The split title of this blog is a perfect comment on my reaction to Zuck's infantile and insulting presentation. A frat boy who started Facebook as an app for ranking attractive women among his friends is not remotely a visionary in the class of Jobs, or Musk. His presentation was a complete embarrassment but he doesn't have the social intelligence to know that. The animation was at least a decade behind the times, more befitting a child's game.
You may want to investigate just who Nedd Ludd was and why his followers were willing to die for their cause. You just might find you'd be proud to be tagged as a Luddite
Yes, messy and demanding. Real life, I mean. Too much for a Second Life? Whoa. Isn't there already one of those that had its moment when you could create a buff avatar and buy 'real' estate in a virtual world. Forget about visiting the virtual Sistine Chapel and hovering inches away from God creating Adam when you can go to a Best Buy or a Target and buy stuff for . . . Oh, who cares. Just buy stuff.
Anyone ask Phillip Rosedale his plan to challenge Zuck's plan for world domination?
Or will real life be more like Ready Player One? Meta is soooo much bette.
Remember when I called you and you said you were busy and I called you again and you got really angry? Think this was in 2004. You don't? Well, don't mean to steam your clams dude, but that "remember" phrase thing is lazy writing. Don't do this...
I think (as a PR consultant for money as well as a born again sceptic of orthodoxy) that the most revealing strand in this piece is the 'read the room' reference. The assumption that *our* bubble is the room.
It's only a pro guess, but I sense that FB went ahead with its Meta launch without worrying about all the bad mojo because it knows most of the world is fairly unmoved by the FB Files hype.
Two things this made me think of: 1) SecondLife. Remember that? and 2) William Gibson's "Burning Chrome" -- "The street finds its own uses for things."
"It reads to me like a declaration that the company can and will act with impunity. Here’s a company marching forward and optimistically into the future and ignoring the smoldering mess it made in the background. "
Exactly. All future messes will be dealt with like all past messes, by deploying the familiar, soul-baffling, corporate drone-speak. All messes are externalities to be obscured and offloaded via same. This predictable paradigm is written right into our societal source code, before MetaFace or whatever it is even existed.
That said - also not a Luddite - there are forms of a metaverse I would find thrilling. I just don't think Facebook is capable of building that form, given the undemocratic nature of their core business model. Other than in scale and technical features, I can't think of the metaverse as much more than the latest attempt to build a walled garden, like AOL in the 1990's but with much better graphics and portable walls.
I take a broader view. I'm less concerned with the ramifications of a Facebook-led metaverse, the particular technology, than with technology itself as an ideology.
I'm the Generation Xer who can remember a life pre-internet and life post-internet, the current state of affairs. As one of the pioneers, who dove in headfirst on the internet as a life-changing force for good, I've come to understand the internet as what happens when it transcends from becoming a thing into an ideology.
This is true of the internet, especially, but technology in general: You have eight months of utopia, but September is eternal.
I was amused when I learned about what "Eternal September" was (i.e., September 1993 was when AOL made Usenet access available to its large base of 30-day-free-trial clientele, and newsgroups turned into a zoo with the cage latches unlocked). It's a pithy, humorous observation. It's also pregnant with a dark truth.
Positive experiences with technology reach a tipping point at scale. Technology overshoots the scale and negative experiences begin to accumulate. Negative interactions cannot be fixed by the people, their thinking and their behaviors that created the problem in the first place. The community must collapse on its own (see Citizens Band or any popular music fad) or be supplanted by a competitor that repeats the problem at much larger scale.
I think it's simpler than that. Current consumer tech is awful. But it didn't have to be, these unaccountable companies made it that way. The issue is also to do with tech "journalism" which is actually just PR. Journalists are supposed to be skeptical, ask difficult questions. Not hype mongers. The default position towards new tech, new platforms, should be assuming it will be awful on every level, and most likely never work the way it's described in its promos.
Yep I agree with all of this, it brings it into a very sharp perspective. I'm not all that bothered by AR and VR either.... the world has bigger challenges to solve!
I very much dislike Facebook and Zuckerberg, but based on my experimentation with Quest 2 recently, I think there is enormous, *enormous* opportunity there. Maybe Meta will screw it up, or maybe a better platform will emerge that turns Meta into the MySpace of VR -- that would be great, actually -- but I also see all kinds of prosocial applications of the technology.
One of the most underrated aspects of VR is that you can't easily alt-tab between applications, at least not in the current iterations.
Oh and I'm old enough to remember when the iPad name was mocked for sounding like a futuristic tampon. I even remember when tech pundits predicted Amazon would fail because the domain books.com was already in use.
Oh dear that was supposed to say I am a genuine brain damaged writer with a genuine brain damaged substack which likely makes it one of a kind. I will be very grateful if you choose to take a look.
I love your non headline. I am a genuine brain games brighter with a genuine brain damage substaff and the genuine brain damaged book that hasn't been published for lack of a genuine agent. I lost my former agents when I was hit by a drunk with a truck. Please take a look at my work and consider sharing it. I think you might like it. Plus it seems to me to fit well in the galaxy of brains.
That headline just snared you yet another paid subscriber!
Well worth the subs!
