, harvesting the data of children under 13 without their parents’ permission in violation of several federal and state laws, so that it could keep feeding them its profitable poison. It’s not that Meta wanted to harm children. It just so happened that some of the stuff the children spent most time on was the harmful stuff — and Meta is a machine for consuming our time.

While the judgment stops short of holding Zuckerberg personally accountable — he was listed as a witness, but never actually appeared in court — it does, potentially, represent a turning point in curtailing the peculiar power he has been allowed to accumulate. 

It’s worth stressing that $18 billion, while an enormous amount of money — roughly equivalent to the amount that America proposes to spend on attempting to solve homelessness — is no biggie, really, so freakishly profitable is Meta’s underlying advertising business. The tale of how Zuckerberg launched thefacebook as a Harvard student in 2004, connected the world and created a billion-dollar company, was mythologized in The Social Network (2010). But the crucial transition happened later, when Zuckerberg brought Sheryl Sandberg over from Google in 2008 and helped embed its advertising model within Facebook’s social architecture. The company thereby answered the question that had long hovered over its billions of users: namely, where’s the revenue? Over the next decade, we shared our favorite bands, we photographed our children, we argued about austerity and Scottish Independence and Brexit, and this in turn created an extraordinary database that could be sold to advertisers. The shift in emphasis from real-world social ties to politics was simply a case of noticing what made users more engaged.

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The enshittification of Netflix

By Richard Godwin

Otherwise, Zuckerberg’s signature moves have been imitative and acquisitive. He bought up rivals, such as Instagram and WhatsApp, and folded them into his empire; and those rivals that he couldn’t buy, he copied. The Stories feature on Instagram is a direct lift from Snapchat; Reels is an attempt to forestall TikTok. The numbers say the users are engaged, so what does it matter if people complain that the experience is getting worse? 

Meanwhile, the one mildly original idea Zuckerberg had — his own dream of luring us all into a virtual reality Metaverse, so that we could float around with an amputee Nick Clegg and have meetings — was a laughable failure. I wouldn’t bet on his deeply creepy AI glasses being any more of a success; Meta’s innovation division has generated a cumulative operating loss of around $80 billion since 2020. Yet Zuckerberg is insulated from the consequences of such terrible decisions. This is partly thanks to the extraordinary power he holds as CEO/chairmen (he has majority voting rights despite only technically owning around 14% of the company); but mostly thanks to the enormous revenues generated by surveillance advertising: over $200 billion in 2025. And, in a purely cynical sense, those shareholders are correct to grant him such unparalleled power. If there is a way of making the user experience worse in the pursuit of greater measurable engagement, he will take it. 

This is why the promises to alter that business model are significant. The line that everyone always returns to is that moment when he watched his fellow students at Harvard surrendering their data and said:  “They ‘trust me’. Dumb fucks!” But when he was forced to sell his political philosophy, the classic Zuckerbergian line was simply that connection was good: the more we connect, the more we will understand each other, and the happier everyone will be. This always put me in mind of Gustave Flaubert’s response to the railway lines that were springing up across 19th century France, promising speed, commerce, connection, progress. Flaubert feared that railways would simply allow stupid people to go and be stupid in other places; this is essentially the problem of politics in the internet age. Still, for years the Zuckerberg defense ran something like: “All we are doing is connecting you guys! There’s nothing harmful about that, is there? Friends are fun! And hey, if you’re spending too much time online — that’s on you! Maybe take a break? In the meantime, we promise, we are doing everything we can to deal with the very tricky problems of fake news and viral hate mobs crying death to the Rohingya and anorexia influencers and the like!” 

In reaching the settlement, Meta has effectively been forced to admit that this is nonsense; its underlying behavioral moderation mechanisms are indeed exploitative. Otherwise it wouldn’t need to introduce a two-hour daily limit for under-18s; or no notifications during school hours, an overnight block from midnight to 6am, or stronger age verification, or an end to the ‘like’ as we know it.

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By Michael Cuenco

This is precisely the case that Shoshanna Zuboff made in her book Surveillance Capitalism (2019), still the essential guide to the Zuckerbergian universe. Zuboff’s insight was that the internet had inadvertently uncovered a new kind of raw material: not our labor, but the “behavioral surplus” left behind by our ordinary lives — our searches, movements, purchases, even our near purchases. The extraordinary business that grew around it was not simply surveillance but the creation of systems capable of predicting what we will do and, eventually, capable of nudging us towards doing the predictable thing. Facebook’s tracking pixel was estimated to be present on 30% of the world’s 1,000 most visited websites. The company’s own advertising materials told advertisers that, with the Pixel, they could identify people who had looked at a particular kind of shoe and then abandoned it in a shopping cart — and then target them accordingly. 

The actual material purpose of all this — the stuff that the finest minds of a generation have devoted their careers towards honing and perfecting — is in fact staggeringly banal. A tiny proportion of us might be prompted to think: yes, maybe I do will have those shoes after all. But the inquest into the death by suicide of the British teenager, Molly Russell, showed how lethal this apparatus can be when it is trained on the vulnerable. During the trial, Meta disclosed that Russell, 14, had interacted with 16,300 pieces of Instagram content in the six months before her death. Over 2,000 of these were related to depression, self-harm or suicide; Instagram recommended that she follow at least 34 accounts with “sad” or depressive content in their handles. Russell’s father, Ian — now a formidable campaigner — has described his discovery of what his formerly happy-seeming daughter was seeing online as “a missing piece of a jigsaw.” “There was no sign of any mental ill health in Molly before her death, and we couldn’t work out what could possibly triggered it,” he told CNN. “It’s a ghetto of the online world… once you fall into it, the algorithm means you can’t escape it and it keeps recommending more content.” 

During the inquest, Meta took the classic Zuckerbergian line that, actually, “content which touches on suicide and self-injury can be shared in a positive context” and “can play an important role in destigmatizing mental health difficulties.” Russell’s lawyers argued in turn that Instagram was not a neutral host; instead, it was actively making decisions that it knew would harm people like Russell and the inquest upheld that she “died from an act of self-harm while suffering from depression and the negative effects of online content”. Meta has, apparently, learned from all this. Only years later, the US litigation essentially points towards the same conclusion. Meta is not a place where people do things. It is a place that does stuff to you. 

One of the more curious results is that Meta has become, overnight, an advocate for regulation of the entire tech sector — the “DO IT TO JULIA!” move. Terrified that TikTok or Snapchat will now lure its users away, Meta has now demanded that its competitors likewise face similar restrictions. Well, good. Still, until the machine is dismantled, it seems likely that all the tech companies continue to view humans as users and emotions as engagement. Much as Alphabet simply regards the EU’s massive fines as the costs of doing business, I suspect Meta will simply seek to get away with as few sacrificial alterations — a streamline ‘like’ experience here, a wholly ignorable prompt there — and figure out some other way that it can boast to advertisers that it can increase the chances of us buying a pair of shoes by 2 or 3%. Only when its fundamental model is challenged will it truly change.

A more open question is what now happens with Big Tech politics. It seems hard to believe now that as recently as 2017, just before the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, Mark Zuckerberg was semi-seriously spoken of as a Presidential candidate for the Democrats. Since then, his aesthetics and his rhetoric — the MMA fixation, the “free speech” talk — have shifted toward MAGA. This development seems less like someone who has experienced a political awakening, beyond the paranoid misanthropy that seems to come over most billionaires, and more commensurate with the basic amorality that Sarah Wynn-Williams describes in Careless People. Zuckerberg, she relates, made extraordinary concessions to the Chinese Communist Party in order to further his dream of connecting people. If Alexandria Ocasio Cortez or Jon Ossoff were to gain the presidency in 2028, I suspect his vibe would shift again. 

But in sucking up to Donald Trump and JD Vance — and attempting to use the might of the US State Department to subdue any middle powers who might be thinking about reining in unaccountable foreign billionaires who insist on messing with their affairs — both MAGA and the oligarchs have only succeeded in making themselves even more unpopular. Anti-tech politics, whether it takes the form of antitrust lawyers, opposition to data centers, or groups of parents rallying around smartphone bans, is likely to be a significant battleground of the next US election, and it’s hard to imagine there are many votes to be gained in doing what Zuckerberg wants. 

The thing that is genuinely sad about social media is that it didn’t really have to be this way. The domain upon which Zuckerberg has built his empire is the domain of human emotion — a domain in which he himself seems hopelessly adrift on such occasions as he does have to display any of it himself. (Indeed, without being too deterministic about it, it feels notable that the most consequential critics of Meta have tended to be women, supposedly more adept at human relationships: the whistleblowers Frances Haugen and Sarah Wynn-Williams; the academic Shoshanna Zuboff, the journalist Carole Cadwalladr, the former data scientist Sophie Zhang). But what was being extracted from us? Our lives, really. That instinct that people have to connect, to share, to leave a trace — it is not an evil one. It’s a very human one, and it is powerful enough that despite kind of hating it, despite knowing what is being done to us even as we hover over the advert, we can’t quite give up our accounts. For one thing, it is incredibly hard to live a full 21st century life without interacting in some way with the Zuckerberg machine. But also, the shrines we made on these site to our children’s birthdays, to our graduation proms, to that one blissful weekend may be tacky and covered in advertising hoardings; but they’re still the traces of our lives. Multiply that by billions of people, every day, for twenty years, and the scale of the theft becomes almost impossible to comprehend.

For just $399, you too can have robot Kylie Jenner tell you the UV index from inside a natty pair of cat-eye specs. The Kardashian princess and makeup mogul has seen fit to expand her business empire — already worth upwards of $700 million — by “collabing” with Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta to release the Starfire Kylie Edition AI glasses, available in three tasteful colorways, with Kylie’s own voice used for the embedded AI assistant. The product’s six microphones and in-built camera with 3K ultra-HD video quality allows you to discreetly capture, record and post anything and everything you do over the course of your day. Welcome to the future, diva!

My guess is that for Meta, recruiting Kylie is less about shifting stock than detoxifying its brand. The tech giant must know that women the world over are highly — and rightly — suspicious of covert recording devices. Its glasses were first released in 2021 in a collaboration with Ray-Ban; since then, public surveillance has well and truly Metastasized. To date, more than nine million pairs of Meta glasses have been sold; growing demand means the company is considering producing 20 million by the end of this year. 

Remember: this is the company — alongside Google Glass — which gave the world the “glasshole”, the marauding wanker who craftily records interactions with women on the street for his own, often nefarious, purposes. In recent years there has been an explosion in junk internet content involving “Karen” interactions, or pervy shots of scantily clad women tumbling out of nightclubs — a 27-year-old man was arrested in 2024 for doing exactly this in Manchester — made to be clipped and posted to social-media sites as thinly veiled softcore porn. In the Manchester case, police did not clarify what sort of device the man used, but the victims reported being recorded “without their knowledge of consent”. While such behavior can often be blamed on the ubiquity of camera phones, covert devices — including glasses — compound the ability to film by stealth. 

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Another contemptible breed of glasshole is the YouTube “auditor”: a content creator who films himself testing whether public officials — police officers, government employees etc — respect his “legal rights”. These insufferable jobsworths, most notoriously the blogger Charles Veitch, go around deliberately provoking people in uniforms, or haranguing low-level staffers who have nothing to do with policy, for the sake of a viral clip or two. The alibi, as with most public recording these days, always appeals to a flimsy notion of the “right to record” — broadly true in any public space unless another law, location rule or civil right cuts across it. In the case of harassment or stalking — impulses which propel many of these viral videos — the right to record simply does not hold. I knew it was bad when my own dad appeared in the background of one of Veitch’s auditing videos, minding his own business outside his local bank branch. If the sleepy high streets of the East Midlands aren’t safe, where is? 

