WIRED Roundup: Fandom in Politics, Zuckerberg’s Illegal School, and Nepal’s Discord Revolution

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In today’s episode, host Zoë Schiffer is joined by senior politics editor Leah Feiger to discuss the top stories you need to know about this week—from Mark Zuckerberg’s illegal school to the repercussions behind the recent pardoning of Changpeng Zhao, Binance’s ex-CEO. Then, Zoë and Leah discuss how fandom on the internet played a key role in this year’s US election results.

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You can follow Zoë Schiffer on Bluesky at @zoeschiffer and Leah Feiger on Bluesky at @leahfeiger. Write to us at [email protected].

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Transcript

Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.

Zoë Schiffer: Welcome to WIRED's Uncanny Valley. I'm WIRED's director of business and industry, Zoë Schiffer. Today on the show, we're bringing you the top stories that you need to know about this week, including how the Democrats fared much better than anyone expected in this week's elections, and how some of those victories show the power of online fandom. I'm joined today by our senior politics editor, Leah Feiger.

Leah Feiger: Hey, Zoë. Great to be here.

Zoë Schiffer: Leah, our first story this week is one that will really make your head spin, and it's about how Mark Zuckerberg opened an illegal school at his Palo Alto compound.

Leah Feiger: Zoë, I am obsessed with this story. Before you continue, I think that it's really important to say that Caroline, the lovely reporter of this story on your business desk, obtained 1,665 pages of documents about the dispute about Zuckerberg's house. This story is canon now.

Zoë Schiffer: Caroline Haskins is a complete star. Our fact-checking team literally cried when I asked them. They were like, "Wait, sorry, how many documents are we looking through?" I was like, "Yes."

Leah Feiger: Shout out to the WIRED research team.

Zoë Schiffer: Absolutely. The school, I think we just have to say, is named after one of the Zuckerberg family chickens. It's called the Bicken Ben School.

Leah Feiger: I mean, hearing you say this, it's, I know you're being serious, but again.

Zoë Schiffer: So, the Crescent City neighborhood in Palo Alto, where the Zuckerbergs live, as you can imagine, is some of the best real estate in the entire country. It's filled with these gorgeous homes, a ton of greenery. Mark Zuckerberg has been expanding his presence throughout the years in this ultra fancy neighborhood. The plot of land that the Zuckerbergs live on has expanded to include 11 previously separate properties. This is so funny and just such a nightmare. If you're living on the street, you paid whatever, $5 million for your house, and suddenly all of your neighbors are Mark Zuckerberg.

Leah Feiger: Important to note that not all of them are connecting either. I don't totally understand what that means. Do they walk through a neighbor's porch to get to their horse's pool? What does this entail?

Zoë Schiffer: We have more questions. We have to Google Earth this. I think there's some holes in this story that we need to fill in. The expansion first became a concern for Mark Zuckerberg's neighbors, back in 2016, due to fears that his purchases were driving up the market pretty dramatically. But then, about five years later, neighbors started noticing that a school appeared to be operating out of the Zuckerberg compound. So, this is illegal to do without a permit, at least under the area's residential zoning code. And so, naturally, the neighbors started to alert the city. Caroline Haskins, the reporter on the story, obtained over a thousand documents, like you said, outlining the resulting fight between the neighbors and the city authorities, basically arguing that, it felt to them like the Zuckerbergs were getting special treatment.

Leah Feiger: The existence of this school was known, but Caroline's reporting reveals two really key things. First, how long the school might've actually been operating, right? I mean, records by the California Department of Education directory claimed that the school opened in October 2022. However, as Caroline found, neighbors claimed that this is a year after they first saw it begin its operations. It's also two and a half years after the head of the school posted on her LinkedIn about this new role. There's so many confusing different things.

And second, the other really key part, is that it shows a pattern, right? For almost a decade, Zuckerberg's neighbors have been complaining to the city about noisy construction work, this intrusive security presence, the hordes of staffers, business associates, I mean, it's Mark Zuckerberg, he has an entourage. They cause traffic, they take up parking, that sweet, sweet street parking in Crescent Park.

Zoë Schiffer: Right. I know. I was like, I really fail to imagine that anyone who has a house on the street needs street parking. But like ...

Leah Feiger: I will say that did stick out to me, which just shows that I live in New York. I will literally be walking in a neighborhood that is not my neighborhood and go, Ooh, great parking spot. Hope someone really gets that too.

