Mark Zuckerberg wants to you be lonely and miserable

That’s the only way he’ll profit from selling you AI friends

Screenshot: YouTube/Theo Von

Mark Zuckerberg is known for being socially awkward, to put it mildly. In April, podcaster and comedian Theo Von told Zuckerberg to his face that he sees socially awkward people as “almost a mix between human and machine.” But he still wanted to get insight into the human half of the tech billionaire, despite having struggled to get through a simple exchange with him about drinking coffee.

At one point in the interview, Zuckerberg spoke about the time he spends with his children. When he got to his oldest, a nine-year-old daughter, he explained how they discuss the news together — hopefully from a reputable publication, not the false information that looks like news proliferating on Facebook. While it’s nice that he tries to engage with the interests of his kids, he also made a striking comment that illustrated the depth of his ignorance.

“It hadn't occurred to me before how much in order to understand technology, you need to really understand government and civics and politics and law and like all of these different things,” said the man who has been running one of the most influential technology companies in the world for more than two decades. Somehow, it had taken explaining current events to his child to realize this quite obvious fact — but it doesn’t seem to have given him much humility.

After spending much of the past year remaking himself as a Trump-aligned tech bro in an attempt to get more favorable regulatory treatment, Zuckerberg is intent on transforming the world as we know it with holograms and AI bots. But rather than making a serious case for why we should want the future he’s forcing on us, he’s convinced himself that we’re all demanding his tech fantasies. To his infantile mind, only they can solve deeply entrenched social challenges.