I’ve not been paying much attention to Erick Erickson lately, but I did note he’s big on data centers and that sort of thing. I noticed his last analysis, or possibly propaganda piece, is full of holes, but being short of time, here’s the one bit that really stuck out for me.
Only Mark Zuckerberg and Meta seem to understand how to approach Americans on the matter. Meta is investing in local communities. The company is training blue collar workers with tools the workers do not have to buy and giving them skills they can use for a lifetime. The workers get six figure jobs without college degrees. In many of the towns Meta is working in, their data centers are generating so much in property taxes that the citizens are seeing reductions in their own property taxes. School funding has increased. Infrastructure funding has increased.
My problem? Ol’ Zuckerberg is a flaming incompetent.
Just look at the flaming remains of Facebook. It could have been a monstrous moneymaker for years to come. But he chose to, ah, in the current parlance, monetize it. Sounds harmless?
Look, he fucking sold your personal information, anything he could find, to Cambridge Analytica. He didn’t understand that social media begins with trust, and ends with distrust. I have a number of friends who left for other pastures, such as Mastodon and BlueSky, and won’t touch FB any more. Heck, I hang around as a former operator of social media, exercising my right to morbid interest. FB has become a small town, degraded from a bustling city.
And then he ran off and invested, not millions, but BILLIONS of DOLLARs in the Metaverse boondoggle.
He doesn’t understand business, and he doesn’t understand social media. He’s just using his elevated position in his chase after glory, and ruining Meta, the owner of FB, in the process.
OK, that said, is doom unavoidable? No, of course not. Humans learn. Maybe Zuckerberg has. Maybe he’s hired the right person to run the data centers subproject. I wish them well, because bosses, as a general rule, hate to be shown up and love to make money by cutting expenses.
This isn’t the only problem with a generally naive piece by Erickson, but it’s where I’m stopping. Too busy.
