You have probably seen the announcement by now Meta Platforms, Inc. on Thursday, by Mark Zuckerberg, explaining his vision for the rebranded company.
I think it is worth reflecting on the implications of this kind of technology, as it encompasses much of modernity's problems.
It is, as we will see, modernity’s ultimate goal. The dream of modern man.
Let’s start with trash.
Virtual Plastics
As an alternative to the current state of physical garbage we keep around the house, Zuckerberg wants to implement a new (more environment-friendly!) way of inserting trash into our lives:
Digital trash.
The lack of craft in the virtual objects shown in the demo would cripple the eyes of whoever wears this for a couple of minutes, I can't imagine what it does to a person experiencing the world through it.
Cheap, cheap, and cheap.
The word aesthetics shouldn't enter this conversation at all, but I'd like to mention the problem with leaving so much of what we see in the hands of a few people, in a particular visual style (dictated by the limits of the technology and their awful taste).
Disney knows how much power that is, and Meta will no doubt tap into it.
Images are powerful, and current society is blind to symbolism, so nobody will notice it consciously.
Representing so great a portion of the experience of a person's day is a level of control dangerously beyond anything we've seen so far.
Connection
Zuck keeps talking about connecting, but it is pretty clear already how much his "connection" applications achieve exactly the opposite.
There are side effects that compound, and in the end, it becomes the opposite of connection:
When everything is connection, anywhere/anybody becomes nowhere/nobody.
Note how much WhatsApp fragments conversation.
Invasion
This will permeate your whole life, work, fitness, social, it will all be through this thing.
This technology undoubtedly will make its users dependent on it to do even the most basic actions, and crippled without it (note the smartphone today, infinitely less invasive than meta tech).
Superficial Education
Cheap is the key with this technology, as it has technological limitations in regards to the quality of its content.
Education will be so fake it will be hard to distinguish it from dull videogames. Children will learn nothing important, as the platforms will be obligated to stimulate them as much as the gaming content, in order to retain attention.
Education will mean distraction.
Shallow "effortless" learning.
"Effortless" and "learning" are contradictions in terms.
Learning from hard mistakes, self-control, and sacrifice?
Nothing like that on this platform.
Children will indulge in order to engage.
The content that appeals to their senses the most will be most successful.
"Ooh, imagine being able to be transported to Rome, two thousand years ago!"
As if books hadn't ever done that.
Good call, Facebook, we will finally be able to experience what ancient Rome was actually like. How come nobody ever had that idea before?
So much of a good education is formed by the child's imagination, and it seems that imagination is what they want to attack most fiercely.
Outsourced Imagination
Ultimately, this is a tool to replace imagination with a cheaper, easier alternative, as the unimaginative mind requires more and more stimuli (and the reverse is also true: the more input the less imaginative a response).
This clearly causes dependency on the tech, as reading a book will subsequently feel like staring at a static blank wall.
Alors,
Prediction number 1:
People will read fewer books.
If you pay attention at no point there is any allusion to books.
This tech is not made for reading, only for consuming more facile content
How can it be so great if it will rob people of what makes them learn and experience the most, which are books?
How can Learning be achieved at any level without books?
If Netflix is already killing critical thinking, then how could books compete in an audiovisual hyper-stimulating environment?
Comfort
This tech came to make you comfortable wherever you are (Horizon Home), and limit creativity to whatever they judge creative can be (Horizon Worlds).
More comfort, more safety.
They might as well say it out loud:
"Education needs to become more comfortable"
"Fitness needs to become more comfortable"
"Work needs to become more comfortable"
Work
They want to make work as comfortable as possible and blend the barriers between what is work and what is fun.
I felt this pressure during the pandemic, work becoming less demanding and play becoming more "productive".
This is dangerous and bad for mental health.
Consider that you don't want your dessert mixed with the main plate:
Cheesecake blended and mixed with a steak is very different from steak; then cheesecake.
We evolved for bouts of stress followed by periods of total relaxation.
You want 100% work or 100% play.
Nothing in between.
Shifting the world economy
Why are they doing this?
Instead of selling data or attention for money, it is much more profitable, or much better than profitable for the company to shift the economy to an attention economy, to a sort of a data-driven form of currency, where real life and metaverse currencies blend together.
Information is always more valuable than whatever price you can sell it for.
Note that their libra project didn't fare very well. They must be thinking of a better alternative.
They are a profit-driven company. If they are investing billions they expect at least billions in return.
The Future
Now, what can we do about it?
Is it possible to stop them from implementing this tech?
Probably not, as they are one of the wealthiest companies in the world and they have every incentive to turn this into a reality.
But in my opinion, we have to combat modernity with modern weapons, there's no point in trying to resist it, we must use it against itself somehow.
People will probably come up with decentralized or less invasive alternatives.
Maybe.
Plausibility
This is all over the media. With history as a guide, no real life-changing technological innovation has been predicted as they are predicting this will work.
That means probably we will be more affected by some technology we are not predicting, not even imagining (black swan).
On the other hand, Zuckerberg's company is extremely wealthy and it has all the incentive (and billions) to make this work.
To force it to work.
We shall see.
Thank you for reading.