1. "Facebook wants to be The Matrix" by Kevin T. Dugan (Fortune).
Zuckerberg still puts bringing people together as his guiding principal [sic], and this is how to do it, even if it just has them interact more with sensors and goggles than with other living, breathing people. It all seems kinda bleak, like when you first see how people are harvested to make up The Matrix. As Morpheus says, channeling the French postmodern philosopher Jean Baudrillard, “welcome to the desert of the real.” But as Facebook’s continued dominance in social media attests, you don’t really even need people to like your product very much in order for it to be extremely powerful and widely-used.
2. "What Zuckerberg's metaverse means to our humanity" by Douglas Rushkoff (CNN).
In the virtual and augmented future Facebook has planned for us, it's not that Zuckerberg's simulations will rise to the level of reality, it's that our behaviors and interactions will become so standardized and mechanical that it won't even matter.... We learn to downgrade our experience of being together with another human being to seeing their projection overlaid into the room like an augmented reality Pokemon figure... Now, just as we're waking up to ways Facebook has knowingly eroded our social, mental and civic well-being, Zuckerberg is back with a new offering: a way out.... But... to go in the direction that Zuckerberg is pushing us, we must leave our humanity behind.
3. "The metaverse may be coming. But don’t expect it from Mark Zuckerberg" by Megan McArdle (WaPo).
[M]any companies that see the approaching catastrophe and dutifully try to adapt fail to do so. Kodak invented the digital camera in 1975, and nonetheless went bankrupt in 2012 thanks to digital photography.... If you wanted to create a digital photography company, you probably wouldn’t staff it with 145,000 employees of a company that made cameras and film....
When Zuckerberg founded Facebook, he was one 19-year-old college student with a computer, among millions. A decade ago, when he was pushing the company to focus on mobile rather than desktop and buying Instagram for $1 billion, he was a 28-year-old entrepreneur. Now he’s a billionaire, one of only thousands, and he has aged out of the coveted 18- to 34-year-old demographic..... [I]t seems more likely that the future belongs to people we’ve never heard of — those without a legacy business to worry about or a thick layer of money and fame insulating them from the longings of ordinary users.
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48 comments:
I quit Facebook when it banned Donald Trump. I'm sure I was not the only person to do so. I wonder how many other people quit at that time.
Why would anybody want to join if he's just going to cancel you out if you don't agree with his progressive opinions anyways...That ship has sailed.
Ole tried to make it better but he only metaverse.
In Hebrew, "meta" means "dead"
Megan McCardle’s take seem the most accurate.
I beg everyone. Get OFF facebook
you don’t really even need people to like your product very much in order for it to be extremely powerful and widely-used.
Like Soylent Green.
Point one: this billionaire list, like all the other lists, is way off. Some aren't counted, some are counted but shouldn't, some totals are way off.
What IS always striking to me is how few of them there are. A few thousand out of almost eight billion? Doesn't sound like much of a problem to me. We're not as unequal as we're being told...
The Zuks of the wold are interesting. Touch a few billion in a tiny, fairly meaningless way and the supervillain megalomania begins to ooze....
McArdle makes a lot of sense, except for one thing. When Facebook came along, most dominant tech companies dominated for about 5 years and then they were replaced by someone better. Facebook has stayed where it is because of a characteristic of social media that is seen in few if any other fields--the product is the community, not the company that hosts the community.
It's much harder for someone to compete with Facebook than with Kodak for the simple reason that if you buy a Sony camera, you're not cutting yourself off from the community of camera users, who all use Kodak. The reason it doesn't matter that people hate Facebook, that people hate Twitter, is because leaving these platforms doesn't just mean leaving the hated corporate management, it means leaving all the relationships they built up within that platform.
I think in the case of Facebook, it's not so much the money and fame that insulates Zuckerberg as the thick layer of woke employees whose ideological preferences differ greatly from those of the majority of his customer base. If anything, my impression is that he is less cocoon-ed than his median employee. Might not help him, but still --
That's when I gave Zuckbook up, Mike. No regrets at all.
I like the second take here. I think Megan misses the point completely, and I might be the only one to have never seen the Matrix franchise, so I can only guess what the first one is about.
Facebook and its subsidiaries (Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, Giphy, et al.) are collectively a truly evil enterprise, apart from the millions Zuckerberg has dumped into the last election. I've never been a FB member, and don't understand the attraction of millions of users to an collective organization that mines every scrap of private data of those users for it's own use and profit. FB needs to be broken up; at a minimum, it should be treated like a public utility.
