- Jan 14, 2013
- 21,193
- 19,661
- 136
In a year with Trump, the Murdochs and the Tuckers and Fox News hosts, and almost any Trump supporting Republican politician, this is an impressive feat Mark.
Good read also.
newrepublic.com
Mark Zuckerberg Is TNR’s 2021 Scoundrel of the Year
The nitwit founder of Facebook has created the worst, most damaging website in the world. And we’re just supposed to accept it.
It does not augur well when a culture’s richest and most powerful men begin musing in public about whether a better life might await them on some otherworld colony. If you’ve spent all or even some of this last year living here on earth, it’s easy enough to understand the temptation, but when the lords of this particular realm are indulging these fantasies—think of Elon Musk’s aspiration to build a city on Mars over which he might preside like a more epic and meme-forward version of Total Recall’s Cohaagen—it gives the impression that they are more or less done with this used-up planet and everyone on it. Imagine Watchmen’s Dr. Manhattan in high isolation on the moon, a god grown tired of his rude and ravening and hungry lessers, except now he’s also really into NFTs and tax avoidance. It’s all ominous, almost poignantly oafish, and sociopathic in the deeply corny ways that we have come to expect from our superclass of tech billionaires. But there is an even worse escape than all of this.
In October, Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg announced that his company would not just be changing its name to Meta—I will continue to call it Facebook here, as I assume will everyone else—but broadening its ambitions to encompass becoming a virtual reality community in which people might work, play, spend, and live. “I believe the metaverse is the next chapter for the internet,” Zuckerberg said in announcing this news. “And it’s the next chapter for our company, too.”
To a certain extent this is just how Silicon Valley’s apex-predator types talk about things now. Because the Web3 fripperies that intrigue them—think of the speculative-unto-grifty froth at the confluence of cryptocurrencies and NFTs and virtual reality and other such ostensibly decentralized, ostensibly liberative online aspirations—are intriguing to them, they believe that those fripperies must therefore be the future of something or other. And, to a certain extent, the outsize power and wealth afforded them by their success in this version of the internet guarantees that they’re at least a little bit right, if only because anything with that much influence and raw money behind it is unlikely to go away simply because normal people do not find it very appealing. In matters like this a little bit of brute force, when exerted by a class of sufficiently forceful brutes, can go a very long way.
But it is worth mentioning that the metaverse as Mark Zuckerberg envisions it is just not a very appealing idea, and only partially because it is Zuckerberg himself explaining it. The concept that Zuckerberg laid out in a protracted and pyrotechnically cringy presentation seems so thoroughly innocent of any idea of what people actually want to do in their nonvirtual lives, let alone in their virtual ones. “This is the Facebook ‘metaverse,’” Max Read wrote in his newsletter. “Using goggles made by Facebook subsidiary Oculus, you enter the Facebook-hosted V.R. metaverse, where you can meet your friends at a V.R. bar, play V.R. board games, go to V.R. meetings for your V.R. job, get summoned into a V.R. conference room to get V.R. furloughed by your V.R. boss and a V.R. human-resources representative.” To be fair, Zuckerberg makes clear in his presentation that metaverse users will also be able to look like a cartoon bear while doing all of these things, if they so choose.
As John Herrman noted in The New York Times, the reason to be skeptical about this endeavor is not that people don’t want to do some or all of the stuff that Zuckerberg talks about in strained tones of wonder and whimsy. Whether in terms of speculating on cryptocurrencies or gaming with a V.R. headset or just clocking into a virtual workplace, people are absolutely already doing all those things, albeit sometimes more happily than others. It is not even the question of why anyone would entrust the design and implementation of the future to Facebook, which has made the world infinitely dumber, uglier, and worse in a number of obvious and inescapable ways, and is a miserable website to use to boot. That is a really good question, though, if only because it is just extremely difficult to imagine someone choosing to work and live inside the website that convinced their grandparents that the germ theory of disease was a hoax. But what really rankles is that it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter that this vision of the future is extractive, joyless, and dull; that the smug cretins who got rich off the platforms that this new decentralized movement is supposedly leaving behind are also leading the supposed successor movement doesn’t matter either. This push to transcend the world that Facebook has befouled and create a new, virtual one can be read in a sense as a response to the 10,000-page Facebook Papers leak, which demonstrated both the extent to which Zuckerberg’s own criminal indifference and Facebook’s inability to police its own sprawl have made the site a malignant metastatic force in countries around the world. Again, it doesn’t matter.
