Meta My Ass

It is cold comfort to know that the tech giants who control the 21st Century economy must still be reading superhero comics in their endless adolescence. Some think they’re Buck Rogers and Captain Kirk combined, why not spend billions of their untaxed money on space tourism? And then there’s Zuckerberg, the boy android, as smooth and plastic as any automaton created in a special effects laboratory, creepy as an evil doll pulled from the closet of anxieties. He’s single handedly addicted the planet to his social platform, intoning all the while that all he wants is to connect human beings to one another. Welcome to the Borg!

But now he’s got bigger fish to fry and problems to hide. Rebranding Facebook as Meta, he wants the world to go virtual. Nice name, Meta, but why not just call it The Matrix? Yep, bringing the world’s inhabitants closer together. Mark has missed the news apparently about Facebook’s algorithms contributing to the civil war in this country, not to mention plenty of other countries, lots of money to be made on incivility, not so much on connecting with peace love and understanding. If Facebook is having problems on this front, why bother fixing the algorithms when you can just double down, take the game into the 3rd dimension, put on the Google Glass blinders and provide the illusion of real networks and virtual friendships.

Boldly going where no man has gone before, I think the idea is. Space, no longer the final frontier, not when you can explore the Matrix, the Metaverse, the profit margins. I know, I’m a hopeless Luddite, not very trusting of these brainy little Pied Piper engineers who never really left their bedroom with the Star Wars posters on the wall and the model of the Saturn rocket on the shelf. I fervently hope they can go where no man has gone before. But hopefully go by themselves. Leave the rest of us out of it….

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