Morning!
Saturday is here, so this will be a short one - busy day ahead, got to prep to move house.
The same appalling war that that had potential to be stopped a few months in, but Borris was sent as messenger boy to tell Zelensky not to accept the ceasefire offer from Putin? Yep that one. It’s worth remembering that Borris is basically skint - or at least when leaving office he was. Not in the same way you and I are skint, but for his status and the circles he moves in, he was the poor kid. Because he can’t keep it in his pants, over the years the result of his failed relationships means what cash he had was getting rinsed continuously. So just like with his hero Churchill, he’s a man with a weak point that can be manipulated. That fact that he and many others now, have changed the record from ‘we will stand with Ukraine’ to ‘end this appalling war’ tells you Zelensky going to be able to get out of his action man costume pretty soon. That he’s publicly backing Trump is also notable.
So Zuckerberg now - on top of his own personal discovery that you don’t have to be a soy eating half man and embracing meat, sun, iron, martial arts and hanging with ‘bros’ - has also come out and spoken positively about Trump. As the accurate tweet says, when the narrative was different Meta had Trump banned of its platforms and censored speech to help the Democrats win the 2020 election, now they see the way the wind is blowing it’s time to change tack. All of this - by ‘this’ I mean not just what we see here with Zuck, but a lot of the madness we’ve seen certainly since 2019 - works through social cues and signalling. There’s a temptation to imagine there’s your typical tin foil wearers idea of a set of baddies pulling strings, but nothing is as formal as that. Key people who have power and influence do and say something and the people who admire, are influenced by, are indebted to, have aligned interests to them, see and adapt their own actions and messaging to ensure they’re all going in the same direction. You may have seen this at a mirco level in your own social interactions. There’s that guy in a group who defers to and copies another group member they admire or want the favour of. You may not listen to the Joe Rogan podcast, but if you want a perfect example of this, watch any episode where Brendan Schuab is there. Schuab is an ex UFC fighter and now podcaster and ‘comedian’ - he’s terrible, but is in Rogan’s circle. Watch any interaction with them and you’ll see what many people would typically think of as an ‘alpha male’ (using that shit terminology) defer completely to whatever Joe says, sometimes spinning 180 in the next sentence when he realises Joe is in disagreement with him. It’s high cringe to watch. But expand this out to the macro, think of the same thing but instead of loser wannabe comedians parroting opinion and actions, it’s activists, leaders of groups, politicians, heads of huge conglomerates and hedge funds and you can see how these seemingly overnight narrative shifts happen, they’re all taking cues from each other. This is how Davos, the World Economic Forum and similar gatherings work, they’re just annual formalised versions of a group of influential and powerful people speaking and listening to each other, then moving in alignment.
Just in case you’re interested in what happened yesterday when we had the worldwide blue screen of death for systems running Microsoft, this is what happened. The thread is a 2 min read if you hit the link. Crowdstrike have some interesting history and connections that made many people immediate go down the cyberattack route, particularly considering the timing and US political events. One thing it should highlight though, is how easy it is to disrupt centralised systems. Just look at the chaos yesterday from a buggy update, how different was that in effect from an actual cyberattack?
That’ll do for today, enjoy your weekend. 👊🏻