Should the “right to record” be exercised so relentlessly? Obviously, emphatically not. Consent in these cases is asymmetrical: the glasses-wearer opts in, and the rest of us are involuntarily recruited. It is highly disturbing for the act of recording no longer to look like a weirdo shoving a phone in your face, but for it to be very likely taking place all the time, undetectably and as a matter of course. Low-level paranoia seems the only possible result. There is strong evidence that this recording technology is being gleefully taken up by a new cohort of ill-intentioned men — including a BBC investigation released in January which unearthed “hundreds” of videos of women who had been covertly filmed on Meta glasses. Many of them were “bombarded” with creepy messages after footage of them was posted to social media. In a lip-service attempt to make video-recording obvious, Meta has installed a white light on its glasses to tell us when we’re being filmed or photographed. Yet the archetypal glasshole will simply put a piece of black duct tape over the light — an unforeseeable outcome. 

Nowhere has the scourge of men secretly recording women been so sorely felt as in Japan. There, upskirting and cameras hidden in women’s loos have instilled low-level dread into everyday life; as a result, smartphone manufacturers are required to build a shutter sound into camera applications which cannot be turned off, so that people always know when they are being snapped. In the West, if Kylie’s Meta glasses are anything to go by, the trend seems to be moving away from making devices obvious: these fashion-forward frames look like something you’d pick up in Urban Outfitters, not the shadowy shelves of Perves R Us. Yet smart glasses stealthify content-creation by design: you don’t need to point a phone, nor even swipe to open your camera; filming is as simple as looking at the subject, then murmuring “Hey Meta, start recording” or silently pressing the “capture” button. The result is to make the social act of surveilling your peers as frictionless as possible, while minimizing the warnings to others that anything they do could be broadcast to the world. 

To those who protest that if women feel comfortable dressing or acting certain ways in public, they have nothing to fear in appearing online, it’s worth remembering that a video does not have to be pornographic to be fetishistic or grim. We know that peeping through a keyhole is violating — but would you feel any less violated if someone zoomed in on your body on the bus? To many of us, being filmed at all feels like a transgression. Regardless of the context, it is impossible to predict how footage could be edited and used. In 2024, two Harvard students connected Meta Ray-Bans to a facial-recognition system which instantly found the personal information of strangers on the street. It doesn’t take a great leap of imagination to conceive of bad-actors using these details to disarm targets or gain their trust. 

Meta probably hopes that by bringing in a fave of female pop culture, it can whitewash these realities and make women more comfortable with living in a fishbowl. Making such devices not only acceptable but cool makes resistance seem uncool. Selling these devices under the innocuous banner of feminine content creation is a cynical stab at removing our defensive instincts. You’re not the obvious subjects of this technology, gals — you’re its users, and you’re empowered! For Kylie, who has been featured on reality television in her own home since she was a child, the intrusion of cameras and microphones into daily life may not seem such a problem. For the rest of us, who have not had a desire for privacy whittled out of us since childhood, it should.

The problem goes beyond the gratification of the common-or-garden pervert. The constant paranoia of being captured doing something outrageous, or embarrassing, or accidental, or ridiculous is already warping the texture of public life. For those of us who spend hours watching videos of people falling over on TikTok, that feeling has come to saturate any time we spend in the outside world. Any perceived infraction is fair game for filming: dressing poorly, having the wrong political views, perhaps even having an annoying sneeze. Nobody is safe. What does it mean not only to fear slipping on a banana peel in front of 20 pedestrians, but to fear footage of said slip being broadcast to the entire world in an instant? 

Privacy in public — to the extent that your every move might not become a viral video — is a value worth defending. If we let it slip, then none of us, man, woman or child, will ever again feel comfortable going about our business at the gym, the supermarket or on the train. The unguarded moments of being sloppy at the pub, or groggy on the commute, or gormless in the yogurt aisle, will no longer be our own; we’ll become as straight-backed and meek as a Victorian child always in range of the schoolmaster’s cane. Err, and you’ll find yourself the star of a “Karen compilation”. The more we accept the rollout of these devices as normal, the more we all passively consent to the public space becoming a de facto content studio. Unless we shame those who use these devices in public, we submit to becoming performing monkeys. I don’t remember opting into that. Do you?

No one is feared more in MAGA world than Laura Loomer. She is Donald Trump’s unofficial muckraker-in-chief, a human-sized security wand who scans for political impurities in the government workforce. As she describes it, her job as an “investigative journalist” is to root out anyone disloyal to the President, be they bureaucrats, judges, or even cabinet secretaries. 

Loomer does this by spending 16 hours a day, seven days a week, researching targets on the Internet. When she finds an incriminating piece of information — BLM support, vaccine promotion, or, worst of all, neoconservatism — she will push out the news to her 1.8 million X followers. She then presents it to the President, either in person or through his staff, and days later, that person is out of a job. They have been, as she modestly puts it, “Loomered”.

Once a Right-wing internet provocateur confined to the dark corners of the internet, Loomer now wields extraordinary influence in the White House. With near-unfettered access to the President — an informal adviser whose online crusades can make or break staff careers — she proudly declares that she has claimed over “four dozen” federal employee “scalps”, and expects “hundreds” more. These might be a “good metric” for success, but there is a more important measure in her eyes: validation from Trump, her peers, and the public. 

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By Kat Rosenfield

Loomer’s life, though, has been characterized by disappointment: missing out on a spot at Dartmouth University (her father’s alma mater), narrowly losing a Congressional seat twice, and most recently being passed over for a White House job. Each loss has fueled an enduring sense of injustice — that somehow the world owes her for her misfortune.

When I speak to her, she is seething with indignation. “I am the most underappreciated and undervalued journalist in America today,” Loomer tells me. “I don’t get the respect I deserve.” It is an interesting assumption from someone who has spent the better part of a decade stretching the bounds of what can be called “journalism”. Back in her college days, Loomer worked for Project Veritas, an activist group that uses sting recordings, stunts and entrapment to create bad publicity for its targets. On the day of the 2016 presidential election, Loomer arrived at a polling station dressed in a burqa and demanded a ballot under the name Huma Abedin. Her ballot was rejected, but the lesson stuck: outrage got attention.

Nine years on, her taste for controversy is undiluted. She has seized on national tragedies to advance her own political agenda and rarely, if ever, apologizes when she is in the wrong. In September this year, shortly after a gunman killed four churchgoers in Michigan, Loomer claimed, “hate against Christians is widespread in places like Michigan because the entire state is being taken over by Muslims who refuse to assimilate”. The shooter later turned out to be a Trump-supporting Republican, yet Loomer stayed silent. And weeks before Charlie Kirk’s assassination, she labeled him a “charlatan” — a charge she stands by to this day.

Trump remains a fan, describing her as “a free spirit” and a “patriot”. She boasts that the pair of them chatted just a couple of weeks ago, but when I ask for details, she affects coyness, claiming she “doesn’t want to get into specifics”. This is the President after all. “I never ask him for anything,” says Loomer, “which is probably why he likes me so much.”

Loomer’s devotion to the President is total. Her work, her weight (she lost 25 pounds to look “presentable” for him), and even her Mar-a-Lago face is shaped for Trump-appeal. But it took years of relentless campaigning, cheerleading, and provocative stunts for him to even notice her. In one memorable — and eerily prescient — example, Loomer disrupted a New York City production of Julius Caesar in 2017, in which Trump was reimagined as the titular character during his first term. Onstage, she screamed: “This is violence against Donald Trump! Stop the normalization of political violence against the Right! This is unacceptable!” While Trump never publicly acknowledged the incident, it would be hard to imagine that he did not notice the subsequent widespread Fox News coverage.

Loomer reveled in the controversy that these stunts generated, and as her profile grew, so too did her notoriety. In 2017, she was banned by Uber and Lyft for complaining about a lack of “non-Muslim” drivers. Then, in 2018, Twitter banned her for attacking Ilhan Omar as “anti Jewish”, claiming that she was a member of a religion in which “homosexuals are oppressed” and “women are abused”. The bans kept coming, but she only grew louder and more provocative. By 2021, she had been barred from at least eight platforms — Uber, Lyft, Twitter, PayPal, GoFundMe, Venmo, Facebook, and Clubhouse — for hate speech and disinformation.

“I don’t know anybody else, aside from President Trump, who has been subjected to the level of deplatforming that I’ve been subjected to,” Loomer tells me with something akin to pride. She says this is why she failed to win her two Florida Congressional races in 2020 and 2022, despite Trump’s endorsement in the latter. “I was the first candidate in federal history that was completely denied all access to social media… I would have been the youngest woman ever elected to the United States Congress in US history had I not been silenced by Big Tech.” And the outrage-generation business clearly has benefits. On her website, where you can buy “Donald Trump did nothing wrong!” and “Forever Trump” T-shirts, a $30 book is on sale called Loomered: How I became the most banned woman in the world. Free speech martyrdom seems to have a few financial perks. 

Her irritation has only deepened after the Supreme Court threw out her appeal this week against Big Tech over her bans — a case so weak that both X and Meta waived their right to respond (Elon Musk reinstated her in 2022). And she is indignant about her “stolen potential”. While she languished in Palo Alto purgatory, other Right-wing podcasters made their riches. “As a woman, you’re in your prime time in your twenties and thirties, so I wasn’t able to amass a fortune and build a media empire,” she says. “What’s so special about Ben Shapiro? He’s not breaking stories. He’s just commenting on the news. He’s Jewish, I’m Jewish. He’s conservative, I’m conservative. And yet, he has a company that is worth hundreds of millions of dollars.” 

But nor was Ben Shapiro going around calling himself a “proud Islamophobe” and stating that Islam is a “cancer on humanity”. He wasn’t dressing up in Burqas to vote in presidential elections either. But Loomer breezes past these awkward facts. “I carry this resentment against Big Tech with me on a daily basis,” she says. “’I’ve had professional opportunities stolen from me, I’ve also had social opportunities stolen from me.”

Despite these bans, she still records a twice-weekly Rumble show that brings in around $15,000 a month. It is filmed in the spare bedroom of her Florida Panhandle rental apartment that she shares with her boyfriend and four rescue dogs. Each show runs for around three hours and features extensive, unscripted monologues on the “EXPLOSION” of Islamic terror in Britain, along with interviews with RFK’s so-called “Tylenol whisperer” and Camp Lejeune widows. They are part crusade, part carnival and part confessional; the only breaks come in the form of MAGA’s holy trinity of ads: hair loss, erectile dysfunction, and gold. 

Her broadcasts are filled with a litany of familiar gripes. She is angry that she’s not a millionaire; angry that her work is overlooked; and angry that other journalists are deemed more respectable. “I know a lot of people who don’t even have anywhere near the following that I have — people who are kind of a joke — who have been given access to Air Force One,” she says. “It makes no sense.” 

All the while, Loomer swims in a river of bitterness and entitlement. Her home is the command center for what she describes as “opposition research”, where tips pour in about Biden holdovers, closet Leftists, and anyone she considers disloyal to the President. It is a craft she learned from Roger Stone, her mentor and a longtime GOP operative who was sentenced to 40 months in federal prison during the Russiagate investigation in 2020. The 73-year-old made his name as the “original political hitman” by unearthing damaging (and sometimes fake) information about his political opponents. It turned him into an invaluable resource for not only Trump, but his Republican predecessors too.

Loomer’s approach to politics bears all the hallmarks of Stone’s skullduggery. She has weaponized opposition research and public pressure into tools which topple officials. During one particularly productive week over the summer, she claimed three “scalps”: the Trump administration ousted FDA vaccine chief Dr. Vinay Prasad, dismissed NSA General Counsel April Falcon Doss, and revoked Jen Easterly’s appointment as chair of West Point’s social sciences department — each decision coming shortly after her public attacks.

Loomer has also shown no hesitation in taking on even the most prominent figures in Trump’s cabinet. After attacking Pam “Blondi” for her handling of the Epstein files in July, a month later, she turned her sights on RFK Jr., claiming that he was plotting a 2028 presidential run. He denied the allegations, but what happened next was classic Loomerism: the pair made amends, with RFK meeting Loomer and announcing a plan to phase out animal testing — a cause close to her heart. 

