Meta-Fiction or Meta-Stasi?
You all remember that scary picture of Mark Zuckerberg walking in a room full of unsuspecting Oculus slaves, five years ago.
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| Yes, yes, there's also that eerie mugshot we used two years later in our fictional "Interview with the data vampire". |
When Zuck presented the new brand covering all the group's activities, it really felt like everybody was invited to submerge themselves again into a rosy virtual future, and forget all about an inconvenient present: the Facebook Papers and whistleblower Frances Haugen's confirmations that the platform contributes to human trafficking, Trump's insurrection, antivaxxer movements etc*...
'Meta' is so Facebook. That's not Google's Alphabet, the alpha and the omega, controlling the keys and tools at the source of sharing knowledge. It's all about encompassing everything, absorbing as much as possible under a gigantic, pervasive umbrella. The ultimate, self-contemplative tech blob. An infinite loop no one can escape.
If 'Meta' opens all possibilities, the MVRS ticker 'reduces' it to the 'metaverse' flavor of the month. See? We've got the label, we made that paradigm shift, Facebook joined the dotcom club of the twenties!
The self-proclaimed 'Social technology company' will not de-merge its activities but regroup all 'Family Apps' (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger...) on one side and 'Reality Labs' (Oculus AR, Spark AR, Novi ewallet, Portal and Co.) on the other. As if to signify that somehow, these household names are not about reality, maybe closer to fiction. The toolbox and the black box.
Facebook could be such a wonderful platform if it were run properly and responsibly. Business as usual is not an option now, and certainly not when on metaverse steroids. The name change almost makes things worse, and people are expecting more than Andrew Bosworth (a.k.a. Boz the robot) and Nick Clegg (a.k.a. Scatterlings of Meta) claiming that Meta is 'building the metaverse responsibly'. Unless Facebook truly changes, it's bound to land somewhere between meta-fiction and meta-stasi.
mot-bile 2021
