Mark Zuckerberg has always been a personality void. Of all of the criticisms I could level against Elon Musk, that is not one: he is always aggressively himself. But “Zuck” always comes off to me as someone scrabbling to justify a success he does not understand and, deep down, feels that he has not earned.

Let me lay my cards on the table here: I invented Facebook in 2000.

No, really! I was doing an internship as a junior sysadmin (a PFY, really)1 at HP’s European headquarters outside Stuttgart, in south-western Germany. It was a wonderful and formative year of my life, which I spent with a lot of other international interns, known as Praktikants in German. Very few of us knew each other before, so in order to get to know each other and arrange activities, I grabbed a spare HP-UX box, stuck a web server on it, and so the PrakSite was born.

Everyone had a profile, with pictures, interests, a brief bio, and so on. Ambitious users customised their profile pages, and we also put together event pages for visits to Stuttgart’s beer festival, the Wasen2, the Rocky Horror Show original cast performance in Frankfurt (in costume!), or snowboarding trips to the Tyrol. Of course the whole thing is lost to bitrot now — probably for the best, really.

If You’re So Smart, Why Ain’t You Rich?

If you’ve ever seen Facebook, this all sounds very familiar — so why am I not a multi-gazillionaire with my own private island?

Partly, it’s a question of timing: in 2000, even we techies didn’t all have home internet connections, let alone Muggles. Maybe there would have been a wider audience if any of us had looked for it, but my guess is no — and even if we had found one, the dot-bomb would probably have killed it.

Also, the tech stack that was available in 2000 was very rudimentary: there was no question of grabbing a framework off the shelf, everything had to be built from scratch, mostly by me, in a text editor in a Unix terminal window.3 I didn’t develop instant messaging or anything like that, and because we were all coders or sysadmins, the way you edited your PrakSite profile page was to SSH in and fire up vi (or emacs if you were that way inclined).

Finally, it never occurred to me to let users rate other users on whether they were hot or not, which is how Facebook got its start. I can only give partial credit to my own personal ethics for this choice; we were all standard nerds, and the only honest answer to whether any of us was hot or not would have to have been negative.

Zuckerberg calling people 'dumb fucks' in chat screenshots

This is the original sin of Facebook that Mark Zuckerberg is labouring under the weight of. No matter how hard he tries, he will always be that creep whose breakout success was a web site that violated consent by its very nature. This is where his recent nonsense about “masculine energy“ is coming from: straight-up insecurity. And it’s bloody embarrassing to the rest of us men.

What does he even mean by masculinity?

He means being an asshole. Full stop.

In other words, Zuckerberg is aligning himself with a very specific type of corporate sociopathy that’s currently masquerading as masculinity. It’s the freedom to be aggressive without accountability, the ability to dismiss workplace harassment concerns as “woke culture gone too far, “ the luxury of framing basic professional courtesy as an attack on identity, and the permission to treat employees like disposable resources while calling it “bold leadership.”

Zuckerberg trying to look masculine

This new look Zuck is sporting comes off as Artie Ziff (yes, with his “busy hands”) trying to dress up as Disco Stu.

Artie Zuck and Disco Zuck

I’m a man, cis-het or whatever, and have never in my life felt the urge to discuss “masculinity”. I like a wet shave, a rare steak, and a cold beer or three — and also use a number of skincare products. I like loud shouty music, including when it’s performed by women, and also quiet meditative music. I take care of my kids, cook for them and clean them, tell them I love them, and melt inside when they cuddle up to me or want to hold my hand. I enjoy rugged outdoorsy sports like mountain biking and snowboarding, but I don’t think they make up any more than a small ingredient of a personality. I read books about history, and get sniffly when I watch Pixar movies. I like an occasional cigar, know how to tie several tie knots, but I don’t like boxing, let alone MMA.

I would be very hard put to it to define how any of that might translate into my professional life, unless I were being asked what I do in my off hours. And I find anyone that does go on too much about masculinity to be embarrassing, if not outright suspicious.

This is the desperate scrabbling of someone who built something once that has grown out of all proportion, has bought all of his subsequent ”successes”, and has paid actually incredible amounts of money for his failures. It’s probably too much to hope that he disappears into his private estates and stops bothering the rest of us with his attempts to justify his existence — but the least we can do is to stop paying attention to his every pronouncement.

🖼️  Zuckerberg chat screenshot from this New Yorker article, Zuckerberg photo screenshot from Instagram video, Simpsons characters from the Simpsons Wiki.

  1. Here is a story from those times. ↩

  2. The Cannstatter Volksfest, known colloquially as “Wasen” because of its location on the Cannstatter Wasen, is nearly as big as Munich’s more famous Oktoberfest, and has a similar vibe of beer, fried foods, oompah bands, and the inexplicable addition of funfair rides — but with hardly any tourists. ↩

  3. One of my official projects that year was to write a tool that would let Apache on HP-UX authenticate users against a Windows NT domain controller, because there was not an out-of-the-box way to do that. Years later I was horrified to discover that my TCL (“tickle”) abomination was still in use… ↩