Bluesky CEO Jay Graber found an intellligent way to put Mark Zuckerberg in his place.
Speaking at SXSW 2025, Graber appeared with her hair discreetly pulled back, dressed in black and wearing an oversized T-shirt, in what at first might have been interpreted as the typical strategy that, unfortunately, many female Silicon Valley executives employ: downplaying their feminine appearance.
Don’t worry, I have not become a fashion columnist, nor was the Bluesky CEO dressing down for no reason: her black T-shirt bore the Latin phrase, “Mundus sine caesaribus”, which translates as “A world without Caesars”. A direct response to a similar T-shirt worn by Mark Zuckerberg in September 2024 that read “Aut Zuck aut nihil”, a play on Julius Caesar’s phrase “Or Caesar, or nothing”.
Faced with a disgusting phony who runs his company like a dictator, running the world’s largest social networks without any kind of supervision, Graber offers another vision: open-source, decentralized, and user-governed.
Bluesky has been built to resist a takeover of the kind that has happened at Twitter. It is now clear that Elon Musk was not interested in turning the company around or protecting freedom of expression, and instead the move was about the transition into politics of a guy who, tired of playing with companies, now wanted to raise his game and play with countries. Or with the whole world.
Musk bought Twitter with loans he never intended to repay (in fact, the banks have already written them off as uncollectible and sold them as junk debt) so he could take over what is effectively the world’s largest media outlet, with huge reach.
Elon Musk’s unscrupulous move shows how little influence users have nowadays: the only option when faced with something as drastic as a guy arriving, buying the social network you once used and turning it into his personal message board, a cesspit rife with insults, racism and hate is to leave.
But how many people are going to leave the network that has become central to keeping in touch with the world? Are you going to move to other networks, experimental and untested, and start building your own network from scratch again? These two issues have protected Musk, who has perfectly calculated that only a few would ever abandon Twitter once it became X.
The model of the omnipotent CEO, carrying out their agenda unopposed as long as there is money to be made is the same one the Trumps, Mileis, Putins and other populists apply to politics: give me absolute power and you’ll see how well everything is going to turn out. After all, checks and balances are nothing more than the inertia of the system, what slows down change”.
When applied to electorates who have given up all hope, the recipe works wonders. After all, things couldn’t be any worse could they? Well, as we’re seeing, they certainly could, and will be.
The temptation to break the system, rather than trying to fix it, is an increasingly attractive proposition to many people, and comes down to one thing: we’re all on social networks, and thus subject to the tyranny of its two fundamental algorithms. The first algorithm simply tries to hook you in so that you spend as much time as possible on the internet and thus consume as many adverts as possible, and to do this it tries to give you more and more content that has previously made you react, that has led you not only to read, but ideally to like or even comment.
The second algorithm brings you together with others who apparently think like you, creating a hall of mirrors so that you don’t think you’re alone in the world or that you’re weird, and it makes you become more radical, because it rewards you when you do so with more exposure, more visibility, more likes and more “social prestige” within the group that has built you up.
All very primitive, sure, but it works. It works so well that now populists are calling for elections because they know they will be able to manipulate them at will thanks to these algorithms. The populism that claims only Trump, Milei, Putin and other wannabe dictators can save the country and change things works wonders and feeds on supposed parallels with business narratives: “you have to run the country like a company”.
Sorry, but that’s simply not true. Countries should not be run like companies (and I say this as someone who works at a business school and teaches people how to run companies). Instead, what we have to do is scrupulously respect the rules of democracy, react immediately when populists try to remove checks and balances, and act against fake strongmen who manipulate these rules to gain and maintain power.
A world without caesars, what a beautiful idea, and what a shame we are not mature enough to be able to put it into practice.
(En español, aquí)
And here’s a 16-minute, AI-generated podcast I created to illustrate the points I made in this article in a different format,
A world without Caesars: why do we put up with dictators? by Enrique Dans for dummies
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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.
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