“Cabinet secretaries all try to have cordial relations with me because they’re scared of getting blown up,” she says when I ask whether she maintains contact with the administration. “So there’ve been a couple of times that I’ve had them call me and say, ‘Hey, I just want to explain what happened here’ because they’re worried about the backlash.” Are they frightened of her? “Well, my receipts are bulletproof,” she says. Was it the same with RFK? “We had a few conversations,” Loomer cryptically replies.

She will even criticize the President on rare occasions. Earlier this year, Loomer attacked Trump’s decision to accept a $400 million Qatari jet for Air Force One, calling it a “stain” on the presidency. And more recently, she threatened to pull her 2026 midterm vote when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that the US had approved the establishment of a Qatari Emiri Air Force facility in Idaho. “I cannot in good conscience make any excuses for the harboring of jihadis,” she posted. “This is where I draw the line.” “America could have been so great,” she followed up. “Now we will be a Muslim country. This must be what hell feels like.”

Given this power, why then, I ask, has she not been given a White House role, let alone a press pass? She claims that Trump has offered her a job four times, but White House staff have quietly blocked it on each occasion. “It’s professional jealousy,” she says. “President Trump’s staff who don’t like the fact he likes me… They just get high on their own power and don’t let me in.” She is, she insists, the victim of small-minded gatekeeping — a misunderstood ally whose loyalty is undervalued by the petty bureaucrats who feel threatened by her power. In Loomer’s eyes, she is utterly blameless. 

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But there is a danger here. As she recklessly burns through the administration, tying herself so closely to the fate and fortune of one man, with no formal role or official recognition, what, then, happens when he goes? She is left with no allies, no job, no platforms, no car rides — just scorched earth. For the first time, Loomer sounds uncertain. She pauses; introspection doesn’t come naturally. “By the time Trump’s out of office, I’ll be 36 years old. And by then, I’m going to have to start thinking about other things in life. So who knows whether I’ll be doing this forever.” And then she adds, with a straight face, “the Right-wing ecosystem has also become very toxic”.

Loomer, arguably more than anyone else in this sphere, has helped stoke that toxicity. Haranguing politicians with bullhorns, filming people without their knowledge or consent, and attempting to cancel public figures online represent the Right at its worst. These are gutter politics — and that’s before we flick through the long charge sheet of particularly “provocative” statements, including that the 2018 Parkland and Santa Fe high school shootings involved crisis actors; that Casey DeSantis, wife of then presidential candidate Ron DeSantis, exaggerated her breast cancer to boost her husband’s campaign; and that 9/11 was an “inside job”. 

Our conversation revealed a woman who is a cocktail of festering resentment and entitlement, who will use any new connection for her own ends. She is the classic Trump pawn: deployed for as long as she is useful, and then discarded. The President will throw her a morsel of camaraderie from time to time, but it’ll never be more than that. She’s driven by this toxic frustration. It came as no real surprise when, a day after our conversation, she texted me a photo of “independent journalists” at the White House from Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt’s account. “No invite for me though.”

Loomer will inevitably be cast out — though she doesn’t seem to know it. “I don’t aggregate news, I create the news,” she says proudly. “The President has said that he sees my content and I’m pretty much followed by every single main White House staffer and cabinet member on X.” Her content extends far beyond X, but the poison that she helped to inject now courses through America’s body politic.

What started out as a platform where users posted slightly rubbish pictures they thought were funny, sexy or cool, ended up introducing a new aesthetic pressure to the lives of Millennials. It made each user a public diarist, the director of a gallery entirely about themselves; it changed, perhaps forever, the amount of narcissism deemed acceptable in public forums. It birthed an entirely new category of bullshit job (“influencing”) and spewed the consumer junk they promoted — plastic phone charms, teas that paralyzed digestion, stacks of crappy eyeshadow palettes — into landfills via the bedrooms of young women. It gave that generation a reputation for vanity and trend-obsession which, millions of images of avocado toast later, it has yet to shake off.

Instagram also sped up young people’s deracination from political realities, becoming a forum for nonsense identity creeds and compulsive virtue signaling. In this, it doubled as a tool for shaming apostates: Instagram stories, launched in 2016, became peak-woke’s Place de la Concorde, swapping the guillotine for condemning posts. No celebrity cancellation scandal was complete until a heartfelt apology was coughed up here.

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When George Floyd was killed, everybody posted black squares on to their grids and vowed to host reading circles to unlearn unconscious biases (five years later, these initiatives have all, obviously, vanished). Many Gen Zs’ understanding of the gender debate is based entirely on the content of infographics — snippets from Judith Butler, misreadings of Simone de Beauvoir — and glib slogans which knowingly trampled nuance (“trans rights are human rights”). More recently, the Israel-Palestine conflict has undergone this cartoonifying treatment: in the weeks after October 7, a woman I followed shared an infographic daydreaming about “queers” in the Gaza Strip, and the experiences Israel, in launching its offensive there, was denying them. Little matter that gay sex is punishable by up to 10 years in prison in the territory. Conducted through the Instagram grid, politics became flattened and hopelessly factional. And for the first time, people incapable of defending their arguments at the pub were able to broadcast their ignorance without justification or debate: put simply, we heard so much more from those who knew so very much less. Given a platform, dullard perspectives flourished and political posers thrived.

These blights were prophesied by the French essayist Charles Baudelaire. In 1859 he wrote that if mechanical cameras were even slightly permitted into the category of traditional artworks they would defile creativity itself. The culprit was “the stupidity of the multitude which is its [photography’s] natural ally”; the spiritual purpose of art would dissolve on contact with a medium so inherently prolific, realistic and (shudder) democratic. Although his argument was limited to the scope of art, Baudelaire’s fears echo through the Instagram feed. The amateur photographers of his imagination were what he called “sun-worshippers”; hysterical yobbos dazzled by new tech instead of being, like he, chin-strokingly detached. Looking at the quality of what we see on social media, how right he was. The issue isn’t tech: it’s the immodesty of believing every one of us deserves to be a “creator”. The implication is horrifically snobbish (helpfully, this has never stopped me): not everyone should be an artist — nor a political pundit nor a poet, for that matter. Any technology that convinces us to broadcast as though we are is not to be trusted.

Later, Walter Benjamin would take the case against photography further by fretting that it endangered the “aura” of art — its singularity, its mythos. I feel that, grand though it is, his argument holds water as a template for our degraded social world. Instagram has made us know far too much about one another; what we know, moreover, is banal, bragging and useless in fostering intimacy. Closeness, friendship, true knowledge of another person; these are not what social media is for. At best, we are swapping avatars. The stupidity of the multitude has won out.

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In 1888, Kodak sold the first handheld camera. In the 1890s, amateur street photographers seemed to spring from every grubby corner: the “Kodak fiend” became a figure of anxiety among the middle classes, who feared being caught in private, undignified moments by a snap-happy rogue. So irritating was the possibility of being ambushed that in 1890 two attorneys wrote a furious article entitled “The Right to Privacy” in the Harvard Law Review. It said that “instantaneous photographs… have invaded the sacred precincts of private and domestic life; numerous mechanical devices threaten to make good the prediction that ‘what is whispered in the closet shall be proclaimed from the house-tops’”. This technology, in the hands of the unscrupulous, could destroy private life itself. It was also, as the essayist Oliver Wendell Holmes insisted, simply not decent. He believed that photography had introduced an unnatural self-consciousness in the lives of ordinary people: “In a moment the sitter becomes aware that the camera is merciless… the unconscious asymmetry of his features are laid bare… the world will see him as he is, or as the lens insists he is.” Of course, today blemishes can just be edited out, or be lost when one flattering image is posted out of 100 options. Social media gets us no closer to seeing ourselves “as we are”.

What a bunch of Luddites, you might think. But self-consciousness about cameras is something Wendell Holmes was right to bristle against. The presence of lenses attached to smartphones in almost every pocket has fundamentally changed how we move through the world. When anything and everything can be recorded in a moment, it’s not just personal vanity at stake; it’s privacy itself. Accustomed as we are to the fact that, in public life, everything we do might end up online, it seems quaint to think of a 19th-century office clerk suddenly feeling mortified about the way his eyes crinkle when he smiles. It seems crushingly naive to imagine anything about us being hidden from ourselves; a world that doesn’t continually show us our wonky teeth is prehistoric.

But 15 years after its inception, Instagram’s biggest crime is flattering us into inanity. Not only has it taught us that we must be our own personal archivists, but that these archives are interesting and important to both those who know us and, for the class of influencers, society at large. Instagram’s visual grammar has evolved over the years, from single, filtered images to carousels of images, videos, stories and the rest of it. All of this encourages us to agonize over how we present ourselves: what would “work” on a feed, what might accrue likes and shock and attention, and, increasingly, what makes us seem like we care about politics? And yet it’s worth remembering that most of us are, at times, boring, ugly and more concerned with the contents of our lunchboxes than the vagaries of far-away wars; though Instagram has supposedly encouraged us to be more “real” than ever, admitting these fundamental things remains too great a taboo.

Since arguably two of these factors were the fault of the Lib Dems under Clegg’s leadership, this is a bold gambit indeed. But the good news for anyone in the UK economically or psychologically crushed by the legacy of the Lib Dems in power is that, according to Clegg, life can get much better. The naysayers about the internet are mostly scaremongering. Regulated correctly in order to keep the flow of information suitably open, transparent, and globalized, new technologies have the power to “empower ordinary people in many ways”.

But who does the public-school-educated multimillionaire Clegg think of as ordinary people? In one section of the new book, he gives us a glimpse. He imagines an ordinary couple with the ordinary names of Clarice and Matteo, and with school-age children called Laura and Pietro. And what such ordinary people allegedly long for is the sort of obsequious daily hand-holding normally afforded only to multimillionaires like him.

First thing in the morning, Matteo asks his personal AI assistant for a “quick and easy breakfast recipe” he can prepare for Clarice and the kids, while Clarice brainstorms the most efficient driving route to work with her own bot. Once at the office, the couple each uses their personal helpers to write emails and presentations, giving Matteo more “time” and freeing Clarice up for the more “creative” bits of her job. Later, Clarice attends a doctor’s appointment, getting AI-powered tips about nutrition, and telling her assistant to “incorporate [them] into her weekly shop” as well as to pass them on to Matteo’s AI assistant too.

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Back at home after work, Matteo gets his assistant to help make Pietro’s boring history homework more interesting; while Clarice uses hers to draft a message for a new nutrition-focused chat group she has just joined, “since she feels uncertain about what to say”. She is pleased when the result gets her some friend requests and likes in the group. At the end of the day, the AI helps smooth out one of the pitfalls of modern marriage: “Matteo, sick of the song Clarice has chosen for the morning alarm, instructs his assistant to liaise with hers and pick a new song based on their joint preferences.”

This, then, is the family of the future: they don’t know how to cook, navigate, or communicate in written form; they are obsessed with health as the central goal in life; they have limited powers of concentration, and find traditional forms of information boring; they are delighted with the validation of faceless strangers for things they didn’t accomplish themselves. They passively outsource many decisions, and are good at following instructions issued by a screen. If this is digital empowerment, then I’m not sure I want to see enslavement.

There’s also the question of what Clarice and Matteo — and by extension, us — will do with all that extra time, when they have dispensed with unnecessary tasks and become so much more efficient. One possible answer thrown up by Clegg’s book is “look for another job”, as bosses realize that, thanks to new technologies, they don’t need warm bodies to come to work at all. Clegg is enthusiastic about the opportunities AI affords for increased productivity, and sanguine about the likely resulting job cuts: they will mostly happen quite slowly, he says, and mainly only in white-collar sectors, where people should be offered “flexicurity” and helped to retrain. What role members of the laptop classes might retrain for in an AI-dominated world is left disconcertingly vague: presumably, we can’t all become Lib Dem councillors.

