Metaverse, Mars, meditation retreats:
billionaires want to escape the world they ruined
Sam Wolfson
Zuckerberg wants us to all turn our attention to a
land of make-believe to distract from his PR disaster while Bezos and Musk are
obsessed with leaving the planet
Fri 29 Oct
2021 19.48 BST
On Thursday
Facebook announced a groundbreaking and innovative new distraction from their
PR disaster. As journalists continue to pour over thousands of leaked documents
that show the company is fully aware that it is degrading democratic societies,
Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook is changing its name to Meta, has a new
logo that looks like a Na’vi bending over, and is going to pivot from spreading
vaccine disinformation to creating a super-lame version of Second Life.
Zuckerberg
promised that in the future we would all work, play and “organise surprise
birthday parties” as avatars in Facebook’s virtual-reality “Metaverse”. His
examples of how this might work had all the cultural awareness of a Kendall Roy
social media strategy.
In one
sequence, Zuckerberg arrives on a spaceship – “This place is amazing! It was
made by a creator I met in LA!” – before opening up his contacts list,
scrolling past 2007’s hottest rapper T-Pain and arriving at a friend who dials
in some “3D-street art” from the streets of New York to the spaceship platform.
“This is stunning! I love the movement,” say Zuckerberg’s virtual cronies, as
they stare at something that looks like a piece of clip art someone might have
used on a letterhead for a small-town law firm. Then just as it’s disappearing
from view, Zuckerberg purchases it, apparently as an NFT, so it can stay in
virtual space forever.
Zuckerberg’s
virtual world of play pretend is a way of escaping the destruction he’s wrought
on the real one. Facebook has played a major role in fomenting ethnic cleansing
in Myanmar, drumming up lynch mobs in India and Sri Lanka, amplifying white
nationalism in the US and providing the anti-vaccine movement with a massive megaphone
during a global pandemic. Rather than address this ruination, Zuckerberg wants
us to all turn our attention to a land of make-believe where he’s friends with
rappers and you can watch Instagram stories on a pirate ship.
He joins a
cadre of 21st-century robber barons who, having successfully colonized huge
swaths of Earth 1.0, are looking to escape to other spheres of reality.
Jeff Bezos
and Elon Musk are obsessed with physically leaving the planet, ploughing their
wealth into a viciously fought space race despite the fact that no one is going
to Mars anytime soon. Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, tried a more
metaphysical escape, spending weeks at a time at glamorous meditation retreats,
practicing total silence, in bid to escape the noisy, unregulated world of hate
speech he platformed.
Zuckerberg
has now gone one step further, creating a reality so virtual that Facebook
hasn’t yet destroyed it. But his vision of avatar poker games is also fantasy.
From Habbo Hotel to SecondLife, Sansar and High Fidelity, there are hundreds of
similar VR social offerings which you probably haven’t heard of because all
that really happens there is people stand in badly rendered condos saying “is
your thing working, mine is lagging”. These kinds of social worlds remain a
niche concern (in part because few social interactions are improved by a
soupcon of headset nausea).
A case in
point: the globe has been living with working from home for 18 months, and in
that time there have been thousands of hi-tech offerings that attempt to
recreate the office, yet every major company is still opting for the dreary
Zoom call. That’s because VR is inherently silly and most work isn’t.
These
billionaire side hustles are both real –in that they will have billions of
dollars ploughed into them – and utter fantasy. It’s impressive that SpaceX and
Blue Origin have achieved low-Earth orbit, but we are not going to move
polluting industries into space or colonize Mars. These projects have more to
do with providing a psychological salve to their owners (and selling shares in
Tesla and Amazon) than they do with the future of tech.
What
Facebook released on Thursday was a Pixar-like dream sequence of how Zuckerberg
wishes people saw him. He has leveraged one of the biggest technology
operations ever imagined to create an entirely new universe in which he is not
a bad guy. For the rest of us living on Earth, nothing has changed.
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