I’m not sure what kind of mindset drives someone to troll dystopian sci-fi for your “next big thing”, but it seems to be a big in Silicon Valley. It’s from one of these unheeded fables that Zuckerberg’s Metaverse emerges. Rather than try and fool a population and lull them into a false sense of safety and security, Zuckerberg is literally rolling out the dystopia-as-a-service right from the outset. Right from the outset you’ll get a completely corporate owned experience where you will agree to give away every single data about your physical and mental self just by accepting the Terms of Service.
Zuckerberg’s Metaverse, as he explains it in his heavily produced founder-as-god keynote address, is a childish rendition of the future. It’s no more ”futuristic” than the Jetsons feels today. Rather than bold and predictive, it’s cliched and entirely built from outdated cultural concepts.
It’s a clumsy attempt to promote Zuckerberg as a founder capable of building worlds. This is to mask the fact that one of history’s richest men is devoid of creativity venturing on a folly that will chew through the natural resources and GDPs of several African nations and wreak untold havoc on the social fabric of society all because noone in his life would say “No”.
I mean what is this garbage?
A multibillion dollar owner and company with more than a billion users and this is the best they can do? How much of cliche is every single thing about this? There isn’t a shred of original thought evident in the whole thing.
Rather than an engaging, mature vision of the future, what we have is the sketch pad of an 8 year old telling us all the stuff he thinks is “cool”. Space, robots, lakes, fire, low-gravity, Caesar haircuts. I mean the only thing missing is some bikini babes, which you know only got cut because Sheryl and the PR department had to intervene.
Through every thing I’ve seen and read about the metaverse the one question I kept asking myself is – who? Who is this for? Why would they want the metaverse? What could this possibly give you?
And there only one answer. Shareholders.
The only reason for the metaverse to exist is to provide shareholders with value.
- Value because it diverts attention from the absolute dumpster fire that is Facebook.
- Value because it divets attention from the real MK ultra effects that Instagram had on teens.
- Value because it shows Xucjerberg as a visionary leader rather than the college that’s so far out of his depth he’s not waving, he’s drowning.
- Value from the invention of an even more efficient and proprietary data vacuum than Facebook ever was. This is shifting the core ideology behind Facebook from “connecting people” (who are most white supremcists and conspiracy nuts any way) to “owning people”.
Yes, at its heart Zuckerberg’s Metaverse is about slavery. Owning the forms, the bodies, the spaces, the interactions and the type of interactions themselves. Don’t be fooled. This is a direct move into owning the digital self. It is not about enabling connections or connecting the world. Those kinds of ideals will never be a part of a company like Facebook.
The metaverse is not something people want, it’s what Mark and his shareholders want. Why? To try and escape their actionsand the consequences that are coming from them. They want to own the rails and everything that runs on them. The metaverse is a colonial project – proclaiming to “civilise” the various digital spaces, replacing what was already with their own system, and then subjugating and exploiting what they now claim to “own”.
Heart | Soul | Machine 