Episode 57: Mark Zuckerberg
In Bed With The Right
Adrian Daub and Moira Donegan
4.8 • 662 Ratings
🗓️ 11 February 2025
⏱️ 66 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Moira and Adrian delve into the career and political trajectory of Mark Zuckerberg. From Facemash to The Facebook to the Metaverse to putting on an absurd amount of sunscreen, they trace Mark Zuckerberg's (and Silicon Valley's) complicated relationship to gender. They explore how data, platforms, innovation and disruption, and guiding Silicon Valley figures like the genius and the drop-out are gendered, and how Zuckerberg's trajectory both reflects this gendered hierarchy and its breakdown. [You can find Adrian's book What Tech Calls Thinking here.]
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Adrienne Dob. And I'm Weirondon. Whether we like it or not, we're in bid with the right. |
| 0:13.8 | So, Adrian, I'm thinking of this episode as part of our series doing profiles in the gendered psychology of our new overlords, right? |
| 0:24.0 | Like a lot of the time on this podcast, we are implicitly talking about Elon Musk. |
| 0:29.6 | A lot of the time on this podcast, we're implicitly talking about Donald Trump. |
| 0:33.1 | Peter Thiel. |
| 0:33.9 | Peter Thiel, there's like various characters who come up a lot in our like taxonomy of right wing |
| 0:39.2 | masculinities. We've got the Dave Portnoy's and the Mike Pence's and, you know, the Joe Rogans. |
| 0:47.3 | And today we're going to talk about somebody who in many ways is the archetype of the creep, |
| 0:55.5 | but who really clearly aspires to be a pervert. |
| 1:00.0 | And that is a gentleman named Mark Zuckerberg. |
| 1:05.9 | Sorry, I just said Mark Zuckerberg |
| 1:07.6 | and you let out like the sigh of exhausted defeat. |
| 1:11.6 | Now, fun fact about me, I've thought about Mark Zuckerberg way more than is merited probably. |
| 1:17.6 | But, you know, I've been researching and writing about Silicon Valley going on 10 to 15 years now. |
| 1:23.6 | And for a long time, people sort of had difficulty accepting the kind of strong libertarian |
| 1:29.8 | slash right-wing element within Silicon Valley. But that was mostly when it came to people like |
| 1:34.8 | Elon Musk, where people sort of eventually like groked the fact that like, well, this guy is just a |
| 1:40.3 | straight-up reactionary. Zuckerberg still might surprise some people showing up in a podcast about right-wing masculinity because he's not known as one of those famous Valley right-wingers, right? He's not Mark Andreessen. He's not Peter Thiel. He's not David Sachs. He's not. He's not. He's not. He's not. he's not. And then the other thing is that he, you know, |
| 2:01.7 | his gender sort of didn't seem to figure into it quite as much until recently, seem, right? |
| 2:07.7 | So I think that this is a very good thing for us to delve into him because in looking at |
| 2:12.6 | Mark Zuckerberg, you look both at the way gender was woven into the Silicon Valley ecosystem all along and the way |
| 2:21.1 | this wasn't noticed, right? I think if listeners are like, huh, why are they talking about Zuckerberg, |
... |
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