Never leave matters of maturity to the Peter Panners of Silicon Valley.\u00a0 At their most benign, they are easily dismissed as potty and keyboard mad.\u00a0 At their worst, their fantasies assume the noxious, demonic forms that reduce all users of their technology to units of information and flashes of data.\u00a0 Such boys (they are mostly boys), felt somehow left out by the currents of reality, their own world excruciatingly boring and filled with pangs of childhood disturbance and regret.\u00a0 So they sought vengeance upon us all: imposing a global regime of fairly useless cyber architecture that saps intelligence in the name of experience, destroys imagination even as it celebrates it, and luxuriates in a lowly prurience.<\/p>\n
Facebook, in particular, has been trying to push such a model using a tactic all companies in distress have sought to adopt: rebranding.\u00a0 Be it the scandals disclosed by the Facebook papers, the scrutiny over the use of algorithms by the company, the inability to combat galloping misinformation on its platforms, or the stark amorality of the company\u2019s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, the chance to seek the metaverse has presented itself.<\/p>\n
Enter, then, the world of Meta Platforms, aided by the virtual reality headset company Oculus, which was acquired by Facebook in 2014 for $2 billion.\u00a0 Astute watchers then would have been the strategy afoot at the time; most, however, thought the decision misguided and destined to flop.<\/p>\n
The metaverse has become a goal for not just Facebook, but the likes of Unity Technologies and Epic Games, though Facebook is distinctly not interested in gaming.\u00a0 It can be seen to be a sort of Internet 2.0, envisaged as shared 3D spaces streaked by virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR respectively).\u00a0 You can access that reality via a pair of glasses or some virtual reality set and get transported to a virtual space populated by avatars.\u00a0 \u201cThe essence of virtual and augmented reality is that you need to have a technology that delivers this feeling of presence,\u201d Zuckerberg mentions<\/a> in an interview this year.\u00a0 \u201cThe sense that you are actually there with another person and all the different sensations that come with it.\u201d<\/p>\n According to Facebook, the metaverse will feature<\/a> a totalising system of various functions and services designed to be \u201cthe successor to the mobile internet\u201d.\u00a0 There will be Horizon Home for social interactions, \u201cthe first thing you see when you put on your Quest headset.\u201d\u00a0 Video conferencing and phone conversations will be replaced by Quest for Business.<\/p>\n For all the company\u2019s egregious sins, this new technology will be pursued, says<\/a> Andrew Bosworth, Vice President of Facebook Reality Labs and Nick Clegg, Vice President of the company\u2019s global affairs, \u201cresponsibly\u201d.\u00a0 In September, $50 million in research development was promised to ensure that such products met that mark, an amount somewhat piddly when compared to other areas of research the company lavishes money upon.<\/p>\n On November 15, there were further announcements<\/a> that the Digital Wellness Lab at Boston Children\u2019s Hospital would \u201cfocus on improving our understanding of how we can foster young people\u2019s digital literacy and embed wellness into emerging metaverse technologies.\u201d\u00a0 The children, it seems, will not be spared.<\/p>\n All this tells us that Facebook is moving towards its next stage of surveillance capitalism, a relentless drive towards extracting and squeezing every bit of nutriment of being that is human behaviour.\u00a0 The privacy of users, already tattered and battered by the predations of Facebook data privateers, can be further diminished, even as it is supposedly protected. \u201cMetaverse technologies like VR and AR are perhaps the most data-extractive digital sensors we\u2019re likely to invite into our homes in the next decade,\u201d reasons<\/a> Marcus Carter of the University of Sydney\u2019s Socio-Tech Futures Lab.<\/p>\n Zuckerberg has spent some time contemplating the road of enthronement in the VR\/AR market.\u00a0 The amount of money Facebook has heaped upon its VR and AR research and development division is eye watering.\u00a0 One estimate places it at $10 billion.\u00a0 Critics can at least take comfort in the fact<\/a> that most of the company\u2019s social VR\/AR products to date have tended to splutter into well-deserved oblivion or flounder in \u201cinvite-only beta phases\u201d.\u00a0 Then there is the issue of the headsets themselves, cumbersome bits of hardware saddled across the user\u2019s face like a harness.<\/p>\n None of that gets away from the sinister premise in this new company strategy.\u00a0 Zuckerberg and his minions seek to corporately control the metaverse, using VR and AR to identify behavioural biometrics unique to each user.\u00a0 Everything from body gyration to eye movement becomes fair game.\u00a0 \u201cWe should all be concerned about how Facebook could and will use the data collected within the metaverse,\u201d writes<\/a> virtual reality enthusiast Bree McEwan.<\/p>\n In truth, we should be more<\/em> than concerned.\u00a0 Facebook\u2019s strength of influence has been its embrace of the innocuous even as it gears up for inflicting the next societal harm.\u00a0 But its increasingly centralising tendencies \u2013 making the user generate a marketable portrait of usage and behaviour \u2013 will be given a further kick along with the metaverse.<\/p>\n With Oculus and the Facebook account linked, one headset, and one user, ever greater pools of marketized data will be generated.\u00a0 Work, fitness, entertainment, social choices will all become a deeper quarry to be mined and monetised by salivating wonks in a corporate enterprise.\u00a0 This is totalitarian cyber-creepism run mad.\u00a0 And Zuckerberg just might get away with it.<\/p>The post Totalitarian Cyber-Creep: Mark Zuckerberg in the Metaverse<\/a> first appeared on Dissident Voice<\/a>.\n This post was originally published on Dissident Voice<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Never leave matters of maturity to the Peter Panners of Silicon Valley.\u00a0 At their most benign, they are easily dismissed as potty and keyboard mad.\u00a0 At their worst, their fantasies assume the noxious, demonic forms that reduce all users of their technology to units of information and flashes of data.\u00a0 Such boys (they are mostly [\u2026]<\/p>\n The post Totalitarian Cyber-Creep: Mark Zuckerberg in the Metaverse<\/a> first appeared on Dissident Voice<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":30,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[725,369],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400954"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/30"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=400954"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400954\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":402100,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400954\/revisions\/402100"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=400954"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=400954"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=400954"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}