Fire and smoke. Last Wednesday, America woke up to footage of Los Angeles’s once-idyllic Pacific Palisades in black and smoldering ruins, as the city began to grapple with the worst fire in its history. Almost immediately, the remaining vestiges of our de facto State press lifted their hands to the sky in despair and blamed global warming, as democratic politicians echoed the charge and demanded action (decarbonizing our entire planet) from Donald Trump (who would not be president for another two weeks). But on X, there was no hiding from the truth, and there will be no forgetting what we saw:

LA was a portrait of madness, as hundreds of thousands of people evacuated the city while suspected arsonists shuffled through the haunted hills and empty streets spreading fire, and roving gangs of looters picked apart abandoned homes. From the first deadly blaze, questions from the frontlines quickly rocketed back to social media, and spread: why were the fire hydrants running dry? Why did LA water chief Janisse Quiñones empty the Santa Ynez Reservoir? And why was she making $750,000 a year? Why was LA Mayor Karen Bass at a presidential inauguration in Ghana. Actually, why was the mayor of LA on a “diplomatic mission” to Africa at all? Why, in a city constantly on fire, did the mayor cut the fire department’s budget? And why had the state prohibited insurers from increasing rates as the risk of wildfire increased, which catalyzed a drop in coverage just before one of the worst fires in its history?

California is a one party state, so failure in California is perceived as an indictment of Democratic governance. This means wildfire discourse is pretty much toxic at the national level. Republicans are incentivized to highlight disaster in the state, Democrats are incentivized to obscure it, and nobody is incentivized to chart a course toward safety for the people of California. While inevitable, the discourse stalemate has nonetheless been frustrating.

I first wrote about California’s wildfires in the fall of 2020, and then again in 2021 in a piece called Global Warming Ate My Homework. In both pieces, I took apart the global warming smokescreen thrown up by local and state politicians, as well as our press. Wildfires, including megafires, have burned through California for thousands of years. But about a hundred years ago, the population of California exploded, which led to prevention of natural, wider-scale burns, as humans fought back against the regional phenomenon. Fuel has built up for decades because of this, and today the state’s at constant risk of burning.

There is no easy solution to this problem — the problem, let’s call it, of living in a place that tends to be on fire — though there are many strategies we should consider, from housing policy that encourages greater urban density away from the wilds to better resource management, to reservoirs, to new equipment. We are also living in the future, I’m told, and I wonder what new strategies in technology might be possible from tracking to fighting fire. Probably someone literally paid to pursue such things should do a little digging. But “decarbonizing our entire planet” is not a serious suggestion, not only because it is never going to happen, but because if it does happen California will still be at constant risk of massive deadly wildfire. We need a plan. I argued this for years.

Then, last week, I noticed something interesting: there was no longer anything really contrarian in what I was pointing out. Online, our wildfire discourse was radically different than it was in 2020, or 2021. Sure, press tactics hadn’t changed in those very early hours, but with a liberated Twitter in the form of Elon’s X, trending topics were no longer safely quarantining “conspiracy theories” such as ‘there are actual human beings in charge of our state infrastructure.’ And by the weekend, with millions of people demanding answers, even our press had to pivot from obfuscation to “fact checks.”

Now, there really is an art to good “fact checking,” one of the most popular and useful weapons in our sprawling information war. Generally, what you want to focus on is something categorically wrong, which by relation seems to disprove an entire class of thing you find uncomfortable. CNN produced a great example of the tactic early Monday morning. Meta fact checkers, they reported, “debunked” a post on looting. And from what I can tell, they were correct — the narrow example they “fact checked” was indeed wrong. But was looting, a problem barely discussed in the early days of the fire, while widely discussed online, a problem or not?

At the time of my writing, 29 looters have been arrested, with hundreds of looters reported. Generally speaking, it was and remains a huge, obvious problem, and any information system — of which, in this case, CNN is clearly a part — that not only prioritizes, but celebrates nitpicking over an open discourse that leads more generally to truth (and public safety) is a problem. Last week, as his army of pedantic, third-party schoolmarms set about their sacred censorship, Mark Zuckerberg agreed. Very clearly. Over and over and over again. The hall monitors were done.

In a baggy shirt and chain, and a freshly quaffed zoomer haircut (see: broccoli), America’s favorite boy boss casually announced a seismic policy shift across the Meta platforms.

Long story short, Meta’s fact-checking system, with Mark’s entire army of bobble-headed third-party fact checkers, is being replaced with an X-like Community Notes system; restrictions on topics like immigration and gender are being lifted in an effort to better align Meta’s platforms with mainstream discourse (topics including: women exist, borders should exist); and political posting will no longer be suppressed. In other words, not only are ‘blue-haired chick’ and ‘gingerbeard in trucker hat’ unshackled, they’re about to be encouraged.

On Bluesky, Zuckerberg’s policy changes were (of course) likened to “white supremacy” by the sort of mental patients once uncritically cited as “experts” by our tech press. And sure, we love to throw eggs at the crazy people who held us prisoner over the last few years. It’s funny when they claim their lives are in danger because people are shitposting on a platform where they do not themselves post, and it’s good to laugh at them. But Meta’s changes really are significant, and they were announced in a manner meant to make that clear.

Mark didn’t only change course on speech. He denounced fact checkers both specifically, in the case of their work at Meta, and conceptually. This was a return to the company’s founding values, he argued. The press, which has generally supported political censorship since Donald Trump’s first election, reacted in keeping with its anti-liberal values.