Zoë Schiffer: Absolutely. I mean, apparently the Palo Alto neighbors feel the same. The documents paint a picture of years of the neighbors actively complaining, and some of them claiming that city officials were giving preferential treatment to those Zuckerbergs, because their complaints weren't being addressed very quickly or very effectively in their view. There's instances of the neighbors reaching out directly to the Zuckerberg family office too, asking them to address the same issues. One of these messages to the family reads, to please, quote, "Ideally, stop, or at a minimum, give us an extended break from the acquisition, demolition, and construction cycle, to let the neighborhood recover from the last eight years of disruption."

Leah Feiger: Oh my God.

Zoë Schiffer: I know.

Leah Feiger: Unreal. All you wanted was to just live in Palo Alto and enjoy your life. And instead, you were Mark Zuckerberg's neighbor.

Zoë Schiffer: Moving on to our next story. Last month, news broke of President Trump pardoning CZ, the multi-billionaire founder of the Crypto Exchange, Binance. In 2023, CZ had pled guilty to willfully failing to implement measures against money laundering and violating US sanctions at his business. Back then, he'd agreed to forfeit his role as Binance's CEO and Binance agreed to leave the US and pay a record $4.3 billion penalty.

But it seems that CZ's reputation is going through a bit of a makeover in Trump's second term in the White House. In last month's pardoning, the Trump administration claimed that CZ had been a victim of the Biden administration's war on crypto. His pardon was, as you can imagine, hotly debated on the merits, but our colleague, Joel Khalili says that, more than that, the pardoning carries conflicts of interests and potential long-term consequences for how the crypto industry goes about regulation. Leah, I'm honestly curious how you feel. I mean, we know how you feel about AI. How do you feel about crypto?

Leah Feiger: Oh my God, no one's asked me this in at least two years. I love this question. WIRED has an unbelievable reporter on crypto. Like you mentioned Joel, everyone should really go back and look at his just archive of incredible crypto reporting and specifically his reporting on the many conflicts of interest between crypto, the crypto industry, and President Donald Trump. There's some key figures that pop up a lot. Obviously, CZ is a big one, but you also have the Winklevii, right? Who have appeared at many a Trump family event, donating money to the ballrooms and other endeavors, and are also the arguably original crypto bros.

The conflicts of interest in this pardon are really, really wild between Binance and World Liberty Financial, the crypto business that's owned by Trump and his sons. Binance agreed in May to receive a $2 billion investment from a coin denominated in USD one, a coin issued by World Liberty Financial, which would earn tens of millions of dollars in this arrangement. So, clearly there are some messy, messy bits of this, but the thing that I keep coming back to, that I'm sure you do too, is that Trump gave this pardon without actually knowing who CZ is?

But literally when he was asked by an interviewer ... And by interviewer, I mean, literally his 60 minutes interview that aired on November 2nd, he goes, "Oh, OK. Are you ready? I don't know who he is. I can only tell you this. My sons are into Crypto."

Zoë Schiffer: Yes.

Leah Feiger: What?

Zoë Schiffer: I know.

Leah Feiger: Zoë, what?

Zoë Schiffer: I mean, I think there's something kind of sweet that we're still getting shocked. Some people are getting enraged by what looks like obvious self-dealing, what looks like obvious conflict of interest. I mean, my view is, this is at least a large reason why Trump is back in the White House under the Biden administration. It was hard to pay to play, and the tech industry did not like that. They felt like, if you talked to a lot of tech CEOs, they were going out on a limb. They were giving money, resources, support to the Biden administration, and what did they get in return? They got a really hostile, in their view, FTC. They got slaps on the wrist. They got Biden coming out and saying, in some cases, implying that they had blood on their hands for various actions. They did not feel like there was anything to be gained from continuing to support Democrats. Whereas Republicans, it felt like, at least you know what you were going to get. If you support Trump, you can expect to get a little kickback in return.

Leah Feiger: Absolutely. And on his end, Joel seemed to have changed his ex bio from ex-Binance to just Binance.

Zoë Schiffer: And the crypto industry. For what it's worth, obviously, I think overall based on Joel's reporting, really appreciates Trump's support. At the same time, Binance not being in the United States was positive for a lot of their businesses. So, the fact that Binance could now be coming back, is kind of sending people into turmoil, trying to figure out what's the strategy. If this major crypto exchange relaunches, competition spikes, what do we do? And worth pointing out, Binance and CZ did not respond to WIRED's request for comment on this story.