Perhaps, instead, our ordinary couple will be turning their minds to higher things. Clegg is keen to talk about the new possibilities for “creativity” afforded by technology, but it turns out that here too, he means typing commands: creating text, images, and music “without the sort of specialist skills required to do so in the recent past”, so we too can become “writers, graphic designers, filmmakers and musicians”. So whether it’s AI pushpin or poetry, it seems it won’t be taking up a lot of brain cells — even leaving aside the question of what satisfaction there could really be in a life spent spawning generic bits of art-slop by hitting return.

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A more realistic answer looks tempting: there will be more time to talk to bots. In the world Clegg approves of, there’s always a therapy bot or a virtual friend available to companion you throughout any life transition (including, one assumes, redundancy). You don’t have to spend a week waiting for your next appointment; you can get all that consoling attention and validation on tap, anytime. And if Clarisse gets into an unhealthily co-dependent state with an AI and starts preferring it romantically to Matteo, that’s cool too. “Ultimately, in a free society, if mature adults want to spend their time hanging out with human-like AI agents, in the full knowledge that they are machines and not people, we should find ways to accommodate these relationships”, says Clegg.

He would no doubt argue that I’ve offered a caricature. If people wish to switch the screens off and do something ambitious and scary instead — read Proust, climb K2, talk to a human, or whatever it is — they still can and will. Skeptical of claims that societies are being inadvertently shaped by smartphone technology as much as they are shaping it, he clearly allows that new preferences can come into being as a result of prolonged contact with the internet — as is obvious from the fact that, by his own admission, advertising is the thing it mainly sells. Yet, he also seems to place a great deal of faith in the abilities of consumers to scrutinize their first-order preferences with second-order rational attitudes of approval or disapproval, and to act on the result.

That is, he thinks people can refuse to act on any more basic preferences or impulses of theirs, which they ultimately do not think worth having. It seems to be this conviction that allows him to brush off worries about Big Tech’s responsibility for people falling prey to algorithmic-induced rages, conspiracy theories, or screen addictions. As long as we are talking about adults, it can be assumed that those concerned ultimately rationally endorse their own behavior in such matters, and Big Tech cannot really be blamed for facilitating it.

All of this is classical liberal fare, as you might expect. It is also deeply unsatisfying, when dressed up as critique. Without a theory of what human life is for, or what makes for a flourishing life, it leaves a person’s second-order preferences no more reliable than the first-order ones they supposedly police. It means Clegg is not going to spend much time worrying about the wider consequences of AI turning us into puzzled, cackhanded strangers to the world, unable to deal with the simplest of chores without prompts. And nor is he going to think much about what else we might be losing along the way, as we move towards what he calls “hyper-personalization”; things like conviviality, patience, self-denial, or even just a sense of achievement for getting out of the house. At one point, he asks: “Why would one take a time-consuming trip to a Blockbuster video store… when Netflix or Amazon Prime had vastly more movies available, which were never out of stock, and which you could stream directly to your television?”. He doesn’t seem to know why nostalgia for the Blockbusters era is even a thing.

Equally, as long as it does not pertain to kids, Clegg scrupulously abstains from substantive judgment about the content of what people are consuming online. For on what grounds could he convincingly criticize them, assuming it is what rational people want? This means that in a book about the ethics of the internet, there is only one mention of adult pornography; and that gestures towards what other people think of it, not him.

Time and again, he raises ethical issues about internet content, or patterns of use, which he says we should “consider”; but then draws no conclusion at all, or else downplays them as overblown. Instead, all of Clegg’s manifestly aerated moral judgments are about how fast or slow, open or closed the internet will turn out to be; for a slower, more fragmented network means the people can’t get what they want. While he sounds intensely relaxed about AI-derived unemployment and consequent fundamental changes of ways of life, he sounds positively panicky about the prospect of a balkanized “European internet” versus an “American internet”, each rival system differently regulated and resourced:

“…there won’t be one great watershed moment when we wake up one day and find the internet has changed beyond recognition… Rather, like the proverbial frog in the pan of boiling water, we will probably barely notice the small, gradual changes, but by the time we do it will be too late.”

In short, Clegg represents the sort of person in charge of the virtual world these days, and his book is an instructive, terrifying read because of it. “What do we want the internet to be?” he asks early on; but his implied conclusion is that there couldn’t possibly be an interesting answer, because there is no “we”. Individual preferences radically differ, and the only thing that binds people stuck on screens together is their collective hunger to have their preferences satisfied, as quickly and smoothly and effortlessly as possible. And in that matter, Zuckerberg or his metaverse equivalent is here to help.

Such forecasts were hasty. So was much of the investment. The railway bubble burst, and speculators suffered bruising losses. Three decades later, a similar bubble arose in the US. This bubble, like the British one, was soon to burst. Around 18,000 businesses failed within two years.

As a share of American GDP, investment in artificial intelligence has surpassed the telecoms boom of the dotcom bubble. In its degree of concentration, it stands second only to the railroad boom of the late 19th century. AI, then, might be approaching a moment of truth. The technology was meant to speed up the economy; now, it appears to be slowing it. Unless the trend is soon reversed, the biggest tech companies might be in for a sharp revaluation.

In fact, if you remove those companies from the stock index, so-called American exceptionalism disappears. Outside the top 10 companies, the indices have been stagnating since the start of 2025. Similarly, minus that top 10, corporate earnings have been flat for the past three years — coincidentally, the period that followed the release of ChatGPT, the event that sent the AI boom into overdrive. With the sector’s capital expenditure having risen tenfold in just the past three years, the AI bubble is now sucking up more than half of America’s investment. So insatiable is this bubble that there may not even be enough cash in America to satisfy OpenAI. Sam Altman attempted to rustle up additional cash by going abroad, seeking to raise $7 trillion from the UAE and other investors.

That rush to the top doesn’t leave much for everyone else. With all that money pouring into AI, investment in the rest of the economy has begun to decline, slowing growth. That helps to explain the rapid deceleration in the US economy now underway, a marked contrast to the recent good fortune of the “Magnificent Seven” tech companies. With job growth flat, consumption now adds less to the economy than a handful of massive AI investments.

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And the gains made by AI are, for now at least, someone else’s loss. Not only is the industry sucking in capital, but it is ravenous for electricity. Data centers consume 10 times the power of traditional servers, and are helping raise American electricity prices — up some 6.5% over the past year. AI centers also consume huge volumes of water for cooling, leading to supply strains and increased prices in many areas. That keeps upward pressure on the inflation rate, raising costs to both consumers and businesses alike and slowing the interest-rate cuts that might facilitate investment in small and medium firms.

In short, the US is currently placing its money on one huge bet: that AI will unleash a productivity revolution so great it will ultimately re-start the economy it’s presently impeding. Americans are doing their bit to make it happen, with ordinary retail investors driving the stock market rally of the last few months and OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT, reporting that Americans prompt their chatbot some 330 million times a day. 

Yet for all that, we’ve yet to see much evidence of a transformation in output. Over the same three years that the AI revolution has been in full swing, labor productivity has grown at barely 1% a year, maintaining a decades-long trend of declining growth across Western countries. And while some might retort that productivity revolutions unfold over many years — several decades passed between the invention of the steam engine and electricity and significant changes in labor productivity — the maths behind the AI boom make little sense. Unlike the railroads built in the late 19th-century US bubble, which are still around today, AI investment is going into data centers that are set to depreciate rapidly. Nvidia, for instance, warranties its GPUs for only five years. 

In short, this bet needs to pay off soon. And while the record profits at the tech giants leading the American AI boom might suggest that’s already happening — Nvidia’s earnings have quintupled and its share price increased tenfold in the last three years — those results don’t actually tell us much. Nvidia isn’t making money off AI so much as the AI mania, capitalizing on the sale of its chips — the “picks and shovels” of the new goldrush — to other companies that then use them to build AI. In a recent earnings statement, Meta said it did not expect the gains of its AI investment to materialize for another two years. Instead, it is still making money off advertisers on its Facebook and Instagram sites, just as Apple still makes its money from iPhone sales.

The record profits of the Magnificent Seven, therefore, do not support a narrative of economic transformation. Instead, we’re awaiting the breakthrough application that will lift economic productivity to a new plateau. Enthusiasts maintain that, once the technology spreads, AI will add one percent or more to America’s annual rate of economic growth. But there’s no shortage of skeptics who question the calculations behind that optimism.

Among them is Goldman Sachs’ Jim Covello, who says that for AI to justify the current wave of investment, it must solve a trillion-dollar problem. It’s hard to see that happening. Daron Acemoglu has argued that AI’s productivity impact will be negligible, because once it gets through the easy-to-learn tasks which are currently exciting everyone, like search tools, the returns will rapidly diminish. This contention is borne out by recent macroeconomic research from Japan. The neuroscientist Eric Hoel calls this the “supply paradox of AI”: “the easier it is to train an AI to do something, the less economically valuable that thing is. After all, the huge supply of the thing is how the AI got so good in the first place.” Take the example of copy-writers. Because so many of them produce so much material, they become easy to replace. Their knowledge is cheap. This phenomenon won’t carry over to fields where knowledge is expensive.

Instead, a closer look at Meta’s bottom line may reveal what’s really going on, and why the optimistic view of AI’s productivity impacts could rest on shaky foundations. The company credits its new AI for helping steer more customers to its products, thereby boosting sales and revenue. We see a similar trend at Google, whose searches previously led people to websites, but which now keep them on the Google site where they can read quick summaries of the linked content: more eyeballs on Google, more ad revenue to it, but less for all those sites.

In other words, the tech giants have been using AI to capture revenue that previously went elsewhere. On the face of it, that’s the market doing its thing, and it’s that very possibility which excites corporate executives. They believe AI will reduce their need for labor, allowing them to similarly suck up money that would have gone elsewhere — in this case, to their workers.

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This, arguably, has been the tale of the information age: new technology doesn’t necessarily raise economy-wide output that much. Instead, it replaces labor and directs the resulting cost-saving to owners, helping to worsen income and wealth inequality. Just as the websites that make those AI summaries possible are now being plundered to the benefit of the AI giants, the LLM chatbots they’re developing are trained using content whose creators receive no compensation. Without that motherlode of free inputs, involuntarily subsidized by their creators, AI might make no sense. As one investor put it in 2023, “imposing the cost of actual or potential copyright liability on the creators of AI models will either kill or significantly hamper their development.”

That route to higher profits raises two problems. The first is that the resulting inequality could stoke a political populism that makes the economy more fragile. We might never have got the volatile policy-making of this Trump administration were it not for the sense of malaise caused by globalization’s decimation of industrial towns and industrial jobs. If AI really displaces workers, one can’t rule out a radically redistributive politics of the Right or Left. If anything, current trends favor it.

But in addition to the possibility that the AI revolution could end up eating itself, this type of job destruction can produce an economic paradox. While professionals might lose jobs to AI, not everyone will. Microsoft recently commissioned a study estimating which jobs will be most affected by AI and least; not surprisingly, those most insulated from its effects are manual laborers and personal-care workers (including health care), with knowledge-workers taking the biggest hit.

In other words, the jobs AI will disrupt least lie in those sectors of the economy where labor productivity tends not only to be lowest, but most resistant to transformation. This gives rise to what’s known as the Baumol-Bowen effect. As workers displaced by AI are forced to take new jobs in lower-skilled occupations, their productivity will decline. In consequence, the needle on economy-wide productivity may budge little.

It may yet be that someone will invent an application for AI that transforms productivity across the economy and lifts everyone’s output and income to a new plane. But time may be running short, because right now, the boom is becoming a bust for many.

So: are we facing another railroad episode? It’s certainly true that AI is starting to resemble a speculative bubble, not unlike the dot-com boom. Although the Magnificent Seven are making profits that justify their valuations, their future growth depends on the AI revolution continuing for years at its current rate or greater.

But that growth depends on AI being deployed in revolutionary new ways. If that doesn’t happen, then those growth prospects will change, and the markets could tumble. Given the weighting of the big tech companies in the US stock market — Nvidia alone is worth nearly a tenth of the market’s total value — a fall in share prices could not only hurt all those retail investors who rode the wave, but ricochet through the financial system.