The Intercept’s Sam Biddle, who spent the early part of his career terrorizing young people in tech for the now defunct Gawker (EDITOR’S NOTE: which went out of business after Hulk Hogan sued the company for publishing, and then refusing to take down, a video of him having sex) produced the first “scoop,” which consisted of a list of (admittedly very) mean things people are now allowed to say on Facebook and Instagram, including for example “gays are freaks.” 404 Media followed with a “scoop” on Meta’s internal culture following Zuck’s announcements. It was “chaos,” they reported after speaking to five people.

Now, I’m not saying there weren’t any highlights in the coverage:

“I am LGBT and Mentally Ill,” one post by an employee on an internal Meta platform called Workplace reads. “Just to let you know that I’ll be taking time out to look after my mental health.”

But I spoke with a couple Meta employees myself. Scoop (in this economy, I guess): following Mark’s announcement, there were a couple hundred comments on an internal post upset about the policy. As of last week, not a single person had quit because of it. Meta employs 25,000 people.

More interesting, one executive I spoke with reminded me of what Facebook culture used to mean. In 2018, when Justice Kavanaugh was elected to the Supreme Court, a Meta employee — and one of Kavanaugh’s good friends — went to Washington to support him amidst the controversy surrounding his confirmation. This, according to the executive I spoke with, led to a full week of what might more properly be termed “chaos,” as thousands of comments lit up Meta’s internal message boards, which concluded in an employee walk-out. That executive’s name was Joel Kaplan. Mark just gave him a promotion. He is now the company’s president of global affairs, and nobody at the company seems to care. Which? Is kind of confusing at this point, as it’s starting to seem like Zuckerberg is actually trying to piss these people off.

A few days after his Instagram post, Meta ended its DEI programs, and Mark appeared on Rogan to (basically) apologize for all the censorship. While that was going viral, he removed tampons from the men’s bathroom at Meta HQ. It is difficult not to read this in the context of his comments on Rogan. “It’s one thing to say we want to be welcoming and make a good environment for everyone,” he said, “and I think it’s another to say ‘masculinity is bad,’ and I just think we kind of swung culturally to that part of the spectrum.”

From the speech policies and the eradication of DEI to Mark’s own identity, and his kind of brovolution, the question now is what’s real? Can Mark really be trusted not to censor speech after lording over a massive censorship regime for so many years? From the nascent tech right, as well as the aggressively politically moderate (but all of them anti-woke), I’ve noticed a lot of skepticism. There’s grace out there for normies, but Mark was more than a random guy in tech who went a little cuckoo for Kamala. He was in charge. He is culpable in the censorship that gripped our country for years. Now, here he is “blowing in the wind,” these former Biden voters argue.

I understand the skepticism. I even understand the anger. But I do not understand the notion men can’t change their opinion. Especially in tech. In this industry, there are exactly two men who are allowed to criticize Mark for “blowing in the wind.” The first is Palmer Luckey, who Mark fired because of Palmer’s private political donations — controversial, according to Facebook’s Stasi workforce. The second is Peter Thiel, who the industry ran out of San Francisco in 2016 for supporting Trump, the man many of these same people are now falling over themselves to praise. And neither Peter nor Palmer seem to care. For what it's worth, I also don’t care. In fact, I’m feeling hopeful. For any freedom-oriented individual, this is the appropriate reaction to one of the most powerful executives in the world telling you that you were right about everything, and that he is changing the rules of his platform in accordance with your values.

As I write, LA is still in the grips of wildfire, suffering from a catastrophe we are now discussing freely and honestly, at the scale of millions, for the first time maybe ever. And not just on X. The media’s reflexive opening bit of climate change obfuscation gave way first to “fact checks,” and then to further reporting. A week in, even the Times is responding to the national discussion with follow-on reporting covering most of the questions I asked at the top of this piece. This is healthy discourse, which I credit almost entirely to freer social media norms, and not only on X but across Meta’s platforms and YouTube, both of which drifted toward openness following Elon’s Twitter revolution. But all of it, every piece of this new, freer information ecosystem, began with Elon’s own change of heart. Which everyone who valued free speech embraced. Correctly.

I don’t believe Mark was held hostage by the crazy Bluesky people who used to run our country, but his company was certainly threatened by Biden’s thugs, the most authoritarian presidential administration in any of our lives, while his psychotic workforce demanded blood in the middle of a cultural revolution. That is a kind of pressure no venture capitalist now criticizing him has ever endured. Yes, I wish he exhibited more bravery in 2020. But no, I am not holding it against him now.

As Meta’s platforms enter further alignment with X on openness, social media will become majority free speech-oriented, and our information ecosystem will evolve into a state of endless conflict — media obfuscation, new media scrutiny for leadership, dishonest and honest “fact checks” alike, fact checks on “fact checks,” and all manner of truth in chorus with the fakest shit you’ve ever seen in your entire life. It will be chaos. This chaos will be preferable to authoritarianism. And anyway, the truth burns. There is no hiding from it anymore, and there is no safety for any fount of power once protected by the Thought Police. Today, for better and for worse, what people actually see and think will rise to the top of national discourse. The only question left is whether open conversation on issues pertaining to governance will give people cultural space to vote for different leaders. My sense is that it will, and on that day all the bullshit burns away.

May it burn in hell.

-SOLANA