Clueless thy name is Zuckerberg

Victor Tangermann, Mark Zuckerberg Orders His Employees to Start Having Fun Again After Brutal Layoffs Culled Their Colleagues, Yahoo!Finance, June 16, 2026.

Morale at Meta has seemingly hit rock bottom.

Employees have been roiling from multiple rounds of major layoffs. Last month alone, the Mark Zuckerberg-led company laid off a whopping 8,000 workers, roughly ten percent of its workforce, as part of its chaotic refocusing efforts around AI.

Many of those who remain are now forced to perform the grunt work to train AI models, weekly busywork that's already driving some of them up the wall, as Wired reports.

In an internal memo to employees on Friday, Zuckerberg attempted to lift their spirits in what appears to be a notable failure to read the room. Specifically, the billionaire promised to host a companywide AI hackathon in July — only to get brutally shut down by workers who were in no mood for such a thing.

Meta has regularly hosted hackathons in the past, but given last month's layoff announcement, the reception was extremely chilly. [...]

For all its employees' pain and suffering, Meta has surprisingly little to show. The company continues to trip over its own feet, struggling to release impressive new AI models as its competitors pull ahead further in the ongoing AI race.

Victor Tangermann, Meta’s Super Expensive New AI Team Is Already a Complete Catastrophe, Yahoo!Finance, June 15, 2026.

Now that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's dream of a metaverse has collapsed in on itself, the billionaire has moved onto his next money pit: a wildly expensive "Superintelligence" unit.

But those who've survived several brutal rounds of layoffs at the company aren't exactly thrilled to be part of his new vision for it. As Wired reports, morale within Meta's 6,500-staffer Applied AI team, which was created in March to support the Superintelligence Labs, is hitting rock bottom.

Three employees who spoke to the publication on the condition of anonymity said that the weekly busywork tasks they are being assigned, like generating puzzles to test the reliability of Meta's AI models, is "soul-crushing." [...]

A petition has also been signed by more than 1,600 employees, opposing a draconian new initiative that involves installing software on work computers to track everything employees to, including keystrokes and clicks, data that's then fed to train AI.

Homo economicus on steroids.

Four Horseman of the Apocalypse

The skinny on techbros Zuckerberg and Musk [#DogShirtTV]

Pissing Off the World's Richest Men: Wherein Ben [Wittes] welcomes Yael Eisenstat, former CIA analyst and current democracy activist, to tell us about her career speaking truth to tech oligarchs. From Yael Eisenstat's Wikipedia entry:

Yaël Eisenstat is an American democracy activist and technology policy expert who has spent over two decades combatting extremism, polarization, and anti-democratic behavior both on- and offline. With experience as one the United States government's top counterextremism officials and as Facebook's former Global Head of Elections Integrity Ops, Eisenstat is best known for being a pioneering voice in shaping public understanding of the ways in which social media contributes to polarization and radicalization.

Eisenstat currently serves as Senior Policy Fellow to Cybersecurity for Democracy, a nonpartisan, independent research institution that exposes online threats to democracy and proposes research-based policy insights on how best to combat them. There, her work focuses on democratic discourse on major social media platforms, AI-powered political messaging, and open information sharing practices in advance of the 2024 presidential election. Before this, Eisenstat served as Vice President to the Anti-Defamation League, where she led the ADL Center for Technology & Society from September 2022 through January 2024.

Prior to her tenure at the Anti-Defamation League, Eisenstat served as the Senior Advisor for Tech and Democracy at the Institute for Security and Technology, and as a Future of Democracy Fellow at the Berggruen Institute. She is a former Central Intelligence Agency officer, National Security Advisor to former Vice President Joe Biden, and diplomat.[2] In 2019 and 2020, she was a visiting fellow at Cornell Tech, where she examined and taught on the impact of technology on media and democracy. From 2017 to 2019, she was an adjunct assistant professor at the Center for Global Affairs at New York University. Between June and November 2018, she was the Global Head of Elections Integrity Ops for political advertising at Facebook. She has become a vocal critic of the company since leaving and is known for her efforts to promote social media platform transparency and accountability.