In the long term, it might be good for America if the market goes back to investing in all the other sectors of the economy. In the short term, if this bubble bursts, it will be very painful. Both investors and the Trump administration are going all-in on their AI bet. If it succeeds, they’ll parade like champions. But if it fails, they’ll be running for the exits. And given last week’s lackluster response to ChatGPT’s newest update, investor patience may be wearing thin.

In 2021, PayPal blocked GiveSendGo, an evangelical crowdfunding site, after it helped raise money for January 6 defendants. In Canada, truckers resisting Covid vaccine mandates faced similar bans. Across the Atlantic, Nigel Farage was debanked. As Chopra told me, “just because someone disagrees with corporate executives, that’s no grounds for losing their fundamental rights”.

Chopra also spearheaded Team Biden’s crusade against corporate “junk fees” (ordering a concert ticket online? That’ll be a $5 service fee, plus a $15 processing fee and a $3 convenience fee). He also sought to wipe medical debt from credit records and to protect veterans’ privacy against data brokers. Trumpian America would have been the chief beneficiary of these measures: lower-income consumers with little to no bargaining power against Big Finance and Big Tech.

Yet in the weeks leading up to President Trump’s inauguration, powerful tech barons vented rage at Chopra’s agency. Most notably, Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg — who previously oversaw the censorship of pro-Trump content on Facebook but is now making nice — complained about CFPB oversight on Joe Rogan’s show: “We had the CFPB looking after us. I didn’t even know what that is. It’s some financial institution that Elizabeth Warren set up.”

Elon Musk was more forthright: “Delete CFPB”, he posted on X on 27 November. That seems to have done the trick. As of last week, visitors to the CFPB website encountered a “404: page not found” error. Musk, whose Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is dramatically remaking the federal government, gloated about the agency’s apparent demise with a tombstone emoji, adding: “CFPB RIP”.

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By Saturday, Russell Vought, Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, said he would be taking over as acting head of the CFPB. Given Musk’s “RIP” message, however, and the sheer power he wields in the new administration, the future of the agency is far from certain. CFPB lawyers have been ordered to stand down in all lawsuits, including one challenging financial institutions’ right to debank Americans. “Oh, and Musk now has access to all this confidential CFPB info about his competitors”, a current CFPB staffer told me.

Less than a mile away, in Washington, the National Labor Relations Board, another agency tasked with leveling the economic playing field, is in similar disarray. Last month, Trump fired Gwynne Wilcox, a Democratic member of the board, and Jennifer Abruzzo, its general counsel. While Abruzzo’s dismissal was no surprise — Biden did the same thing to Trump’s NLRB general counsel upon taking office — Wilcox’s firing is a different matter.

In 1935, a unanimous Supreme Court held that the president can only remove a member of a bipartisan board like the NLRB for good cause, such as neglect or malfeasance. The National Labor Relations Act, the law that created the NLRB, likewise requires notice and good cause for removing board members. Wilcox received no notice, and by all accounts, she has a sterling record (whether Team Trump disagrees with her views on labor law is irrelevant).

Wilcox’s removal might be a first step toward overturning the high-court precedent that limits presidential power over bipartisan, multimember boards, a question over which reasonable people can disagree. But it also deprives the board of the quorum needed to uphold collective-bargaining rights. That has the effect of “creating chaos and disruption and making this agency inoperative”, said Wilma Liebman, who served 14 years as a member of the board under presidents of both parties, the final two as chairwoman.

Rendering the NLRB inoperative in this manner serves the interests of pro-Trump tycoons, Musk foremost: even before the election, he filed a lawsuit attacking the constitutionality of the New Deal-era board. Now, it seems, Musk the efficiency czar has achieved what Musk the employer had long desired. Said Liebman, “The fact that it is Musk is glaring”.

Unless Team Trump changes course, the plutocratic, self-dealing policy choices will become impossible to ignore. And the Trumpians will end up betraying the millions of working-class and union households who pulled for them in last year’s election seeking immigration sanity and economic protection — not to make it easier for Big Finance to surveil and debank them, or for Musk to use his new government job to stymie organizing efforts at his firms.

So far, the GOP’s activist base feels no danger, only joy. (This, even as Musk’s influence on Trump has already become much less popular, even among normie Republicans.) Among Right-wing activists and intellectuals, the mood is retribution, and TrumpElon the avenging dagger. As one Right-of-center operative told me, describing an attitude he himself disavows, the thinking is: “Now it’s our dicks that are hard, and we’re gonna f–k you in the ass.”

It’s understandable. Who on the Right could have lived through the political and cultural turmoil of the recent past, and not feel some version of the same sentiment, even if expressed in less vulgar terms?

From the #Russiagate hoax to Trump’s first impeachment on the flimsiest grounds; the Big Tech suppression of the lab-leak theory to the censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop; the pandemic-era banning of Catholic masses and Jewish funerals (even as George Floyd protests were encouraged) to the unlawful altering of election rules in Pennsylvania in 2020; the winking permission granted to Left-wing rioters setting fire to a federal courthouse in Portland, Ore., compared to the hammer dropped on Right-wing rioters who stormed the Capitol; and so much more besides — Democrats and their allies in the media, Silicon Valley, and the security forces subjected the other half of the country to a lot of mishigas over the past decade.

As I say, who on the Right — or even the non-woke Left — could have lived through all that and not feel a jonesing to burn down all their works?

Then again, politics isn’t only about enmity and payback, even if it would be foolish to deny a place altogether to these primordial urges in the affairs of fallen human beings. Politics is also the art of prudence, especially when dealing with a state apparatus as large and complex as the federal government, overseeing an even larger and more complex society and economy.

It shouldn’t require the insights of Aristotle or Weber to know that the state isn’t a tech startup. The danger in unleashing Musk and his team of Groyper whizz kids is that, in slashing and burning, they might bring about not just efficiency and an end to DEI nonsense, but careless enshittification.

If some drug-approval process is short-circuited, and lots of people end up being harmed; if critical entitlements payments are withheld from senior citizens needing medical care; or if some official unit gets axed whose job it was to alert decision-makers to this or that natural or manmade hazard, and something somewhere goes boom; or if… In any of these scenarios, it won’t be Musk left holding the bag, but the politically accountable men who empowered him. Musk insists he is the soul of caution, of course, and so far nothing of that sort has taken place. But these things take time to ramify through a delicate system.

Then, too, the slash-and-burn mentality represents a reversion to the neoliberal model that Trumpism promised to counter. Recall that Trump won the first time around by rejecting the GOP’s Reagan-Bush-Romney orthodoxies. He pledged to protect social insurance, and he even hinted at a public option in health care. The 2024 Republican platform reiterated his entitlements pledge.

Musk, meanwhile, has vowed to trim as much as $2 trillion from the federal budget, or about a third of total outlays. There simply aren’t enough silly expenditures — programs funding research into transgender monkeys or musicals about Ireland’s black roots — to get him to that amount. If Musk really means it, and if Trump isn’t prepared to restrain him, then entitlements will end up on the chopping block. An eccentric billionaire cutting Grandpa’s Social Security payments: the 2026 and 2028 electoral kill shot Democrats are rubbing their hands for.

And what about state capacity? Trump won in 2016 and then again in 2024 by promising to restore the battered manufacturing sector. Tariffs are one important tool for doing so, with origins in the American tradition going back to Alexander Hamilton. But a manufacturing revival also requires a competent workforce and long-term research and development on a massive scale — tasks that have proved too big for any entity but the state.

None of this is to defend waste or entrenched bureaucrats who’ve grown accustomed to defying the president’s will, especially when the president happens to belong to the Republican Party. But de-Baathification is unlikely to work any better for the US state than it did for Iraq, and the Right, especially, should be wary of Year Zero delusions: the utopian dream of starting totally anew, unencumbered by the past — heedless of why our institutions took the shape they did.

Which brings us back to those crippled agencies, the CFBP and the NLRB. Both emerged in the wake of market emergencies: one fairly recent, the 2008-2009 financial crisis precipitated, in part, by banks’ risky home lending and the securitization of those loans; and the other much older, the Depression, brought about by a demand crisis in the economy resulting in turn from a brutally lopsided distribution of the social income (low-paid workers unable to afford the goods they produced).

Trashing these agencies would do nothing to address the structural power imbalances which bedevil Trumpian America and which compelled it to vote for him in the first place. On the contrary, it would exacerbate the imbalances. A regulation such as the CFPB’s anti-debanking rule is the best defense against people being arbitrarily cast out of the financial system, whether it’s over a belief that there are only two sexes or 107 genders. Likewise, collective bargaining, upheld by the NLRB, gave rise to the American middle class and such blessings as paid vacation time, health insurance, disposable income, and, yes, a measure of protection for what workers think and say off the job.

Is it not telling that, say, Jeff Bezos — who, three years ago, marched at the forefront of corporate America’s Black Lives Matter column — has now joined the anti-woke ranks? Is it not obvious why the Amazon boss, notwithstanding his ownership of an anti-Trump #Resistance newspaper, The Washington Post, has teamed up with Musk in challenging the existence of America’s basic labor law? Does anyone believe that Zuckerberg has undergone a profound change of heart about online censorship, now that a new administration is prepared to remove barriers against his power in the name of owning the woke?

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Elon Musk: neo-feudal prince

By Mary Harrington

There is no denying that parts of the federal government fell in thrall to the same wacky and unpopular ideologies taken up by professional classes in the private sector. But abuse doesn’t negate the proper use of something. And as time goes on, it is becoming obvious that the oligarchs, and Musk especially, are taking advantage of justified public outrage against wokeness and DEI to ram through wide-ranging economic changes whose benefits beyond their own circles are questionable at best.

The cynic might respond that the American state has always sought the favor of the rich: better to get rid of the meddling institutions of the New Deal and have the class antagonism out in the open. The successor state is here. Get with the times.

Maybe that’s right. But the populist Right should be clear that this could entail enormous pain for the working and lower middle classes and galling self-dealing by Musk & Co., the likes of which we haven’t seen since the late 19th century. Once the dust settles, and the next reforms take hold, the political rewards will redound not to the neo-Gilded Age party and politician — there is a reason Trump had to drag William McKinley out of obscurity — but to the transformative reformer.

If Trump himself wants to earn that mantle, it behooves him to apply his signature motto to Elon Musk: You’re fired.

The Washington Post has called it the “bro-ification” of Zuckerberg, drawing attention to his new UFC fighter’s physique and curly Gen Z-like hairstyle. In keeping with his claim to be “done with politics”, most of his recent antics have been largely apolitical. But make no mistake: without openly declaring support for the Republican candidate, he has dropped hints as to which side of the party divide Meta is trending. He has praised Trump as a “badass” after his near-brush with martyrdom, expressed regret at toeing the Biden Administration’s line on content moderation, and, recently, started to ban accounts that track the private jets of billionaires like himself, the former president, and Musk. Gone is the soft-spoken computer nerd with close-cropped hair as depicted in 2010’s The Social Network, replaced with a noticeably more flamboyant incarnation.

This repositioning only makes sense for Meta, as it does for Silicon Valley as a whole. The last decade’s liberal orthodoxy saw social media as a benign tool to foster democracy and progressive values at home and abroad, in the context of events such as the 2008 “Facebook” election and popular uprisings across the Middle East. This was a time when Zuckerberg and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey were routinely feted at receptions in Obama’s White House. Then came the epoch-shattering election of 2016 in which Facebook played a most conspicuous part. What followed was a scandal-tainted half-decade in which Zuckerberg’s firm was blamed for enabling misinformation, conspiracy theories, and foreign interference. After being hauled before Congress to answer for these, Meta’s founder saw the writing on the wall: his (and the tech world’s) alliance with the reigning establishment was effectively over.

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By Michael Cuenco

A 2020 email from Zuckerberg’s mentor and Facebook angel investor, Peter Thiel, counselled him to consider a deeper cultural break with the system: no longer should he be “a Baby Boomer construct of how a well-behaved Millennial is supposed to act”. The advice made sense. After all, the current climate now favours alignment between the Right’s embrace of free speech and laissez-faire online — sharing a common enemy in the establishment’s drive to combat disinformation (seen by many as scarcely-veiled censorship).

