The recent spate of social media magnates making truly awful decisions in order to pander to the incoming Trump regime has been horrifying to watch. From Zuckerberg and the fact that he's turned Meta platforms into outlets for far-right propaganda, misinformation and harassment, to Paul Graham's execrable "wokeness" essay (publishing it just before Trump's inauguration says more about him than the contents of the essay ever could), to basically everything Elon Musk does, these men have abased themselves and condemned so many people to horrific fates. My first instinct, when I read about this, was basically "these are fucking ghouls", and while at the time this was just a casual thought, on consideration, it might be more than just that.
It's a well-known principle in the academic study of horror literature that horror stories reflect the anxieties of the society that creates them. Vampires reflect the seductive and rapacious nature of aristocracy and power: the vampire drains the blood of the common folk, but still represents a seductive, aspirational life that it's our duty to reject. Werewolves reflect the perceived bestial, uncontrolled and dangerous nature of the lower classes, and zombies? Well, they're very much a reflection of elite fear about what might happen when the working classes actually rise up and express their discontent. So, what might the ghoul represent?
The ghoul in Arabic folklore is a spirit or demon heavily associated with graveyards, death and the consumption of human flesh. Ghouls lure unwary people into the desert or into abandoned places, killing and eating them and taking the form of the person they've most recently eaten. They prey on children and the vulnerable, take the shape of attractive women or loved ones to lure in unsuspecting victims and drink blood. While their depiction in popular culture is more varied, the motif of eating flesh, trickery, forbidden hunger and desecration is consistent through almost all of them. Ghouls are, in short, the monsters that trick you, that lie to you and that then kill you and eat your corpse.
Does that sound familiar, Mark?
Mark Zuckerberg is personally responsible for the genocide of the Rohingya people in Myanmar: he did this because he wanted money (while already being richer than God) and had no care for any of the people impacted by what he did. He lured vulnerable people into addictive platforms full of misinformation, causing young women to starve themselves to death in pursuit of unrealistic body images. He caused a large part of the older population to become consumed by hate and lies, and he had a large part to play in the election of a fascist to the highest office in the USA. He wants to let queer people and minorities get torn apart by bigots on his platforms, and finally, the new AI profiles he's pioneering can only be interpreted as false faces, meant to draw people into what is by now an abandoned and blasted wasteland. The ghoul metaphor fits excruciatingly well.
Zuckerberg and all the others are driven by a deep, forbidden hunger for money and power. This impulse consumes them: they want nothing else but to be rich, powerful, adulated and above everyone else, and they will do anything to get that, no matter how vile or contrary to basic morals it is. Their hunger blinds them to any other kind of value or beauty or truth or anything, really, and so, they deceive, they kill and they desecrate. And so, they wind up making wherever they are a wasteland or a charnel house.
The traditional way to ward off ghouls was to recite the Throne verse from the Quran. Unfortunately, I don't think that this is going to work on these ones. If anyone knows how to ward off Mark Zuckerberg, please let me know: I don't want my flesh to be eaten.