The trial between the US Federal Trade Commission and Meta began this week'and the future of the company is at stake. The FTC wants Meta to sell off two prized assets, Instagram and WhatsApp, arguing that it acquired them illegally to suppress competition. Today on the show, senior writer Paresh Dave joins host Zoe Schiffer to discuss what we know right now about the government's case'and what we learned when Mark Zuckerberg took the stand Monday. Zoe Schiffer: Welcome to WIRED's Uncanny Valley. I'm WIRED's director of business and industry, Zoe Schiffer. Today on the show, we're talking about the FTC versus Meta trial. The US Federal Trade Commission is alleging that Meta illegally acquired Instagram and WhatsApp in an effort to suppress competition, and it wants to force Meta to spin off those assets into separate entities. Yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg took the stand to defend his company. We're going to get into it today. I'm joined by Paresh Dave, senior writer at WIRED, to talk about the trial. Paresh, welcome to Uncanny Valley....

Whether it was the stock market cascading downward, investors fleeing from U.S. Treasury bonds, Republican donors jamming the White House phones, or even fears for his own portfolio, President Donald Trump decided yesterday afternoon to lift, temporarily, most of his arbitrary tariffs. This was his personal decision. His 'instinct,' as he put it. His whim. And his decision, instinct, or whim could bring the tariffs back again. The Republicans who lead Congress have refused to use the power of the legislative branch to stop him or moderate him, in this or almost any other matter. The Cabinet is composed of sycophants and loyalists who are willing to defend contradictory policies, even if doing so makes them look like fools. The courts haven't decisively intervened yet either. No one, apparently, is willing to prevent a single man from destroying the world economy, wrecking financial markets, forcing this country and other countries into recession if that's what he feels like doing when he gets up tomorrow morning....

Trump's second term is the beginning of the end of the American empire, including the Western geopolitical order fashioned by US power after the Second World War. But in the ashes of this decline, a liminal space is emerging for a new system. In 2016, a futurist and doyen of peace studies who had predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union told me he had used the same framework to pinpoint the coming collapse of the United States. The late Johan Galtung, a renowned Nobel Prize-nominated sociologist, had made his original prediction of US collapse in the year 2000. The process would start, he warned, in 2025. It's now 2025, and the fulcrum of American collapse can be found at the seat of the US federal government under a second Trump administration. Nearly a decade ago, Galtung had said that he saw Trump as an accelerant of American collapse at the beginning of his first term. Now under his second term, Galtung's extraordinary prescience is on display again as we see a second Trump administration tear apart the fabric of the US government, democratic checks and balances, and the rule of law. Galtung had warned that as American power retracts globally, this could end up reflecting internally ' even resulting in the potential breakup of the US....