This is the taunt implicit in everything Zuckerberg does at this point in his reign. Here is a man who got unconscionably rich off the worst website that has ever existed, a website that has broken brains on a scale previously unimaginable in human history, and here is his stupendously wack vision for the future—and everyone is just going to have to deal with it. There are many things to abhor about Mark Zuckerberg and his works, but the fundamental mediocrity of it all—the lack of vision, the absence of any moral sense or shame, the inability and unwillingness not just to fix but even reckon with the dangerous and ungovernable thing he’s made—is what feels both most egregious and most of this moment. It is embarrassing and not a little enraging to realize that you are subject to the whims of an amoral and incurious capitalist posing as a visionary optimist. It is especially humiliating when the all-bestriding and inevitable figure in question is such a dim, dull nullity.
It seems important to mention that Facebook is not just a bad website, but a company that has shown itself willing to do the wrong thing whenever and wherever given a choice. Facebook was not the first and is not the only company to tell wild lies to advance its own ends, but few companies have done it bigger or suffered less for it. Facebook also did not invent a politics grounded in unreasoning spite and toddler-grade oppositional defiance and relentless resentful signaling; Americans did that all on their own, with some crucial late help from one family of reactionary Australian media types. But Facebook did create an algorithm that valued that style of grievance above all others, which pulled users along behind in turn. In the United States, the culture wanders, hunted and lost, through the virtual and nonvirtual wreckage those decisions made, without even the armor afforded by a V.R. bear costume. Abroad, where Facebook has been criminally indifferent at best and actively complicit at worst in abetting the spread of dangerous medical misinformation and genocidal rhetoric, the damage has been infinitely worse.
...Continues at link
Good read also.
Mark Zuckerberg Is TNR’s 2021 Scoundrel of the Year
The nitwit founder of Facebook has created the worst, most damaging website in the world. And we’re just supposed to accept it.
newrepublic.com
Mark Zuckerberg Is TNR’s 2021 Scoundrel of the Year
The nitwit founder of Facebook has created the worst, most damaging website in the world. And we’re just supposed to accept it.
It does not augur well when a culture’s richest and most powerful men begin musing in public about whether a better life might await them on some otherworld colony. If you’ve spent all or even some of this last year living here on earth, it’s easy enough to understand the temptation, but when the lords of this particular realm are indulging these fantasies—think of Elon Musk’s aspiration to build a city on Mars over which he might preside like a more epic and meme-forward version of Total Recall’s Cohaagen—it gives the impression that they are more or less done with this used-up planet and everyone on it. Imagine Watchmen’s Dr. Manhattan in high isolation on the moon, a god grown tired of his rude and ravening and hungry lessers, except now he’s also really into NFTs and tax avoidance. It’s all ominous, almost poignantly oafish, and sociopathic in the deeply corny ways that we have come to expect from our superclass of tech billionaires. But there is an even worse escape than all of this.
In October, Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg announced that his company would not just be changing its name to Meta—I will continue to call it Facebook here, as I assume will everyone else—but broadening its ambitions to encompass becoming a virtual reality community in which people might work, play, spend, and live. “I believe the metaverse is the next chapter for the internet,” Zuckerberg said in announcing this news. “And it’s the next chapter for our company, too.”
To a certain extent this is just how Silicon Valley’s apex-predator types talk about things now. Because the Web3 fripperies that intrigue them—think of the speculative-unto-grifty froth at the confluence of cryptocurrencies and NFTs and virtual reality and other such ostensibly decentralized, ostensibly liberative online aspirations—are intriguing to them, they believe that those fripperies must therefore be the future of something or other. And, to a certain extent, the outsize power and wealth afforded them by their success in this version of the internet guarantees that they’re at least a little bit right, if only because anything with that much influence and raw money behind it is unlikely to go away simply because normal people do not find it very appealing. In matters like this a little bit of brute force, when exerted by a class of sufficiently forceful brutes, can go a very long way.
