I appreciate you sharing your perspective. I agree/disagree on various points.
I agree with you that Trump has not delivered every item on capital’s wish list, and that all else being equal, they’d prefer a better response to covid. At the end of the day though, capital cares less about methods and more about the results on the scoreboard. Right now, the wealthy are wealthier, stonks are up, and the bail outs and corporate hand outs keep flowing. The Dem’s Wall Street donors said publicly that if Bernie or Warren was the Dem nominee, they’d sit out or back Trump in 2020. The GOP’s Wall Street donors doubled down on more Trump. The bottom line, again, is that capital values profits/power > anything else, including people’s lives.
The counter weight to capital is organized labor. Imagine how difficult it will be for working people to organize ourselves, when ~half the workforce believes Trump and the GOP’s BS and lies. The wealthy are absolutely ecstatic when working people can’t even agree on reality, let alone identify that capital is crushing them in the class war. If the methods necessary to achieve and maintain that level of division is anti-mask BS, capital will make that trade off, all day everyday. We know this because it’s the same trade off that the Koch brothers(and their ilk) have made their whole lives in pushing even more damaging BS like climate change denialism and lolibertarian/Chicago school economics.
I’ll judge Zuckerberg by his actions rather than his Op-Ed. Zuck effectively owns our most popular virtual public space. If Zuck owned that space in the physical world, and he was making money hand over fist in part by letting lies and conspiracies, hatred and toxicity run rampant; would you judge him by the festering cesspool that you could see with your eyes, or a letter that his PR team wrote for him?
It seems like you’re simultaneously saying that Zuck can’t shut it off, but also that he could, however it would cause his net worth to drop from an 11-digit number to some smaller 11-digit number.
People have agency. There is no law of physics that prevents Zuck from choosing to value humanity/decency/truth > his personal net worth. Every day he is confronted with that decision, and every day he consciously takes the path of a sociopath: to “gain wealth, forgetting all but self”.
I’ll agree that if Zuck pushed the toxicity off of his platform, there will still be toxicity in the world, but that doesn’t absolve him of responsibility for what he does have control of–Facebook.
