As the Hegseth hearings unfold, I wanted to give you a view into a small part of the story which, while perhaps not terribly consequential in itself, sheds some additional light on the Trump team’s effort to lock down details about Hegseth’s background as well as general press credulity about the same. This morning’s Axios reports that the Trump transition’s “red line” is that only Armed Services Committee Chair Roger Wicker (R-MS) and Ranking Member Jack Reed (D-RI) should be briefed on Hegseth’s FBI background check, not the rest of the committee. “The Trump transition team is demanding the president-elect’s nominees be treated the same way they insist Joe Biden’s were,” it reads.

There’s currently a debate online about whether social media owners were always secretly or latently right wing or whether “progressives” took a business constituency that was a reliably friendly and financially generous ally and turned it into an enemy through relentless attacks. Needless to say, there are a lot of jangling threads to this story, details that are hard to wrestle into an overarching theory. There are Silicon Valley titans like Peter Thiel who have always been not simply right-wingers but advocates of weird, tech-infused neo-monarchism. There have also been various left-aligned campaigns that must have rankled various tech titans. And finally, it’s very important to remember that it’s not at all clear that Silicon Valley as a whole is moving right. Management is. But the real and big story is simpler and more structural. The major technology platforms became mature businesses at vast scales; in so doing they butted up against the regulatory purview of the national government; and with the former leading to the latter they shifted toward a more conventionally anti-regulatory politics. A lot of it is really that simple.

There’s an important additional, related point which is that on becoming mature businesses they began looking toward the federal government more and more to protect their business positions from new entrants or other threats.

If you delve into Greenland discourse you quickly find all sorts of degenerate weirdness. And let me be crystal clear in the second sentence of this post that by “Greenland discourse” I mean more or less nothing about the actual physical place or its people: I mean the imaginings of various North American tech weirdos and Trumpers. I also mean very little about the generally silly conversation about whether the United States will annex Greenland. I stand by everything I wrote about that yesterday. But whenever you discuss Donald Trump’s Greenland jones, or, more specifically, whenever you dismiss it, you’ll hear from a lot of people about the various Silicon Valley fantasies about Greenland and why this is really what Trump’s talking about. I don’t think those are really what Trump’s yakking is about at all. But they’re at least part of the milieu Trump’s now part of. So it’s in the mix, adjacent, part of the idea world that gets these guys excited. Or, stated differently, what gets Trump’s new money men ginned up and thus keeps him talking.

For this little adventure we can start with this TechCrunch article entitled: ‘I went to Greenland to try to buy it’: Meet the founder who wants to recreate Mars on Earth. You have to go deep into the tech weirdo rabbit hole to make sense of recreating Mars on Earth (it has to do with Elon Musk, basically). Because Mars is actually a super-frigid, waterless barren wasteland. I’m into space travel as much as the next guy. But you wouldn’t want to live there or recreate it anywhere. You also shouldn’t try to buy Greenland. But that’s another story.

Some of you will disagree with this. And perhaps the future will vindicate your criticism. But I don’t think we should be distracted by Trump’s nonsense about Greenland, the Panama Canal or bum rushing Canada into becoming a U.S. state. We’re all under the grip of that line: “When someone tells you who they are, believe them.” But that doesn’t always work with con men and pathological liars. None of this stuff is going to happen. At a minimum, we shouldn’t get pulled into these outrage cycles or pretending any of this is a thing until you see the U.S. deploying military assets in Central America or … Maine? (I’m not sure where your deploy military assets to menace Greenland but wherever that is, wait for that.)

I saw this CNN article about how Danish officials “fear Trump is much more serious about acquiring Greenland than in first term.” And I get it: the U.S. is a nuclear power and Trump’s a freak. I don’t begrudge them being concerned. But I restate the point. None of this stuff is going to happen. What’s possible is a bunch of bullshit followed by some negotiations in which the Kingdom of Denmark agrees to some minor changes to the existing agreement which allows the U.S. military pretty vast liberties to defend and operate in Greenland. (That’s the NAFTA model: bullshit followed by some discussions and then huge fanfare for marginal changes to existing agreements.) It is the same story that we’ve talked about in other contexts: the constant stream of threats and maybes, all of which create what in this case may not be a penumbra of fear so much as a penumbra of reaction. Absurd tempests in teapots, the effect of which is to have everyone else in a pattern of reaction. He acts — or really doesn’t act, he jabbers — and everyone else reacts. And spin maybe 12 of those things at any one time. And that’s life under Trump.

I noted yesterday how Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is rushing to jump on the Trump tech bandwagon. He signaled this again when he announced that Meta is getting out of the content moderation business and adopting Musk-Era Twitter’s “community notes” model. He further added that he would relocate the remaining content moderation operations to Texas where people are less biased — yes, he really said that.

I want to make a broader point. The issue here is that one of the richest men in the world and one of the very most powerful has made himself and his vastly powerful tech platforms appendages of the Trump political machine and dedicated himself to flowing money to the Trump family directly. But let’s not get too upset about his “content moderation” decisions. The content moderation pivot is an example of the former decision, a carefully timed signal to curry favor. But it’s not some big disaster. The whole existence of it was just a ploy to get out from under his company’s last PR disaster back in 2017 and 2018. And on a more specific level we should be agnostic at best about whether Meta does “content moderation” at all. We should always have been highly skeptical of any corporate-backed effort at scale to determine what is and isn’t accurate information. This isn’t a new thought on my part. It goes back to what I was saying in 2018 and before.

You’ve likely seen that Mark Zuckerberg, newly re-branded as Donald Trump’s fluffy lap monkey, has announced that Facebook and Meta’s other properties are getting out of the content moderation business. They’ll move in the direction of “community notes,” semi-functional community moderation which Elon Musk pioneered at Twitter. What interested me much more was the Axios run-down of the news: “Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are of one mind. The most powerful global information platforms should be governed by free speech — and the people — not by the platforms themselves.”

Who are we kidding here?

I’ve always been wary of the whole concept of “misinformation” in the context of corporate platform moderation. Not against precisely, but highly skeptical that you can actually come to such open and shut definitions at scale. But it’s all basically an impossible skein to untangle because of the unavoidable scourge of the platform monopolies themselves. These are private companies, not any kind of actual public square. Let them do whatever they want. Don’t do them the favor of granting the premise that their advertising and data platform is a public good. And yet the freedom to spin up untrammeled monopolies makes the conceit half true. There’s simply no extracting a “free speech” from these engines since they’re algorithms all the way down.

But again, who are we kidding here?