But both instances of Zuckerberg’s political signalling — whether towards Hope-and-Change Democrats once upon a time or MAGA Republicans today — arguably had less to do with ideological principles and more to do with raw interests: or what would allow the company to realise its aim of gaining mastery over “the future of human communications”. So far, this narrative may allow Zuckerberg (and the other tech billionaires) to claim that it’s the other side that’s changed and that he, in fact, has remained true to the liberatory promise and idealism of Facebook’s early days. When he borrows from Caesar to say Aut Zuck Aut Nihil or “All Zuck or All Nothing”, he seems to be uttering a liberationist promise, telling aspiring founders: follow Zuck and you, too, can be a Caesar!

However, Meta’s recent policy decisions to use personal data to feed algorithms and train generative AI point to the real heart of the tech giant’s project. Meta’s advertising speaks of self-expression even as the resulting output ruthlessly invalidates those very things. Automating the production of creative work and instrumentalising users’ most intimate digital footprints, while causing untold damage on people’s mental health — that doesn’t seem to be all in the name of fostering genuine connections. Children who grew up on Facebook and Instagram now report having stunted personal development. A federal child safety case against Meta and Senate hearings earlier this year in which Zuckerberg apologised to parents (without having to change much of his corporate policy) are cases in point.

Unlike the partisan Russia-gate charges, Zuckerberg’s deleterious impact in this case cuts across political lines, alienating Americans from each other regardless of party — all while Meta turns in handsome profits.

If Silicon Valley does succeed in hijacking the Republican Party as it did the Democrats a decade ago, and if a future GOP administration manages to give the moguls their desired regulatory regime, will it really represent a moment of liberation for mankind? The tech discourse has tipped over from mere libertarianism toward something far more grandiose and sinister, namely accelerationism, predicting (and encouraging) the agglomeration of all intelligence into a post-human singularity.

The race to see who will bring about — and therefore wield the power of — such a singularity is what motivates the moguls. And Zuckerberg, though less vocal in articulating this messianic ambition than say Musk or Open AI’s Sam Altman, is no exception. It tracks with the worldview of the Valley’s intellectual guru Thiel, who endorses monopoly as the natural, healthy endpoint of all competition, which he says “is for losers”. In light of this, Zuckerberg’s identification with Caesar takes on a different meaning. It becomes less about individual emancipation and more about individual submission to a single fount of technological power and authority. That’s the thing about Caesars (and monopolies), there can only really be one.

There is, therefore, something more significant at stake than whether Republicans or Democrats get to benefit from the largesse of Silicon Valley. Its continuing domination over society heralds nothing less than a reckoning over the role and agency of human beings in a world of ceaseless technological saturation and collectivisation.

Conscientious voices across the Right and Left have raised many compelling arguments against the broader social ills caused by Meta’s platforms. Rather than taking a side in the reductive and overly partisan fight between free speech maximalists and anti-disinformation crusaders, opposition to Zuckerberg’s empire-building could instead rally around a more capacious standard, namely the common defence of our humanity against the brazen accelerationist schemes imposed by Meta and the other tech titans. Just as the American revolutionaries of 1776 likened George III to Caesar (“is not Britain to America what Caesar was to Rome”), so too should today’s citizenry see Zuckerberg and his fellow moguls as the agents of a great dehumanising tyranny. Against this would-be Caesar of the algorithm, their own refrain could be: Aut Homo Aut Nihil or “All Human or All Nothing”.

1. The reincarnation of Nick Clegg
2. The escape from California
3. Clegg battles Britain
4. The rise of Facebook fraud
5. How Clegg wields his superpower

1. The reincarnation of Nick Clegg

In July 2018, former deputy prime minister Nick Clegg was a mid-tier guest speaker at Anders Fogh Rasmussen’s inaugural “Democracy Summit” in Copenhagen. No longer an MP after being unceremoniously dumped from parliament in 2017 by a bar manager now in jail for fraud, Clegg was one of a number of former politicians who, having lost power, believed democracy was in trouble. Also appearing with the former Lib Dem leader were the two headliners that day: Joe Biden and Tony Blair.

The themes of that summit reflected the zeitgeist of the moment: the dangers of fake news and technology, particularly on social media platforms. For much of that year, Facebook had been under intense public scrutiny following revelations that people’s private data had been secretly collected and sold to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. The “Cambridge Analytica scandal” had seen Facebook’s owner, Mark Zuckerberg, dragged before Congress where he had given a hesitant and unconvincing performance in front of the world’s media, becoming a lightning rod for all the anxieties of the moment.

Rasmussen’s Democracy Summit was, then, another potential PR problem for Facebook. Yet, as one of the key sponsors, it also offered an opportunity to show how seriously it was now taking its responsibilities. Facebook’s Vice President of Global Policy Solutions at the time, Richard Allan, headed up the company’s delegation. Allan was the former Liberal Democrat MP for Sheffield Hallam who gave up his seat for Clegg in 2005, acted as his campaign manager, and was then granted a peerage by the Coalition in 2010. Also in attendance was Facebook’s former vice president, Joanna Shields, who had also been given a peerage under the Coalition, becoming a minister under David Cameron and then Theresa May’s “special representative on internet crime and harms”.

So, while Clegg was a rather bruised former politician, he remained a very well-connected one. When the conference ended, he did not even have to sort his own travel home: Blair offered him a lift back to London in his private jet. Here was a taste of the gilded life he might aspire to in his political retirement, the life of a former politician no longer constrained by democracy.

But Clegg, thanks to that summit, has taken quite a different path from almost any previous British politician. He had never been that interested in technology, according to those who know him. But as Allan told me recently: “The event was one of those moments which helped Nick understand how politically significant all this was.” Within a few months, Clegg had joined Facebook, and relocated to the US. He has since risen to become one of the most senior executives at its parent group, Meta — no longer merely deputy prime minister of the UK, but, according to those I spoke to in Whitehall, effectively “Foreign Secretary of Facebook”.

Clegg’s importance at Meta was revealed last year when he negotiated both his return to London and promotion to “President of Global Affairs”; a position which reportedly earns him upwards of $15 million a year. Six years after his career low-point, Clegg is now Zuckerberg’s trusted consigliere, the political representative for a $1 trillion corporate behemoth. He is the man paid to ensure Zuckerberg is not exposed to the sort of political scandal that dragged his name through the mud in 2018.

In short, Clegg has it all: not only the kind of power, wealth and settled family life back in London that few former politicians could ever dream of, but also his reputation repaired and even enhanced. No longer a humiliated political loser, he is now the man tasked with making the world’s most important media company more socially responsible and saving democracy from the populists in the process.

While Clegg remains relatively guarded about this new life — he would not agree to be interviewed for this piece — his wife Miriam González Durántez’s Instagram page is like a show reel for what it all looks like. There he is with his wife one moment, hiking in Africa, smiling for the camera, soaked in the mists of Victoria Falls; then in the United States; and then back in England walking in the countryside. “Happy birthday Nick Clegg!” Miriam writes below one image of the pair of them. “Life with you is an incredible journey.”

“Y’all shooting Clarkson’s farm?” one of Miriam’s friends jokes in reply to her birthday post, the rolling English countryside clearly visible behind them. “I’ve watched two episodes and I’m hooked!” Miriam replies. “At least it’s anti-Brexit!!” For Miriam the nature of her husband’s departure from politics — and what came soon after — remains a source of bitterness. Under a news story that she posted on her Instagram feed about David Cameron returning to frontline politics as foreign secretary, she remarks, “Clearly getting bored at home,” before adding, acidly: “And yet home is where he truly belongs.” When a friend replies, “I thought it was George O you really hated”, Miriam posts a laughing emoji. When another adds, “what a joke of a man”, Miriam responds with a heart.

But is her husband really so different from Cameron? “The only difference,” one senior government minister said to me, “is that David is back in government trying to launder his reputation — whereas Nick is selling his to launder somebody else’s.”

This is central to any consideration of Clegg’s new life: is he really the liberal constraining influence on Meta that his defenders claim, the man making Facebook that little bit more responsible for the good of us all? Or is he, actually, an enabling force, giving a veneer of respectability to a company that is so big it has moved beyond the control of mere national governments and remains just as socially irresponsible as ever? For, according to those I have spoken to in the British Government and law enforcement over the past few months, Meta’s influence is not becoming more benign under Clegg — quite the opposite.

I was told by a senior minister that, in the UK today, 10% of all crime happens on a Meta platform. “That’s not online crime,” he said, “but all crime.” And it is getting worse. Not only has online fraud exploded on Facebook marketplace, but child exploitation is being made easier by Meta’s decision to ignore pleas from law enforcement agencies and government ministers not to roll out “end-to-end encryption” across its platforms, in effect making it much easier for paedophiles to groom and abuse children without anyone knowing. “They are responsible for an awful lot of harm in this country,” another minister told me.

And yet what is being done about it? According to those I spoke to in government, Britain has become a global soft touch for online criminals, attracted to the country by the ease of operating in English, our economic openness, speed of online payments — and, crucially, the utter inability of the state to do anything about it.

2. The escape from California

Clegg’s time in California was important, say those who know him, because it allowed him to get close to Facebook’s “C-suite” executives — in particular, Zuckerberg himself. For much of this time, his boss was Sheryl Sandberg, the company’s all-powerful number two. When she stepped down in the summer of 2022, Zuckerberg relied instead on a team of lieutenants, one of whom was Clegg. With this direct relationship established, Clegg felt secure enough to move back to Britain.

According to Meta, he only occasionally interacts directly with the British Government — his job is now too important for that. “He spends most of his life on a plane,” I was told. In January, he was in Switzerland for meetings about AI; in December, in Brussels to talk to the EU; in October, Greece for another summit about democracy; and over the summer, India, where he was greeted like a visiting head of state.

Clegg’s job at Meta is to set overall strategy for dealing with the world’s most powerful regulators, oversee Meta’s own governance strategy and manage the politics that inevitably come with its extraordinary global influence and wealth. In total, there are now 3 billion “monthly active users” on Facebook, 2 billion on WhatsApp and 1 billion on Instagram. If Meta is now the size of a country, Clegg is both its cabinet secretary and its chief diplomat.

As such, Meta is not just another social media company, but a monster of global proportions: an international news platform, publisher, marketplace and advertising giant all rolled into one, used not just by ordinary people, but also by criminal gangs, sexual predators, authoritarian governments and terrorists. Indeed, one of Meta’s own lines of defence is that its very size is the reason why so much crime happens on its platforms.

Clegg’s defenders argue that, since joining Meta in 2018, he has moved the company away from its more libertarian instincts towards a more “mature, sensible place”, where it apparently acts more proactively in addressing public concerns about its role in things such as deep fakes, sexual exploitation and fraud. He has, they say, been instrumental in making Meta less hostile to regulation while creating new layers of governance for the platforms. He created the independent “Oversight Board” which now makes decisions on free speech and content on Facebook and Instagram, and which has been filled with unimpeachably liberal bigwigs such as the former Danish prime minister, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, who lives in London, and the former editor of The Guardian, Alan Rusbridger. These are Clegg’s people.

The Oversight Board has certainly helped to reduce the kind of political controversy over Facebook censorship which dogged the company during Clegg’s early years, when Donald Trump was removed from the site. Yet this innovation also points to the question about Clegg’s influence. “I mean, come on,” said one of the senior UK government figures I spoke to. “Does anyone really believe the ethics board is anything more than a rubber stamp for the same old West Coast liberal politics the company has always had?” To Clegg’s critics, in other words, it’s all just window dressing for the same corporate interest.

Over the past months, I have spoken to more than a dozen figures in government, finance, tech and police, as well as those who know Clegg personally, to try to understand how much he has really managed to achieve at Meta. Those who have come across him at work describe the same figure who burst into the public consciousness in 2010: fluent, charming, persuasive, normal.

