In Silicon Valley, the first week of January is reliably bookmarked by two news stories: the latest absurd and amusing products at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement of his new year resolutions, which he annoyingly persists in calling “personal challenges”.

Zuckerberg’s resolutions have evolved in tandem with Facebook itself, from the domestic and human-sized (go running, eat less meat) to the global and unwieldy (“fixing” Facebook). So it seems worth noting that 2020 is apparently the year that Zuckerberg is officially giving up.

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It’s not just that Zuck announced that he is no longer going to announce new personal challenges every January (and believe me, as someone who made it eight hours into the new year before I gave in and had a piece of toast, I feel him). It’s that the longer-term goals he outlined for 2030 represent a move away from the hard work of fixing Facebook before Facebook destroys liberal democracy.

After three years of at least paying lip service to demands that Facebook please do something about the way in which its products and staff have helped elevate rightwing demagogues into positions of power around the world, Zuckerberg appears to have decided enough is enough. Facebook is not going to change, and he’s not going to pretend that he wants it to.

Instead, Zuckerberg wrote in a lengthy Facebook post, he plans to focus his efforts on five major areas in the next decade, in the hopes that by 2030 (a year whose significance to impending climate catastrophe goes unmentioned), his daughter will be attending high school, virtual reality tech will be really good and the average life expectancy will have increased by two and a half years.

Three of the five areas of focus are simply to continue working on Facebook’s major business aims (private messaging, e-commerce, and VR/AR); the personal challenge version of deciding that, screw the diet-book industrial complex, you’re beautiful just as you are. A fourth, entitled “New forms of governance” is to continue working on the “supreme court” of Facebook content moderation, another project already long in the works.

The fifth, which Zuckerberg entitled “generational change”, appears to encapsulate his desire to see more millennials take positions of power in institutions over the next decade. Considering that many millennials will be approaching their mid-40s by 2030, this is the equivalent of resolving to experience the passage of time.

So no, if you thought that Zuckerberg was going to spend the next decade grappling with the question of what Donald Trump, Narendra Modi and Rodrigo Duterte have in common, I’m sorry to disappoint you. Please join me instead in imagining Zuck in his bathroom, crooning to himself in the mirror: “You’re beautiful, you’re beautiful, you’re beautiful, it’s true.”

Zuckerberg’s decision to turn his attention away from the political problems his company has created was telegraphed throughout the week. A pair of policy announcements epitomized the new take-me-as-I-am attitude: Facebook will only attempt to police doctored video designed to misinform voters if the video is manipulated with AI tools, and it will not reverse its decision to allow politicians to advertise lies, nor will it implement any new restrictions on micro-targeting for political advertisements.

Meanwhile, the timely leak of a 2,500 word “memo” by Facebook executive and Zuckerberg “proxy” Andrew Bosworth provided the less-varnished-than-Zuck-can-be explanation for the policy decisions. In the extraordinary document, which Bosworth published to his internal Facebook page on 30 December, the executive who ran Facebook’s advertising business during the 2016 election asserted that the company was, in fact, the reason Trump won the US presidency.

It wasn’t a question of Russian interference or Cambridge Analytica, Bosworth said. “Parscale and Trump just did unbelievable work. They weren’t running misinformation or hoaxes. They weren’t microtargeting or saying different things to different people. They just used the tools we had to show the right creative to each person.”

From this basis, Bosworth draws the conclusion that it would be immoral to change any of Facebook’s rules to make it harder for Trump to win in 2020, a frankly astonishing feat of pseudo-intellectualized mental gymnastics.

Let’s just walk through this again. Bosworth is a self-declared liberal and “no fan of Trump” who believes Facebook’s tools were so powerful that they secured a long-shot victory for a presidential campaign that was principally animated by racist xenophobia. And in reflecting on the machine that made that extremely unlikely outcome possible, Bosworth concluded not that it should be dismantled or radically reformed, but that the only “moral” course of action was to leave it intact.

“If we change the outcomes without winning the minds of the people who will be ruled then we have a democracy in name only,” he added, in a chilling impersonation of Donald Rumsfeld expressing dangerously misplaced confidence about the invasion of Iraq.

If there is any good news to be found in this ideologically bankrupt morass, it is that finally, the mask has dropped. Facebook is done pretending to be a social good. It’s just sugar, Bosworth wrote. It tastes good; really, really good. And while it will eventually kill you, it will be a slow death.

What I’m reading …