I suspect many other commenters will have pointed out how News Corp buying My Space was such a giant fail. It's probably really weird for Zuckerberg to read that he's not one of the cool rule breaking young entrepreneurs. He's the establishment. In his video for introducing the Meta name change, his wild gesticulating reminded me of Terry McAauliffe's recent dance moves.
Megan McArdle isn’t looking at the new feudalism that results from monopolies and oligopolies. Zuckerberg and Dorsey and other tech lords are buying up or outspending —in Congress and the marketplace— all those new players. The prevailing ethos is to land a job at Google and do what you’re told.
The "metaverse" is going to happen.
But it will end up on the Starlink system and it will be an infrastructure project, not a software project.
People like Musk can compete without government help. People like Zuckerburg cannot.
My prediction is that a future generation, maybe one gen from now, will grow up with all this virtual life and get nothing from it. It'll feel empty. There will then be small groups that break out and spend more time with in person meetings with people. No...not being in the same room, at the same table, with their face in their phones, but together and interacting with each other, live and in person. It'll become a trend. More and more people will leave their virtual crap at home and go out...on the hush, to meet with others who are going anti-virtual. And so the next revolution will be the engaging of the human experience with other humans, using tech to help us with our menial accessory tasks. Directions. Ordering goods (maybe). Looking up the name of a restaurant. You might even see some smart entrepreneur coming up with a new way to shop. Get this:
A brick and mortar building filled with...clothing! You can actually go in there and...try stuff on to see how it looks before you buy it! And there's more: you get to interact with other humans while you're doing it. So radical, I know.
Or, the future generations will never leave their homes except to go out and find more Pokemon characters with their phones. Which future would you like to see?
>> It seems more likely that the future belongs to people we’ve never heard of — those without a legacy business to worry about or a thick layer of money and fame insulating them
In racing, they say "There is no substitute for cubic inches."
In IT, they say "There is no substitute for cubic money."
Zuckerberg could afford to launch a few dozen $10M startups and count on chance to have at least one of them be the wildly successful "next big thing".
He means "guiding principle ", doesn't he?
Temujin said...
My prediction is that a future generation, maybe one gen from now, will grow up with all this virtual life and get nothing from it. It'll feel empty. There will then be small groups that break out and spend more time with in person meetings with people.
"Virtual Life" is going to feel and seem just as real as "real life."
People can reprogram their memory. The can "remember" things that did not actually happen. There are many studies on witness statements in court attesting to this. There are known responses to stimuli and we are learning more about memory and reward pathways at an increasing rate.
If you want to watch something interesting there is an anime called "Sword Art Online." The first series is less pertinent than the second series "Sword Art Online II.". Who is going to choose to live in this world where they are a diabetic fat ass when they can live in another world where they are Superman, or a Pharaoh, or whatever they want to be.
Add in direct dopamine injection. Pretty sure only psychopaths and people with similar mental breaks will be able to deal with that.
The meta is coming one way or another. Your phone will transform into wearable glasses and act as a Heads up Display to interact with both the real and virtual worlds. The quest VR headset is the start of it. FB might not pull it off with a real wearable but someone will.
Will it ruin relationships? Maybe - but it just might help us value and appreciate real contact.
People with Asperger's creating a world with Asperger's ...
META - Make Everthing Trump Again.
My prediction is that a future generation, maybe one gen from now, will grow up with all this virtual life and get nothing from it.
People don't value the things they've had around them their whole lives, so a generation growing up with the "metaverse" will come to hate it. That reaction may already have started, though it won't build up to be significant for a while.
In the Noah Baumbach movie While We're Young Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts are struggling to cope with all their devices and social media, to keep up and remain in the loop, while the younger couple played by Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried have given all that up.
"It's much harder for someone to compete with Facebook than with Kodak for the simple reason that if you buy a Sony camera, you're not cutting yourself off from the community of camera users, who all use Kodak. The reason it doesn't matter that people hate Facebook, that people hate Twitter, is because leaving these platforms doesn't just mean leaving the hated corporate management, it means leaving all the relationships they built up within that platform."
This is a great point, but it leaves out a key factor: Younger people are not doing that thing of building up a community inside Facebook. And the business model is advertising, which values the 18-34 demographic. They aren't stuck with their Facebook-cultivated social group. They are avoiding it. The pattern is already devastatingly clear and it's the reason Facebook is straining to look new and cool — to bring them in for the first time.
