Tonight I went to the Acquired podcast live show. Acquired’s tagline is “Every company has a story: Learn the playbooks that built the world’s greatest companies — and how you can apply them as a founder, operator, or investor.”

The show opened with a shticky video feed showing the two hosts, Ben and David, backstage. Ben had forgotten to bring the mp3 of the theme song to kick off the night. He assuaged David, “the people here at the Chase Center are really great, I’m sure they’ll figure something out.”

Just then, Mike Taylor, the artist who sings their theme song “Who Got The Truth”, burst into the spotlight playing with his band. The band was vibing well, clearly grooving and shooting each other satisfied smiles. This performance was, unfortunately, one of the sole displays of what might be called human affect this evening.

As the theme song closed, the hosts Ben and David came onto the stage. They fumbled through some opening comments (they are not very funny and were not able to reach the crowd) and threw up a blooper reel from their podcast recording sessions on the Jumbotron. The response from the crowd was muted.

Finally then, we were graced with our first holy personage of the evening, albeit virtually: Jamie Dimon, CEO of Chase appeared on the Jumbotron to talk about the importance of Chase’s payments business and to congratulate the Acquired boys on all their good work. This was not the last “embedded advertisement” for Chase.

After that, we were treated to a holy personage in the flesh: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek, who had flown in from Sweden for 1 day to do 20 minutes for the podcast live show. Spotify is, as we were reminded in Ek’s interview, the number 1 platform in the world for podcasts, so the choice of guest was appropriate. In true tech industry fashion, the interview opened with a slideshow of exponential graphs. There were 3 subsequent slides showing slightly different graphs of the exponential increase in Acquired’s listenership over time.

This was when I began vaguely to grasp the true meaning of the evening: a glorification of the hole at the center of capitalism. This hole is in the psychic architecture of the executors of capital: a bottomless desire which can never be fulfilled, because it refers to nothing.

When the hosts implied that “social” was no longer important for Spotify, he quickly refuted them, saying that their new “Jam” feature is “growing incredibly rapidly.”

He did say something interesting, which was that they have been very cautious in creating new features and products, and only do so when they are replicating a use-case that customers are already doing in a hacky way. For example, he said in Germany people were uploading audiobooks as if they were music, and it was so popular that they became the biggest book distributor in Germany (again the obsession with growth). It was only then they decided to make audiobooks an official feature with an improved user experience.

Next we had a forgettable conversation with Emily Chang, a TV reporter for Bloomberg. The highlight was when they discussed what Taylor Swift’s market-cap should be if you take into account her future earnings potential.

This was followed by advertisement disguised as a show segment when the “co-heads” of JP Morgan Payments (the main sponsor of Acquired) came out to give a little speech. Again more glorification of growth and bigness: “1 in 4 dollars is exchanged using our platform”, etc.

After the spon-con we had a 15 minute intermission during which Mike Taylor and the band took the stage again. Taylor tried in vain to hype up the audience (“come on San Francisco!") who even at full attention were pretty sedate, and presently were mostly making their way to the bathroom and to buy $15 slices of pizza.

Intermission ended and finally the awaited time had come. The Jumbotron announced the guest, not just any personage but the damn pope himself: Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg was dressed in a ridiculous drop-shoulder T-shirt with Greek lettering on it. We later learned it was designed in collaboration with “one of the greatest designers in the world” (whose name I sadly did not write down), and the Greek was the phrase “pathe mathos” (which means “learning through suffering” according to Zuckerberg.)

His curls were luscious as ever. Zuckerberg is clearly really into the metaverse. One of the hosts brought out his Meta x Ray-Ban smart-glasses which I had heard of but forgotten to curry favor. Mark went on a long tear about how they are building a new platform from the ground up, one which will truly be appropriate to their mission as a “human connection company” free from the shackles of phones (coincidentally owned by his competitors) which he trashed as trapping people and not allowing them to express their full humanity. To him, it was clear the correct device for commodifying social interaction needs to be something that can capture (sic) the full range of human capacity in the real world.

For him, that was obviously going to be glasses. He told vaguely but proudly of how we would all be wearing glasses, and maybe through these we would see an embodied AI guy next to us also in our conversation. Exactly what would be shown on these glasses otherwise was not clear. But, he reminded us, even if we only get as customers all the current glasses-wearers, that would already be a huge market. But, he said, he thinks it will be even bigger than that.

All joking aside, I do think the vision he very vaguely articulated, of a wearable device that will “see what you see, hear what you hear” is deeply troubling. Phones represent a catastrophic apparatus of libidinal regulation and surveillance that militate strongly against revolutionary, or even just social action. A pair of glasses that can project images directly into your perception and relay your gaze directly to the NSA is a terrifying prospect on both fronts.

One of the hosts, Ben, challenged Mark’s commitment of billions of dollars to the metaverse project which still has not yielded much. Mark replied it was sure it was the correct path and he could not be stopped: that if someone put a wall in front of him pretty soon there would be a Mark-shaped hole in it.

Later, we got another “tough” question from one of the hosts: “which of the criticisms that you’ve received over the years do you think was the most legitimate?” Mark started out politic, saying many of the criticisms they received were totally spot-on and they’ve learned from them. He said, though, that in 2016, when many were criticizing Facebook’s role in spreading misinformation, that “we should have pushed back harder on allegations people make about our role in creating problems.” In other words, he regretted that he had made the fatal mistake of listening to the haters.

I will finish with an anecdote Mark told about his daughter (7):

Recently we were at a Taylor Swift concert together and my daughter said, “I wanna be like Taylor Swift when I grow up.” I told her, “you can’t, that option is not available to you.” [pause for laughter] She thought about this, and then said “I want people to want to be like August Chan Zuckerberg”, and I was like “hell yeah.”