Audio: Ireland in the queasy middle

Mark Zuckerberg's comments on Europe yesterday seem to have gone under the radar, drowned out by his announcement of a radical shift in content moderation at Meta. But they really are striking. He said that Meta would:

“work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more”,

Including Europe, which has

“an ever increasing number of laws institutionalising censorship and making it difficult to build anything innovative”

I was on RTE radio this morning to discuss this, noting that Ireland finds itself in a difficult position, increasingly squeezed between a waring Brussels and Silicon Valley. The new Draghi agenda is pushing the EU towards tech sovereignty, while US Tech companies cosy up to an America First administration. Neither agenda serves us particularly well.

You can listen to that here {8 minutes, including Zuckerberg's full remarks on Europe}.

{FWIW - Casey Newton's Platform hass the best coverage I have read of the Meta changes}

All of this is in a context of the memeification of governance, of "government-by-shitposting". I wrote about this in yesterday's The Irish Times, looking at the threats being thrown at Greenland and Panama, and Canada and Mexico, and the dangerous blurring of joke and reality;

"These types of statements {buying Greenland, annexing Canada} are sent out into the world as trial balloons of Hindenburg proportions – tossed like grenades that will either cause real world devastation, or explode in a Jackass-style farce of silly string, leaving braying bullies to LOL at your humiliation. The blurring of online jokes and declarations of intent by the world’s most powerful man is deeply destabilising, and our turn is coming."

My point was that we will find ourselves in the same firing line one day. But, unlike, say, Greenland, the Trump administration has unilateral tools to hurt us - tax and trade policies in particular - and the people around him have already injected their singular brand of toxic discourse into policy debates here, especially the Hate Speech Bill.

I included three calls to action in that piece, half-formed ideas rather than concrete policy actions:

1. Working out now how we will react when the spotlight inevitably comes on us, how to integrate the art of avoiding online baiting into the craft of diplomacy and the politics of statecraft
2. Planning for the risk of weaponisation of our presidential election later this year
3. Building a real alternative vision of Ireland’s economy without our extraordinary reliance on mobile capital

These are the three ideas I plan to work on as we start this new year, including via this newsletter.

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