Yet there isn't even a product yet, just a dream of a future product.
Kodak invented the digital camera in 1975, and nonetheless went bankrupt in 2012 thanks to digital photography.... If you wanted to create a digital photography company, you probably wouldn’t staff it with 145,000 employees of a company that made cameras and film....
A lot of innovation came from Bell Labs, Xerox, IBM, but the companies were already too big to successfully develop the products. One would have thought companies would be able to fix this problem by now, but it may not be possible.
I read a lot of cyberpunk fiction as a teenager in the 90's, and I remember being fascinated by what that kind of technology would allow. Now that we get closer and closer to that kind of world, I increasingly want nothing to do with it.
I could be completely off base, but I think it is a much harder sell for Facebook to get people to spend hundreds of dollars for dedicated hardware just to use an awkward VR app. Facebook was amplified by the ubiquity of personal computers and smart phones that people already owned. I just don't see people running out to spend $500+ to use Facebook in a different way.
I still have a Facebook account, which I reactivated after abandoning it for about 6 months earlier this year. There are still things I use Facebook for, but nothing serious. I keep up with a few friends, use Marketplace (which has completely replaced Craigslist), and keep up with some hobby related stuff. What I don't use Facebook for is anything serious, anything real. They destroyed any trust I had in them during and after the last election, with the blatant censorship and deplatforming they engaged in. Why invest a lot of time and energy into something that has shown a willingness to completely deplatform their users for engaging in wrong-think? The last straw for me was when, after the 2020 election, Facebook prevented me from privately sharing an article about the 2020 election with a family member on Messenger. Zuckerberg can talk all he wants about bringing people together, but that is all absolute bullshit if their censors won't allow you to have a conversation that is real.
Like many things in life, social media like Facebook should be something that serves the life you already live. It isn't an end in itself. It should help you stay connected to people you actually know, inform you about events that you may want to go to in the real world. Far too many people substitute social media for real experiences, and that seems sad and hollow to me. They fight with and alienate people they actually know, just to get accolades from an echo chamber and little hits of dopamine from a bunch of strangers who are all addicted to the same pathetic, manipulative psych-trap.
It reminds me of that guy that betrayed everyone he knew so that the machines would put him back in the Matrix. You feel contempt for that guy in the movie, but more and more people make that choice every day.
"He means "guiding principle ", doesn't he?"
Yikes. Thanks. I've added a "sic"
Tim Maguire: “Facebook has stayed where it is because of a characteristic of social media that is seen in few if any other fields--the product is the community, not the company that hosts the community.”
A similar thing happened here on this blog. When our hostess and theme-setter dropped comments, I lost interest in the blog. When she allowed the community back in to give its two cents, I returned.
fairmarketvalue said: "...at a minimum, [Facebook] should be treated like a public utility."
Facebook IS treated like a public utility, as is Twitter. Your City, County, School District, numerous State and Federal agencies have Facebook and Twitter accounts. Your tax dollars pay employees to post information on these accounts. You need a personal Facebook (or Twitter) account to access that information.
Another issue: Facebook is not a reliable conduit of information. Information is filtered and censored. The recipient does not reliably receive what the sender sent.
I see Ann is continuing yesterday's theme, The Nerds Are Winning.
I was looking at the background which Big Zuck chose for his talks on Meta and wondering to whom it would appeal. Those empty hallways, those blank walls, those windows on nothing, that sunny world where nothing was growing. I thought, finally, that that background appeals to his own workers. They like to come into an clean, sunny, empty building and work on their digital project-dreams on off-hours with no distractions from finished projects like a Rembrandt or from natural forms on their own like a dandelion or rain. For them what we see is the app layer but their job is on the programming layer or even the machine code layer. We see an Cezanne, they see pixels; we see Flight Simulator, they see l. 47 Jump; we see Candy Crush, they see 0000010000001001. So somehow they don't want any pictures. Maybe they'd like framed bit code. 010010101010. It's like that Hooper picture of an all-night restaurant or like working the midnight shift. And Meta assures them that they can link from their layer to others on the same layer.
So then what story goes with that background. Well, isn't this the background for An American Tragedy where the hero loves a hotel for its marble and brass and impersonality and loves the rich for pretty much the same reasons and kills trying to become a member of the dream? As if someone messed with elections to try to bring in the abolition of crime?
Plato's cave....