Our next story takes us all the way to Nepal. WIRED gave us the inside scoop on how Gen Z essentially toppled Nepal's leader and chose a new one through Discord. This is how it went down. This past summer, some young Nepalese social media users started seeing reels shining the light on the country's Nepo babies. These videos showed the luxury cars and designer clothes owned by the country's elite, which was quite a contrast to the life of most Nepalese citizens.

As those flurry of videos kept growing, the tone behind them also shifted, from just showing the luxury goods to criticizing corruption and inequality in the country. At the beginning of September, the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology ordered internet service providers to block access to 26 social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, X, and YouTube. Ostensibly because the companies had failed to register with the government, as required by a Supreme Court directive. But to many young people in the country, the timing was just a little too convenient. So, the reason rang completely hollow.

VPN downloads surged and in the next few weeks, the digital defiance from these videos translated into street protests. This is where Discord servers became the main form of communication for protestors to coordinate and protect each other. Unfortunately, the protests would ultimately leave at least 72 people dead, and over 1000 people injured nationwide, making it the deadliest unrest in Nepal's recent history. The protests kept going though, and eventually 10 of the Gen Z activists who'd participated, were invited to sit down with members of Nepal's military to basically decide how to move forward.

Leah Feiger: It's incredible. This entire story, which has been unfolding, as you said, Zoë, for quite some time, is just such a testament to the way that social media is not only utilized these days as communications around the world and various protest movements, but literally as this deciding force. This is real life right now. Like watching people on Discord actually vote in this way, is a pretty unbelievable part of this article. Quite literally, it was through Discord that young Nepalese decided on who would be the next leader. One quote from the article that I will never get out of my head is, "Please decide on a representative right now. We do not have time."

It was such an interesting look at where there are crackdowns on different ways to communicate, and obviously we've seen this over the last few decades. Twitter, pre-Elon Musk, was a very, very specific place for organizing and information. I'm thinking of Nigeria, I'm thinking of Egypt. This has been consistent. And this article, I think took that and threw it even further. And obviously there's a lot that's happening right now in this space, with young Gen Z activists utilizing socials in this way. We look at Kenya, we look at Mozambique, we look at Madagascar. This is really happening across the board.

Zoë Schiffer: The parallels with the 2011 Arab Spring really stuck out to me. I remember Twitter's offices in those days, if you would walk in the front door, they would have papers spread out talking about the Twitter revolution. And that's really how social media saw itself. It saw itself as a tool for empowering democracy around the world, in a lot of places. That narrative has really died down, it feels like, but we could see in kind of this Discord story, that young people were saying, the tools available to us are not adequate, and so we're going to use these online tools to build our own. Coming up after the break, we'll dive into how this week's election results were a win for Democrats, not just electorally, but also online.

Welcome back to Uncanny Valley. I'm Zoë Schiffer. And joined today by senior politics editor, Leah Feiger. OK, Leah, let's dive into our main story. Election day this week ended up delivering key wins for Democrats in New York, New Jersey, Virginia, and California. Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger won the governorships of New Jersey and Virginia. Zohran Mamdani skated his way to becoming mayor of New York City and California voters said yes to Proposition 50, which will allow state legislators to redistrict before the midterm elections, in an effort to counter GOP-led gerrymandering in other states. So, obviously, Leah, you have been paying very special attention to what's going on here. I know you've had an incredibly busy week. Just high level, what has been your main takeaway?

Leah Feiger: As bad as some Democrats are at campaigning, the Republicans are worse. We're in a very particular moment right now. I think obviously the story of this election cycle is Mamdani. This was an absolutely unbelievable campaign from start to finish, that democratic institutions did not support, that Democratic leadership did not support, until, quote unquote, "The very end" and in a very lukewarm fashion. And yet, this was the campaign that won, that the people wanted.

Makena Kelly had a fantastic article up about how Mamdani's campaign really figured out how to channel fandom, this idea that has been around for a while. You have your Taylor Swift fandom, you have your Beyonce fandom, and you have your Zohran fandom. The clips of him on social media that were in everyone's feeds were not just from his campaign. They were not very canned DNC responses featuring some kind of lame music and memes that already feel dated. These were fans that were recreating videos and making homages. This was something that we haven't actually seen in a very long time. Not to mention just the network of volunteers, and they brought together everyone in person. So, this was pretty incredible.

Zoë Schiffer: Right. OK. But I have a question for you because obviously this man is good at social media. I think we can just say that, but how much of being good at social media is also having an outsider campaign? Because I feel like that's the narrative that Democrats have lost as of late. They're the establishment now, they're the ones that have been in power, they're protecting and championing our institutions. And Republicans have felt like they're the outsiders. They're the ones trying to change things up. So, I guess I'm curious, how big a factor do you think that was in Mamdani's success?

