Mark Zuckerberg renamed Facebook “Meta” today and did a pitch which was vague but basically sounded like the overpromising of video games that we’ve all heard, at least those of us who are into video games, which I emphatically am not. Playing Pacman in a bar while drinking a few beers was about my speed back when all that got rolling.
Meta is supposed to be some utopian virtual sci fi realm where people congregate and have good clean fun, going to concerts together, playing chess, what have you. It’s all quite civilized. Quite a contrast with what’s actually going on on Facebook in the real world.
While Zuckerberg was pitching his fantasy fantastical Facebook of the future, here is what was going on on his platform at that very moment.
Let VICE describe this to you:
About 19,000 people were watching Zuckerberg cosplay as James Halliday, the fictional metaverse creator from the bleak Ready Player One series on Facebook’s Live platform. Facebook’s algorithm, meanwhile, was recommending that users also watch a Latina woman dominate and lick the stomach of a little person (11,000 viewers); it also recommended people watch a video game livestream pitched with a thumbnail of two CGI men fucking each other (4,000 viewers).
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to watch either of those things, of course. But Zuckerberg’s pitch of living, working, playing, and generally existing in a utopian, fake, Facebook-developed virtual world loaded with fun and friendly people, concerts where you can always be in the front row, seamless mixed-reality basketball games where you feel like you are actually playing basketball, and kicksass, uhh, NFTs you can use to modify your metaverse avatar, is a far cry from the disinformation, conspiracy theories, genocide-related, self-esteem destroying, spam, and general garbage content that exists on the platforms Facebook has already built.
There is no universe, meta-or-otherwise, in which people will not spread conspiracy theories, hate speech, and make threats online. In the metaverse, they will try to show each other their dicks, though it’s worth noting right now that Facebook’s current metaverse avatars do not have bodies that exist below their waists.
Zuckerberg repeatedly said Facebook alone won’t build the metaverse. But the metaverse Facebook is building will be and has been built with Facebook developers to run on Facebook servers using Facebook hardware, which are connected to Facebook accounts.
About halfway through the delusional fever dream that was Facebook’s biggest product announcement of all time, Mark Zuckerberg said that “the last few years have been humbling for me and our company in a lot of ways,” as Facebook has nominally had to grapple with the harm it’s done to this world. It’s hard to find anything “humble” about a proposal to fundamentally remake human existence using technology that currently does not and may not ever exist and that few are currently clamoring for.
But Facebook’s problems are too numerous to list, and so he is pitching products that don’t exist for a reality that does not exist in a desperate attempt to change the narrative as it exists in reality, where we all actually live.
Facebook is Zuckerberg’s monster. It left the laboratory and got out of control many years back. Since a combination of Congress and whistleblowers have been coming after Zuckerberg with torches and pitchforks, not to mention subpoenas, and demanding accountability for some time now, his answer is to flip to a new benign face for the company. Maybe he never heard of lipstick on a pig?
It all sounds very high flown and scifi-ish, the “metaverse” but it has yet to be realized beyond the drawing board and meanwhile, here we are with the exact same social media problems today as we had yesterday.
To be fair to Zuckerberg, social media, like movies, music, literature, journalism, you name it, will always reflect the entire scale of human experience, the best of us, the worst of us, and all shades of behavior in between. Zuckerberg got immensely rich from Facebook by putting his own profit margin way above any considerations of social utility or accountability until it got very late in the game. And that’s understandable, greed is a common part of human nature, one of the seven deadly sins we are told.
Meta offers no answers to any of the big questions which have been raised in the past five or more years about the pernicious effect of Facebook. It offers diversion and deflection rather than solutions.
Color me underwhelmed.
Maybe Zuck should view animated videos made by FB users, where he’s not the hero.
Did he use that clay-mation thing in the pic above to launch his Linden rip-off? Kind of…well, Gumby and Pokey come immediately to mind which were about as lame as anything out there until this that is.
Why not call rename it FacistBook, as from what I have read, Suckerberg has never had any intention of stopping the lies, disinformation and hate speech on the platform. Instead we see that he has had research done as to how to make FascistBook more addictive, especially to young people. Traitor Tot would never have stolen the 2016 election if not for FacistBook! And even though Traitor Tot was finally (5 years too late!) banned, his cult members still post his lie that the 2020 election was stolen!! FacistBook needs to be shut down completely, as the only reason that it was started and continues to exist is to collect what should be private information and sell it to advertisers, or whoever will pay. If you use FacistBook, YOU are the product being sold!
I disagree that FB grew out of control. It has done exactly what Zuckerberg has wanted it to do which is make tons of money – by any means necessary. Remember that it wasn’t that many years ago he was still known to say in private what he said all along: “Move fast. Break things.” Zuck the Fuck didn’t care about consequences because he knew he’d be rich enough (and creative enough to avoid most) even criminal charges – such as faciitatating Russian’s buying their way into his site in 2016, sometimes LITERALLY paying in Rubles! He didn’t care about the harm everyone told him his site caused so many people for so long (long before Trump) because all he cared about was the ad revenue that all that personal information he was collecting (and collating!) was making him one of the richest people in the world. Rich enough to buy all the politicians (and prosecutors if necessary) he needed.
He is one sick, narcissistic fuckwad. And I say again he knew EXACTLY what he was doing as FB was doing its damage and is continuing to do.
I put this up elsewhere, but when it comes to his rebranding I figure folks on this site might like it:
Meta — as in short for Metastasize.
Of course, if you do it in all caps the acronym possibilities are plentiful:
Mark’s Ego Trashes America
Mad Egoist’s Takeover (of) All
That’s just off the top of my head. I encourage others to let their creative criticism flag fly.
(there were some creative responses such as “Make Everything Trump Again”, “Mark Eats Trump’s Ass” and “Mark’s Exemplary Treatment of Assholes.”
Move fast and break things ought to be the G.Q.P. platform. It’s what they’ve been doing for decades. Who knew the little f*ckwad was a G.Q.P.’r?
I think he’ll find that Linden Labs created a metaverse a long time before he even thought of it – it’s called ‘Second Life’
Dare I guess this foolish little man is seeing stock prices being adversely affected by his silly little empire? Not a fb fan. Never was, never will be. When I want to know what friends or family are doing I give them a call or email sometimes. Foolish little man stroked people’s egos-“I have this many friends on fb”. Once people’s egos are stroked I have noticed it is pretty easy to lead them around by the nose-we had four years to watch this being done to former guy.
The term “devil incarnate”springs to mind when I think about Suckemburg. He like for everyone to just live a fake life in a fake world, zombied out of their minds for all eternity. Everyone should run as fast as they can away from this travesty of humanity, and especially the children. This will be 1984 on steroids.
A jew that supports the nazis. Call him capo.