You can do math and live in your own universe. Actual social contact once a year is plenty.
The computers just dumb it down so everybody can do it.
Facebook is for boomer and genX. The oldest millennials are 39 and the oldest genZs are 21. It's the younger people who are laughing at the zuckermeta pivot. Unfortunately it's too early for schadenfreude
It is enough to make me sometimes wish for a gigantic global EMP.
McArdle may be wrong. Some tech companies successfully expanded into new business areas after their founders turned 34. Oracle Corporation expanded out of database software and into business apps. Bill Gates took Microsoft out of operating systems and into applications like web browsers, spreadsheets, and WYSIWG word processors. Steve Jobs got Apple out of PCs and into iPhones and other things.
It’s the older, stodgier corporations that have issues. The example of Kodak has been noted. There are people who claim that IBM invented the PC (I’m not one of them), but they failed to make a go of it in that market.
So maybe Facebook is too big and already too bureaucratic to make it in the metaverse. But not necessarily.
Wildswan,
I doubt it. Find a way to get a tour of Facebook hq in silicon valley. Very very far from your description.
It’s the older, stodgier corporations that have issues. The example of Kodak has been noted.
Xerox is a better example. They had all these dynamite products in their own shop at PARC and the corp said, "Quit that nonsense and get back to improving copiers."
In the Metaverse you can live up on the estate or plantation in the virtual world. You will live, love, go to church etc., in the virtual world as long as you pay our food rent. And perhaps the occasional collection for a Danegeld. And all will be joyous as long as you don't offend the lord of the manor who oversees your estate and get cast out, perhaps even driven from your hundred. But really no need to worry about a virtual Highland Clearances at some point when there's more profit with you gone, is there?
"Now he’s a billionaire, one of only thousands, and he has aged out of the coveted 18- to 34-year-old demographic....."
This reminded me of the following that Russ Roberts of the Econtalk podcast said in one of his discussions:
There’s this meme that tech culture is solving one problem: “What is my mother no longer doing for me?” Or, as George Packer put it in 2013, “It suddenly occurred to me that the hottest tech start-ups are solving all the problems of being twenty years old, with cash on hand, because that’s who thinks them up.”
"The quest VR headset is the start of it. FB might not pull it off with a real wearable but someone will."
Facebook wasn't the first social media site, just the right one to hit at the right time. While they may be the first to create a VR community, it is doubtful they will be the only players in the field. There's too much incentive to become "the next Facebook" for others to leave it alone.
There's also incentive on the user side. If you are going to have to spend hundreds of dollars on VR equipment, are you really going to want to spend your time in a world created by an autistic sociopath? Or are you more likely to gravitate towards a world that caters to your particular tastes and world view? This VR community idea is likely to spawn all matter of worlds, some quite beautiful that speak to the best in humanity, and others not so much. It should be interesting to see how things turn out.
if Z-berg succeeds with creating M-verse when Facebook is broken up what happense? or will this be like Terminator where the M-verse reintegrates
BigMike said ....
There are people who claim that IBM invented the PC (I’m not one of them), but they failed to make a go of it in that market.
Yep, they missed out on New areas..
Pretty hard to make 'a go' of New areas, when you're under investigation for antitrust Already
In the mid 1980's, IBM was The Most Profitable corp on the S&P.. Doing what they did..
With a large chunk of the federal government trying to destroy them.
Trivia Question. When was IBM's FIRST antitrust investigation started?
Hint. It was BEFORE WWII
Bah. I'm old enough to remember when Second Life was a thing.
So the environmentalists are going to save the planet, making it all shiny green and blue,and noone will be living in that world? They'll be in Zuck's world?
Greta von Thunberg's gonna be pissed when nobody appreciates all her hard "work".
"There are people who claim that IBM invented the PC (I’m not one of them), but they failed to make a go of it in that market."
IBM threw together parts other people designed in what's called an open architecture. That means other manufacturers could (and did) make clones of their computer. Those clones were usually better and cheaper than what Big Blue produced. They couldn't innovate fast enough to compete with those clones.
The level of hostility against Zuckerberg is a salient reminder that many people really hate autistic people. His awkwardness, his strange gestures, his bland, 'robotic' demeanor. etc.
There's even hypocrisy about the name change. When ultra-woke, hipster google changed its name to the stupid and ridiculous "Alphabet", the world shrugged. "Meta" is far better name, but, oh no, we must act as if Zuckerberg is perrennially socially embarrassing, even when he's not.
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