Leah Feiger: We can't count that out. This was someone who did not have the buy-in of the Democratic institution, which a lot of people looked at from within the institution as a serious negative. Democrats aren't polling well.

This has been a pretty mind-bendingly difficult year for this party not in power. And so, to have someone that's an outsider, that's saying, I actually want to fix this, I want to do this better. I think that can only help in this situation. And to then pack that in with an incredible team of volunteers, a social plan and a very progressive platform, like a really, really progressive platform. There was an essay that I can't stop thinking about, that was written by a Breitbart author. And Breitbart has done many things, and I read them, but I am not, I would say, their number one fan or supporter, bluntly. But this article did an unbelievable job of capturing what, in some ways, a new left looks like. Is that it's not just college educated white people in Park Slope that are saying, yeah, support the underclass.

The dynamic has shifted. It's that people no longer have the purchasing power that they were told they were going to. These are college educated people in Park Slope, who can't afford to buy a home. And in fact, what this article is saying is, Republicans have to be on the lookout for this. What so many people want right now, in his mind and in this essay, are actually very conservative values of like, I want to have a home and I want to have a yard and good school for my kids and safety and all these things.

And obviously, I would argue that both parties to a certain extent try to pitch that sale to their constituents, but he does a very good job of saying, if we do not understand that that's actually how Mamdani helped build this groundswell in New York, by saying, yeah, prices are too high, and having your Bowdoin educated, Harvard educated graduates in Park Slope going, yeah, what did I do this all for? That they might not be in as bad of a position as a neighbor in a different borough, but they are still not where they want to be.

Zoë Schiffer: Right.

Leah Feiger: So, in some ways, the Democrats lucked into that on messaging, but then you have other races like New Jersey was a bit of a shock. Dems were saying that Cheryl was running this terrible campaign and she crushed it. She really crushed it. It made me very eager to get into midterms coverage, Zoë.

Zoë Schiffer: I'm happy to hear you say that, because we both know that midterms are going to be your entire life, very, very soon. I want to touch on one more aspect of this story, which is that, our colleague, David Gilbert, reported on how MAGA influencers, Republican lawmakers and conspiracy theorists, have all responded to Mamdani's mayoral victory in New York City, by pushing far right anti-immigration and Islamophobic rhetoric and claiming the city had essentially fallen. So, Tell us about that. This is rhetoric that had been coming for quite some time. I mean, this was the entire campaign, right? This was basically what Cuomo had been pushing as well. If you go with the other guy, you're screwed. New York is done. It's all over. So, I did anticipate, we all anticipated the absolute freak out that was going to come.

It was so racist, so full of conspiracy theories, so full of anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim sentiments. I mean, it really was just exactly what you thought it was going to be and worse, right wing podcaster. Matt Walsh is just saying, "A third world communist won in New York, because New York is a third world city right now." I don't know. I live in New York, I think it's fine. We're going to see how everything plays out, and a new mayor and a new team is always a shakeup for a city. But Steve Bannon is going like, ugh, Jihadi, Marxist Bolshevik.

Leah Feiger: Oh my God, they're so triggered.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah.

Leah Feiger: They're so hysterical and they're so triggered.

Zoë Schiffer: It was really interesting. And I mean, there were some threatening undertones, if I can say that. Look, Stephen Miller, the White House deputy Chief of Staff for policy, and also the architect of the Trump administration's hardline immigration policy, didn't add commentary right after Mamdani won, but did post a screenshot on X from a 2023 report pulled from the nyc.gov website that showed that around 50 percent of New York's households contain at least one immigrant. It was elucidating to see, and I really think that come January, February, March, we're going to be having some probably pretty serious conversations about some of this and how it plays out.

Leah, I feel like that's a good place to end. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Leah Feiger: Thanks so much for having me, Zoë.

Zoë Schiffer: That's our show for today. We'll link to all the stories we spoke about in the show notes. Make sure to check out Thursday's episode of Uncanny Valley, which is about the four criteria that some researchers have used to accurately predict tech bubbles and what they think applies to the current AI landscape. Adriana Tapia and Mark Leyda produced this episode. Amar Lal at Macro Sound, mixed this episode. Kate Osborn is our executive producer. Condé Nast, Head of Global Audio, is Chris Bannon. And Katie Drummond is WIRED's Global Editorial Director.

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