The split title of this blog is a perfect comment on my reaction to Zuck's infantile and insulting presentation. A frat boy who started Facebook as an app for ranking attractive women among his friends is not remotely a visionary in the class of Jobs, or Musk. His presentation was a complete embarrassment but he doesn't have the social intelligence to know that. The animation was at least a decade behind the times, more befitting a child's game.
You may want to investigate just who Nedd Ludd was and why his followers were willing to die for their cause. You just might find you'd be proud to be tagged as a Luddite
Yes, messy and demanding. Real life, I mean. Too much for a Second Life? Whoa. Isn't there already one of those that had its moment when you could create a buff avatar and buy 'real' estate in a virtual world. Forget about visiting the virtual Sistine Chapel and hovering inches away from God creating Adam when you can go to a Best Buy or a Target and buy stuff for . . . Oh, who cares. Just buy stuff.
Anyone ask Phillip Rosedale his plan to challenge Zuck's plan for world domination?
Or will real life be more like Ready Player One? Meta is soooo much bette.
Spot on
Remember when I called you and you said you were busy and I called you again and you got really angry? Think this was in 2004. You don't? Well, don't mean to steam your clams dude, but that "remember" phrase thing is lazy writing. Don't do this...
Lols, 1 Hacker Way.
Super well-articulated. Sigh. Mark Zuckerberg needs to go to a silent retreat, stat.
Really on point
I think (as a PR consultant for money as well as a born again sceptic of orthodoxy) that the most revealing strand in this piece is the 'read the room' reference. The assumption that *our* bubble is the room.
It's only a pro guess, but I sense that FB went ahead with its Meta launch without worrying about all the bad mojo because it knows most of the world is fairly unmoved by the FB Files hype.
Two things this made me think of: 1) SecondLife. Remember that? and 2) William Gibson's "Burning Chrome" -- "The street finds its own uses for things."
"It reads to me like a declaration that the company can and will act with impunity. Here’s a company marching forward and optimistically into the future and ignoring the smoldering mess it made in the background. "
Exactly. All future messes will be dealt with like all past messes, by deploying the familiar, soul-baffling, corporate drone-speak. All messes are externalities to be obscured and offloaded via same. This predictable paradigm is written right into our societal source code, before MetaFace or whatever it is even existed.
That said - also not a Luddite - there are forms of a metaverse I would find thrilling. I just don't think Facebook is capable of building that form, given the undemocratic nature of their core business model. Other than in scale and technical features, I can't think of the metaverse as much more than the latest attempt to build a walled garden, like AOL in the 1990's but with much better graphics and portable walls.
I take a broader view. I'm less concerned with the ramifications of a Facebook-led metaverse, the particular technology, than with technology itself as an ideology.
I'm the Generation Xer who can remember a life pre-internet and life post-internet, the current state of affairs. As one of the pioneers, who dove in headfirst on the internet as a life-changing force for good, I've come to understand the internet as what happens when it transcends from becoming a thing into an ideology.
This is true of the internet, especially, but technology in general: You have eight months of utopia, but September is eternal.
I was amused when I learned about what "Eternal September" was (i.e., September 1993 was when AOL made Usenet access available to its large base of 30-day-free-trial clientele, and newsgroups turned into a zoo with the cage latches unlocked). It's a pithy, humorous observation. It's also pregnant with a dark truth.
Positive experiences with technology reach a tipping point at scale. Technology overshoots the scale and negative experiences begin to accumulate. Negative interactions cannot be fixed by the people, their thinking and their behaviors that created the problem in the first place. The community must collapse on its own (see Citizens Band or any popular music fad) or be supplanted by a competitor that repeats the problem at much larger scale.
I think it's simpler than that. Current consumer tech is awful. But it didn't have to be, these unaccountable companies made it that way. The issue is also to do with tech "journalism" which is actually just PR. Journalists are supposed to be skeptical, ask difficult questions. Not hype mongers. The default position towards new tech, new platforms, should be assuming it will be awful on every level, and most likely never work the way it's described in its promos.
Yep I agree with all of this, it brings it into a very sharp perspective. I'm not all that bothered by AR and VR either.... the world has bigger challenges to solve!
I very much dislike Facebook and Zuckerberg, but based on my experimentation with Quest 2 recently, I think there is enormous, *enormous* opportunity there. Maybe Meta will screw it up, or maybe a better platform will emerge that turns Meta into the MySpace of VR -- that would be great, actually -- but I also see all kinds of prosocial applications of the technology.
One of the most underrated aspects of VR is that you can't easily alt-tab between applications, at least not in the current iterations.
Oh and I'm old enough to remember when the iPad name was mocked for sounding like a futuristic tampon. I even remember when tech pundits predicted Amazon would fail because the domain books.com was already in use.
If you turned this reply into a long post I'd read it. Really thoughtful
Oh dear that was supposed to say I am a genuine brain damaged writer with a genuine brain damaged substack which likely makes it one of a kind. I will be very grateful if you choose to take a look.
I love your non headline. I am a genuine brain games brighter with a genuine brain damage substaff and the genuine brain damaged book that hasn't been published for lack of a genuine agent. I lost my former agents when I was hit by a drunk with a truck. Please take a look at my work and consider sharing it. I think you might like it. Plus it seems to me to fit well in the galaxy of brains.