05 November 2021 10:10
On October 28, Facebook announced a new and innovative way to distract public opinion from the public relations disaster the company finds itself in. As reporters continue to examine thousands of documents they have come into possession of, which show that the company is perfectly aware of doing harm to democratic societies, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook will have a new name, Meta, a new logo that reminiscent of a na’vi, the humanoid of Avatar, and will move from spreading disinformation about vaccines to creating a low-level version of Second Life.
Zuckerberg has promised that in the future we will all work, play and “throw surprise birthday parties” as avatars in Facebook’s virtual reality metaverse. His examples of how it might work contain all the cultural awareness of a Kendall Roy-esque social media strategy.
In one sequence Zuckerberg arrives on a spaceship – “this place is amazing! A made it creator I met in Los Angeles! ” – before opening his contact list, recalling the hottest rapper in 2007, T-Pain, up to a friend who creates a sort of 3D street art work that from the streets of New York reaches the spaceship platform. “It is amazing! I love the movement, ”Zuckerberg’s virtual associates say, while staring at something that looks like a piece of clip art suitable for the letterhead of a fourth-rate law firm. Then, just as he’s walking away, Zuckerberg buys the something, apparently like non-fungible token (nft), so as to leave it in virtual space forever.
Barons brigands
The virtual play world of Zuckerberg serves him to escape the destruction he has spread in the real one. Facebook has played a major role in fomenting ethnic cleansing in Burma, inciting lynchings in India and Sri Lanka, amplifying white nationalism in the United States, and providing the anti-vaccine movement with a huge megaphone during a global pandemic.
Rather than face this devastation, Zuckerberg wants to draw our attention to a fictional planet where he is friends with rappers and we can watch the stories of Instagram on a pirate vessel.
Zuckerberg is one of that group of twenty-first century brigand barons who, after successfully colonizing huge portions of Earth 1.0, are trying to escape into other spheres of reality.
Virtual reality is inherently obtuse
Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are obsessed with the idea of physically leaving the planet, and invest their wealth in a fiercely fought space race, despite the fact that no one will actually be able to go to Mars in the short term. Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, has attempted a more metaphysical escape, spending several weeks at a time in trendy meditation retreats, practicing total silence in an attempt to escape the world of hate speech, noisy and unregulated. , which he himself posted online.
Zuckerberg has now taken it one step further, creating such virtual reality that Facebook hasn’t destroyed it yet. But his vision of avatars playing poker is also a fiction. From Habbo Hotel to SecondLife, passing through Sansar and High Fidelity, there are already hundreds of similar social virtual reality platforms, which you probably have not heard of, because what really happens to us are people standing, in poorly made virtual apartments, who they say, “Does your thing work? Mine has some problems ”. This kind of social universes remains a niche matter (also because few social interactions are actually improved by a sickening addition of virtual reality).
Psychological relief
An example: the world has lived working from home for eighteen months, and in this period thousands of high-tech products have come out that attempt to recreate office life, yet all the major companies continue to prefer mundane calls away. Zoom. This is because virtual reality is inherently dull, while most of the work isn’t.
These billionaire side assets are both reality – in the sense that billions of dollars will be invested in them – and utter fantasy. It is impressive that SpaceX and Blue Origin have reached low Earth orbit, but we will not move entire polluting sectors into space or colonize Mars. These projects have more to do with the psychological relief of their owners (and with the sale of shares in Tesla and Amazon) than with the future of technology.
What Facebook released on October 28 is a Pixar-style dream sequence of how Zuckerberg would like people to see him. He has used one of the greatest technological operations ever imagined to create an entirely new universe in which he is not a bad person. For the rest of us who live on Earth, nothing has changed.
(Translation by Federico Ferrone)
This article appeared in the British weekly The Guardian.
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