One British minister who had dealt with Clegg in government told me he was the same as ever, only now with the air of corporate power behind him. Another MP said he was “charming but defensive” when representing Meta. Another who met him in California told me that while he was thriving professionally in the US, he was clearly out of place in Silicon Valley’s deracinated suburbia, too far removed from the Victorian warmth of south-west London where the family had made their home and to which they have now returned — albeit to a new £8 million home in Chiswick.

Clegg and his wife disliked the scale of urban poverty in California that sat alongside the kind of extraordinary tech wealth that they were benefiting from. Both felt that their time in the US had confirmed how European they were and, while they might hate Brexit and the Conservative Government, London was nevertheless home. While they were there, Miriam lectured on international trade policy at Stanford University, but she has her own political ambitions in Europe. Since returning, she has created a new political movement — or “nascent political party” as one friend described it — called España Mejor, or “Better Spain”.

It was always the pair’s Europeanness that made Clegg such an attractive prospect for Zuckerberg. He is, explains one friend, fluent in European in a way Zuckerberg is not.

3. Clegg battles Britain

“The tech industry needs to work together to fight predatory adults online,” Clegg tweeted in November. “That’s why Meta is a founding member of the Tech Coalition’s new Lantern programme, which will allow companies to share signals about predatory behaviour & take action on their respective platforms.”

A month later, Meta announced that it was rolling out end-to-end encryption for all personal chats and calls on Messenger and Facebook, meaning, as it boasted at the time, “the content of your messages and calls with friends and family are protected from the moment they leave your device to the moment they reach the receiver’s device”. As a result, “nobody, including Meta, can see what’s sent or said”.

For years the British Government had been lobbying Meta not to go through with this plan. Today, Britain receives around 800 referrals every month from the US-based National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), an organisation which trawls the internet looking for evidence of child exploitation. When NCMEC finds evidence of wrongdoing it passes it on to national crime agencies around the world who then go to arrest the abusers operating in their country. As a result of these 800 referrals, around 1,200 children are protected from predatory adults every month. By rolling out end-to-end encryption, the UK Government believes this number will collapse overnight.

In 2022, there were around 32 million reports of online child sexual exploitation made to NCMEC — 21 million of which came from Meta. When I put this to Meta, they pointed to comments by the NCMEC executive John Shehan, who recently praised the company for going “above and beyond” in their search for online child sexual exploitation while other companies did not, and there seems to be some truth in this. While Facebook referred 21 million reports to NCMEC in 2022, Google reported 2.2 million, TikTok 290,000 and X just under 100,000. Apple reported just 234. And yet, by rolling out end-to-end encryption, Meta has, in effect, wilfully blinded itself to at least some of what is happening on its platforms, even if it insists there is still much they can do to combat child sexual exploitation.

A Meta spokesman told me: “We don’t think people want us reading their private messages so have spent the last five years developing robust safety measures to prevent and combat abuse while maintaining online security.” Here is classic Cleggite third-wayism. Meta points to things such as enforcing age limits, using technology to scour for suspicious behaviour and stopping adults contacting children they don’t know. The company says, for instance, that it can block anyone over 19 from starting a direct conversation on Instagram with children they don’t follow. Meta also says it has developed technology to identify “suspicious adults” — for example, if they’ve recently been reported or blocked by a teen — which would prevent them from finding, following and interacting with teen accounts. But if adults are this suspect why aren’t they just thrown off Facebook altogether?

Another safety feature Meta boasts about are the “safety notices” it sends to teenagers if they are talking to suspicious adults. In just one month last year, 85 million users apparently saw such safety notices. And yet, as a parent, it is hard to feel reassured by such statistics rather than simply terrified at the scale of potential abuse. Other defenders of Meta argue that end-to-end encryption does not disempower the police. Encrypting messages does not stop undercover police entering WhatsApp groups or seizing mobile phones. Meta insists that overall, even with end-to-end encryption, it expects to continue providing more reports of potential child sexual exploitation than other social media companies. We shall see.

The British Government, at least, is far from convinced. In the autumn of 2022, the then home secretary, Suella Braverman, held a video call with Clegg about the issue. In this meeting, Clegg claimed Meta was being unfairly targeted because it was making the majority of referrals to NCMEC. From the British Government’s perspective, though, this was exactly the point — it is making so many referrals because there is so much abuse happening, which will now be harder to do anything about. The discussion ultimately ended without agreement: the UK Government insisted that it was possible to protect privacy and child safety by developing new technology to sit alongside end-to-end encryption. Clegg insisted that it was not.

It looks, to those in government, like Clegg has absorbed the prevailing libertarian orthodoxy of California: an orthodoxy which places privacy above all else. In Silicon Valley, there is an arms race to offer customers total privacy in their private communications, no matter the cost. For the British Government, the cost of such unbreakable privacy is simply too high. Instead, it believes technological solutions are possible that allow social media companies to scan for illegal material on encrypted platforms, while also maintaining privacy. “We know it’s possible, because GCHQ says it is,” one government figure told me. The British state, in other words, had developed the technology itself. Meta says most experts disagree.

After Braverman and Clegg’s discussion in 2022, the pair did not meet until 2023. In the meantime Braverman ordered the Home Office to produce a public campaign directed against Meta’s planned roll out of end-to-end encryption which would target Zuckerberg directly, pleading with him “as a father” to change course. The plan, in effect, was to launch a coordinated government attack on the Facebook founder to shame him into action by turning public opinion against him. But, then, Rishi Sunak ordered Braverman to pull the campaign.

Why would he do this? On this point there remains a fierce dispute between ministers. Some see something nefarious — Sunak eyeing a future career like Clegg’s — others the power of the Treasury, others mere political tactics or Sunak’s weakness. What is certainly true is that there was a campaign and then there was not.

It was also at this time that the Government began trying to reassure Meta about the measures contained within its then-controversial Online Safety Bill, which was making its way through parliament. Under the Bill’s provisions, social media companies such as Meta would be responsible for the content on their platforms and would have a new duty to “identify, mitigate and manage the risks of harm” from illegal content and “activity that is harmful to children”. The legislation also gave the powers to enforce this to Ofcom, the media regulator. Ofcom, the act states, could order Meta to use “accredited technology” to look for and take down child sexual abuse material on its platforms, and also to levy fines up to 10% of a company’s global annual revenue.

Facing this threat, in March 2023, Meta warned it would pull WhatsApp from the UK if the proposed measures in the Bill were not removed. But, then, in September — just as the row between Braverman and Clegg was reaching its climax — the Government moved to reassure Meta and the other social media companies that Ofcom would only be able to force them to scan WhatsApp, Messenger and Facebook for illegal content if that was “technically feasible”, which Meta insists it is not. In the end, the Bill received royal assent in October without the changes once demanded by Meta, but with responsibility for dealing with the problem kicked over to Ofcom.

No one knows how Ofcom will use its new powers — or how powerful the new law will actually be. One thing we do know is that since the passage of the Online Safety Act in September, Meta has not only not pulled WhatsApp from the UK but has felt free to push ahead with the roll out of end-to-end encryption across its other services. “The truth is we’re too scared and timid,” said one government figure involved at the time. “As ever.”

When I opened my phone this weekend, I noticed a little message on WhatsApp. “We’re updating our Terms of Service and making relevant changes to our Privacy Policies for UK users, effective 11 April 2024,” the note read. The changes are necessary, it went on, “to reflect that the minimum age to use WhatsApp in the UK will be changed from 16 to 13″.

4. The rise of Facebook fraud

Alongside the Online Safety Act, the principal challenge for Meta over the past year has been the growing anger over the explosion of fraud on its platforms, particularly Facebook. According to the Government, fraud now accounts for 40% of all crime in England and Wales, 70% of which comes from abroad with as much as 80%  happening online — the vast majority on social media. In recent evidence to the Home Affairs Select Committee, the TSB’s Financial Crime Prevention Director, Paul Davis, said 80% of the fraud they saw originated on social media, before adding: “Let’s not walk past the fact that when I say ‘social media’, the majority of them start from the channels owned by one company in particular, which is Meta.” Baroness Nicky Morgan, chair of the House of Lords Fraud Act Committee, told Meta that she had received written evidence from high-street banks that in one three month period alone, 70% of all cases of investment fraud started on Facebook or Instagram, either through adverts or victims being directly messaged.

The police are seeing the use of social media and “encrypted messaging services” like WhatsApp by criminals “increasing throughout all aspects of fraud”.

While Clegg sets Meta’s overall political strategy, he tends to defer the job of defending Meta’s interests in the UK to the team he has assembled in London, most of whom also used to work in Whitehall.

Meta’s director of public policy in London is Chris Yiu, a former No. 10 adviser and Treasury official who went on to become one of the most influential figures at the Tony Blair Institute (TBI). Yiu is credited within the TBI as being the man who convinced Blair of the revolutionary potential of technology, setting him off on his journey towards Oracle’s Larry Ellison, who now funds most of his work calling for much greater use of technology by government. Yiu remains close to Blair, becoming one of the TBI’s board members in 2022, a position he still holds, alongside his job at Meta.

Alongside Yiu, there’s Rebecca Stimson, who was in the Cabinet Office during the Coalition as a senior EU policy advisor to Cameron. Then there’s Richard Earley, Meta’s “Head of UK Content Regulation Policy”, who also worked in the Cabinet Office with Clegg during the Coalition, and Philip Milton, who does much of the direct interaction with the Government on the issue of online fraud. Before joining Meta, Milton previously worked at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, “with responsibility for e-Privacy, Data Protection and Net Neutrality policy”, and before that at the Serious Fraud Office. For Meta, Whitehall is less a revolving door than a one-stop shop from which to poach its lobbyists.

When Milton appeared before the House of Lords in 2022, he claimed that dealing with online fraud was Meta’s “number one priority”. “Without our users, our platforms cease to exist, it is as simple as that,” he said. “Even if they do not necessarily fall victim to fraud, the very presence of it degrades users’ experience, and it makes it an unattractive place for advertisers to use as well.”

Yet, according to those I spoke to within the British Government, Facebook has been the slowest and least effective of all the Big Tech companies in reducing fraud on its platforms. When Google changed its algorithm so that it would only take adverts from investment products regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority, the amount of online fraud coming from the site collapsed to almost zero. Meta, in contrast, dragged its feet and is only now doing something similar.

Far from being motivated to act, one senior government insider told me, Meta’s business model and sheer size meant it was, in fact, incentivised to move much more slowly than other companies. “If you are eBay or Gumtree, then fraud on your marketplace is a real problem because it’s your bread and butter,” they explained. “For Meta, they are ultimately an advertising company, so eyeballs on site is what they need, so the incentives are completely different.”

Meta’s principle strategy was to avoid any new legal obligations imposed upon it to deal with the fraud — or, more specifically, any new legal liabilities to recompense those who had been defrauded through its sites.

Today, pressure for the Government to do something is not just coming from consumers who have been ripped off online, but from Britain’s powerful banking sector, which has become incensed at the amount of money it is having to pay out in compensation to those defrauded on social media. The issue has become more acute because of a new regulatory regime coming into force in October this year, which will mean almost everyone who is defrauded online will be entitled to a full reimbursement. At the moment, most banks voluntarily reimburse their customers, covering around two-thirds of all fraud cases. Under the Government’s new rules, however, almost all claims up to £415,000 will be covered — some 99% of all cases — with the cost of the compensation split 50/50 between the bank of the fraud victim and the bank of the fraud thief. The social media platform on which the fraud took place will not have to pay a penny.

To deal with this discrepancy, there has been a growing push inside the Government for tighter rules on tech companies — Meta in particular — to force them to clamp down on the fraud on their sites. The Government has had two “anti-fraud champions” over the past year or so — Anthony Browne and then Simon Fell. Both have publicly backed calls for the burden of compensation to be shared between the banks and social media companies. For Meta, this is not just a financial irritation but also a potential legal principle that could become a new gold standard across the world.

