A while back, Mark Zuckerberg announced to the world he was creating a holding company – that would house Facebook and Instagram etc – called Meta.
He launched it with this piece of underwhelming fanfare …
There are so many questions about this …
Why did Zuck make his avatar leaner than the real him? Why did he think showing a virtual room with some boring mates playing cards would excite the world? Why the fuck is his wife & dog making an appearance & why would his dad give a shit about receiving a clip of the pooch? Why was the “awesome virtual room” like a Sega Megadrive game background? Why are Facebook/Meta employees so cowardly they can’t tell their boss his acting is worse than people who appeared on that short lived BBC soap, Eldorado? Why did they think it would be trippy to show a flying fish to a generation who make TikTok videos far weirder, fancier and more interesting? Why did I watch the whole thing. Twice? Why did they make their logo a shot Zorro mask? Why does android Zuck still pretend he’s human?
It was, in no uncertain terms, fucking terrible.
But to show that Facebook have no shame taste, they then went on a social media tirade in a bid to drum up support and interest from brands.
Not people. Brands.
Asking them what they’ll be doing in the metaverse.
And while the social media account of a brand talking to another brand may be cool for the people working at the brand, 99.9% of the time it’s an act that shows a complete lack of self awareness.
Look at this …
It’s the equivalent of 2 old white dudes – wearing Yeezy’s & Supreme tees – thinking they’re the hippest, hottest dudes on an empty petrol station forecourt in Basingstoke on a wet Tuesday night.
Seriously, I detest this sort of thing.
I certainly detest every bit about this echo chamber, jock-banter, industry ‘in joke’, interaction.
I know some people will claim it is ‘hijacking culture’, but there’s 2 key issues with this.
1. How can it be ‘hijacking’, when this approach is so common, people literally expect it.
2. There’s a major difference between hijacking and boring them.
Putting aside the danger of letting a man like Zuckerberg have even more knowledge about our lives so he can profit from it … putting aside his track record of saying his company does good things then is found to be doing bad … putting aside Facebook ‘borrowed’ their Meta logo from another company … what Zuckerberg is showing is he doesn’t care about the people who use his products, just the advertisers who keep throwing money at him so they can find more and more ways to sell stuff to them, before launching ad campaigns saying they care about the environment and everyone should act.
Or some other blame throwing tactic.
Zuckerberg isn’t going anywhere.
And what makes it worse is that technology … specifically the metaverse and mixed reality … has the potential to do incredible good for humanity. However when governments allow this space to be ‘owned’ by egotistical billionaires, then the only ‘incredible good’ we can look forward to, is more blatant exploitation with no legal implication whatsoever.
Thanks Zuck.
Thanks for robbing us of the future we could have, but you want to dictate.