But it is worth mentioning that the metaverse as Mark Zuckerberg envisions it is just not a very appealing idea, and only partially because it is Zuckerberg himself explaining it. The concept that Zuckerberg laid out in a protracted and pyrotechnically cringy presentation seems so thoroughly innocent of any idea of what people actually want to do in their nonvirtual lives, let alone in their virtual ones. “This is the Facebook ‘metaverse,’” Max Read wrote in his newsletter. “Using goggles made by Facebook subsidiary Oculus, you enter the Facebook-hosted V.R. metaverse, where you can meet your friends at a V.R. bar, play V.R. board games, go to V.R. meetings for your V.R. job, get summoned into a V.R. conference room to get V.R. furloughed by your V.R. boss and a V.R. human-resources representative.” To be fair, Zuckerberg makes clear in his presentation that metaverse users will also be able to look like a cartoon bear while doing all of these things, if they so choose.
As John Herrman noted in The New York Times, the reason to be skeptical about this endeavor is not that people don’t want to do some or all of the stuff that Zuckerberg talks about in strained tones of wonder and whimsy. Whether in terms of speculating on cryptocurrencies or gaming with a V.R. headset or just clocking into a virtual workplace, people are absolutely already doing all those things, albeit sometimes more happily than others. It is not even the question of why anyone would entrust the design and implementation of the future to Facebook, which has made the world infinitely dumber, uglier, and worse in a number of obvious and inescapable ways, and is a miserable website to use to boot. That is a really good question, though, if only because it is just extremely difficult to imagine someone choosing to work and live inside the website that convinced their grandparents that the germ theory of disease was a hoax. But what really rankles is that it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter that this vision of the future is extractive, joyless, and dull; that the smug cretins who got rich off the platforms that this new decentralized movement is supposedly leaving behind are also leading the supposed successor movement doesn’t matter either. This push to transcend the world that Facebook has befouled and create a new, virtual one can be read in a sense as a response to the 10,000-page Facebook Papers leak, which demonstrated both the extent to which Zuckerberg’s own criminal indifference and Facebook’s inability to police its own sprawl have made the site a malignant metastatic force in countries around the world. Again, it doesn’t matter.
This is the taunt implicit in everything Zuckerberg does at this point in his reign. Here is a man who got unconscionably rich off the worst website that has ever existed, a website that has broken brains on a scale previously unimaginable in human history, and here is his stupendously wack vision for the future—and everyone is just going to have to deal with it. There are many things to abhor about Mark Zuckerberg and his works, but the fundamental mediocrity of it all—the lack of vision, the absence of any moral sense or shame, the inability and unwillingness not just to fix but even reckon with the dangerous and ungovernable thing he’s made—is what feels both most egregious and most of this moment. It is embarrassing and not a little enraging to realize that you are subject to the whims of an amoral and incurious capitalist posing as a visionary optimist. It is especially humiliating when the all-bestriding and inevitable figure in question is such a dim, dull nullity.
It seems important to mention that Facebook is not just a bad website, but a company that has shown itself willing to do the wrong thing whenever and wherever given a choice. Facebook was not the first and is not the only company to tell wild lies to advance its own ends, but few companies have done it bigger or suffered less for it. Facebook also did not invent a politics grounded in unreasoning spite and toddler-grade oppositional defiance and relentless resentful signaling; Americans did that all on their own, with some crucial late help from one family of reactionary Australian media types. But Facebook did create an algorithm that valued that style of grievance above all others, which pulled users along behind in turn. In the United States, the culture wanders, hunted and lost, through the virtual and nonvirtual wreckage those decisions made, without even the armor afforded by a V.R. bear costume. Abroad, where Facebook has been criminally indifferent at best and actively complicit at worst in abetting the spread of dangerous medical misinformation and genocidal rhetoric, the damage has been infinitely worse.
...Continues at link
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