Before the party conference season last year, formal proposals went into No. 10 that included a recommendation that the Government look again at “burden-sharing” as part of a new Online Fraud Charter. According to one minister, two of the Prime Minister’s closest advisers — James Nation, deputy head of the policy unit, and Will Tanner, deputy chief of staff — were demanding the Government “push hard in this space”.

And yet, when the Charter was eventually published in November, there was no mention of it. Instead, the Charter was a kind of voluntary compact between the Government and tech firms to do more to deal with fraud, with a review to take place in six months to see how they are getting on. The tech companies — and Meta — had dodged a bullet. “The lack of anything in the Fraud Strategy caused quite a stir from the financial services sector,” the minister told me.

Even getting Meta to accept some responsibility for the content on its platforms took an enormous effort and the direct lobbying of Clegg to get it over the line. “It is the first time they have ever accepted responsibility for what is on their platforms,” one insider said, “so it’s a big mental boundary that they’ve crossed, which we shouldn’t overlook.”

In the run-up to this turning point last year, Clegg spoke to Bob Wigley, Chair of UK Finance, after which he ordered a number of his juniors to engage directly with Anthony Browne, the Government’s then anti-fraud champion. Following one such meeting, Browne wrote to Clegg directly to say he was “very pleased with the new identification measures that Meta is taking to combat fraud on your platforms” and that he was “confident they will have a real impact, and benefit millions of your users in the UK”. He concluded: “Thank you for your constructive approach and taking the issue with the seriousness it deserves.”

Meta says that while the Government has not made it financially liable for site fraud, the Online Safety Act does list fraud among the harms social media companies have a duty to combat — with fines of up to 10% of its global turnover if it does not. Meta also insists that the commitments it has made in the Online Fraud Charter are significant. For instance, it will soon be rolling out “increased verification” on Facebook Marketplace, introducing warning messages to encourage users never to pay for an item without seeing it first. But why has it taken so long to get here? And if it takes the threat of government action to do it, why aren’t we demanding more laws with more bite all over again?

According to a number of insiders involved in the process, the real brake on imposing burden sharing was the Treasury and Jeremy Hunt in particular. “It was a combination of the two of them,” said one government figure. The Treasury does not want to impose financial burdens that make Britain less attractive for inward investment, particularly from tech companies. A second figure confirmed that the reason the social companies had escaped without any new liabilities for the fraud was because of “competitiveness issues”. A third said: “As ever, the Treasury is reluctant to choke off any potential UK investors with what they see as punitive measures.”

For Hunt, personally, one of his central objectives as Chancellor is to make London and “the triangle” with Oxford and Cambridge “the Silicon Valley of Europe”. In his Autumn Statement, he boasted that Britain already had the “third largest technology sector in the world, double the size of Germany and three times the size of France”, but wanted to go further. Meta has already invested heavily in London, with a big new campus at King’s Cross, one on Rathbone Place and another on Warren Street. It is from Warren Street in particular that Clegg is able to “hot desk” whenever he goes into the office. Hunt’s vision has also been embraced by Sunak, the tech bro with a place and a former career in California.

And so, what is the result? Next month the UK Government is hosting the first ever Global Fraud Summit in London, attended by interior ministers and figures from Interpol, the EU Commission and the UN. And who has been asked to give a presentation on how to share intelligence? Meta.

5. How Clegg wields his superpower

If Nick Clegg has a superpower, it is surely the illusion of normality. He is the public schoolboy in an M&S pullover helping to run one of the world’s great hegemons. It was this ordinariness that once made him politically popular, but which also contributed to the ferocity of the backlash when it came. The country had briefly fallen in love with this new Blair, only for him to let them down, just like the old one.

His skill as a politician was to always adopt the demeanour of the most sensible person in the room, neither irresponsibly libertarian nor hysterically conservative. It is the same trick he plays today. When Clegg bemoans those fixated on “speculative future risks about AI models that currently do not exist”, this may sound like third-way centrism, but it is also no coincidence that this reflects Meta’s corporate interest in maintaining a light-touch regulatory system for as long as possible.

Again and again, Clegg has adopted the same strategy: shepherding Meta into a place where it can say it is already regulating itself — and so does not need sweeping new regulations imposed upon it. But all the while, things are getting worse online, not better, and Clegg is the man ultimately responsible for Meta’s overall political strategy — a strategy which, I was told by four separate figures from within the UK Government, was self-interested, slow and resistant to any real democratic challenge, reticent to do anything which affects its corporate bottom line or sets damaging regulatory precedents which could be adopted elsewhere.

“There’s no question in my mind that he is an enabler,” one former colleague at Meta told me. “The only question is whether he realises it or not.”

Far from a burnt-out politician, Clegg is now a private citizen with extraordinary power and responsibility, paid a fortune to promote the interests of a company whose policies affect the lives of billions. If the US Congress can hold Zuckerberg to account, why isn’t the British Parliament doing the same to Clegg?

But it is also true that when trying to piece together his influence, the British Government has also shown itself to be as full of contradictions as Meta. During my conversations I heard how unimportant Clegg was to Zuckerberg, a figure to be held in contempt for selling his reputation for money. But I was also told how instrumental he was in dragging Meta over the line to sign the Online Fraud Charter. Meanwhile, some ministers boasted about how the Government had refused to give in to threats from Meta, while others lamented how ineffective they had been. Some blamed the Treasury, others No. 10 and others still a general mindset of British state weakness, made worse by splits within the Cabinet between security-conscious departments such as the Home Office and rivals such as the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology.

For all this pointless squabbling, a simple reality remains: Clegg might be an influential figure in a giant corporation, but the British Government is responsible for the laws which apply in Britain. If Britain is a soft touch, that is the Government’s fault. The question of whether he is a restrainer or an enabler is, then, moot: he is, inevitably, both. The real question is one of power. Clegg and the British Government have it. And we should be angrier with both for how they use it.

Meta (formerly Facebook) and Microsoft (having recently purchased online gaming giant Activision) are enthusiastically talking up the “metaverse” — a world of virtual reality-enhanced social interactions that will be more real than reality. It will capture the nuances of offline interaction in massively fulfilling virtual experiences and then monetise them. With JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs declaring it a trillion-dollar market, the metaverse, if it succeeds, will be a constant presence in our lives.

If this is, as some say, a chilling vision of the future, it’s not for the Huxleyesque reasons usually given. If the worry is that people will be drawn away from real life into an online world provided by high-tech devices, that horse has already bolted. Meta’s talk of an “immersive” metaverse belies the fact that we are already well and deeply immersed in online life.

“Self-expression” and “meaning” are already so heavily intertwined with online activity that adding a headset isn’t going to make a  difference, even if the prospect of thousands of loud, angry Twitter users being more immersed is terrifying.

While the metaverse will further the internet’s shift away from text and photos toward VR and video, it is not a revolution, or at least not the one Meta portrays. In the metaverse, people will do things together, share their experiences, and fight with each other, just as they currently do.

The new parts of the metaverse are commercial. Compared with online life today, there will be more things to buy and more money to be made. Personalised avatars, virtual pets, online concerts and shows, digital real estate, and fashion made of pixels instead of fabric: Meta, Microsoft, Verizon, and other giants all hope to serve as brokers for all these, in much the same way Amazon is the middleman and guarantor for its Marketplace transactions. If America were not still so squeamish about sex, one could add teledildonics to the list.

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For those inclined to doubt that people will pay for a pair of metaverse trainers, recall that virtual goods in games like World of Warcraft and Pokemon are sold and traded for significant amounts of real-world cash. In the wildly popular Roblox online world, pre-teens eagerly programme and share games, virtual clothes, and virtual houses to earn an imaginary currency, Robux, with a real-world exchange rate set by the Roblox parent company.

Some gamers have invested thousands to purchase spaceships for the online game Star Citizen, even though the game has yet to be released — the virtual spaceships are themselves funding development of the game. And we now have “Decentraland”, a 3D virtual world in which you can own “land” and “objects” in the same way one can offline, thanks to the blockchain technology of NFTs, which immutably declares who owns what.

So far, virtual goods in games have been confined to their online universes — you could spend $7,000 on a World of Warcraft elf, but you couldn’t take it out of the game. NFTs remove that limitation, allowing one to proudly declare ownership of a virtual hat across the entire metaverse. This Brave New World may not be more immersive than the current internet, but it will be more acquisitive, more possessive, and more status-conscious.

Viral competition has already proven to be a moneymaker: at one point, Facebook drew 30% of its revenue from Zynga’s Farmville and its clones, games that exploited social competition to encourage users to pay for virtual crops. Roblox and Decentraland are blueprints for how Meta and Microsoft hope to turn the whole world into Farmville. Just as the internet monetised personal information to better target advertising, the metaverse will monetise online interaction by having your friends do the advertising to you. Who wants to be the last on their virtual block to have a virtual mansion?

The result will be the monetisation of identity, something already visible in the burgeoning industries of paying for instruction on how to be patriotic, how to be anti-racist, how to be Christian, how to be eco-conscious. The metaverse seeks to make money off of less-loaded aspects of identity by fostering intra-group solidarity through purchases. As sociologist Erving Goffman wrote, “To be a given kind of person, then, is not merely to possess the required attributes, but also to sustain the standards of conduct and appearance that one’s social grouping attaches thereto.”

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In the metaverse, everyone can potentially be a seller and advertiser in addition to a buyer, yet the power will chiefly lie with the companies. They will exert significant influence over group standards of conduct and will have a greater ability to steer those standards in profitable directions. (The metaverse will also offer malicious actors far greater ability to pervert those standards, but that is a whole different can of worms.) In the run-up to the 2020 election, Meta (then Facebook) restricted all its users from forwarding private messages to more than five people.

The goal, evidently, was to stop “harmful” content, probably political, from exploding across tight in-groups within Facebook’s user population. Such blanket restrictions are indeed effective by their very nature, but imagine what they would mean in the metaverse: private online groupings could be prohibited by their hosting platform (Meta or Microsoft, say) from sharing particular content, encouraged to share more innocuous content, or simply barred from interacting in certain ways.

Yet group affiliations are strong, and aggrieved groups have a way of sticking together against the powers that be. Online life, above all, offers one the chance to pick their tribe, their gang, their comrades. Offline we are limited geographically in our affiliations, but online, you can scour the world for your crowd. The explosion of conspiracy theories, extremism, and a general distrust of any elite opinion is not a consequence of individual bad actors online, but the simple ability, brought to us by the internet, to find people who share and reinforce our opinion, no matter what that opinion may be. The metaverse will supercharge these trends. Where people formerly congregated in Facebook groups, Reddit groups, or blog chats, they will now find cozy virtual spaces in which they can be welcomed.

Offline life will not be more “real” than the metaverse, merely less affirming. There will be even less need to congregate with those who disagree with you in the slightest if, by going online, one can not only exchange words with identically-minded individuals, but can gain all the reassuring benefits of human interaction with them.

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There’s a cost to pay as well. The price of group homogeneity in any regard (ideological, cultural, demographic) is a far greater rejection of deviation. Urbanisation and immigration may have caused melting-pot tendencies in the last century, but the metaverse offers previously unthinkable possibilities for undoing the heterogeneity of modern life, separating us out into monocultural strata in which every hobbyist subculture, every sub-Marxist movement, and every sexual fetish can easily find mutual affirmation. Individuality will dissolve into the unified mindset of one’s chosen monocultures. Once having joined a stratum, members will naturally play down their differences in favour of their commonalities, to the point that they forget those differences.

The result will not be a melting-pot but a disconnected patchwork. Conformity will no longer be a meaningful concept because we will be able to conform to anything. You can pick whatever social norms you’d like to follow, but having chosen them you will follow them to the utmost. No group will feel big enough to be confident of its dominance; each group will police its boundaries rigidly, forming a kaleidoscope of what anthropologist Mary Douglas defined as latent groups. Each will feel threatened by some number of others, just as the Left and the Right are both equally convinced today that the other is winning.

In the metaverse, we will not be alone. But some of us will wish we could be.