‘The Next Facebook Will Be a Tartarus, an Endless Prison for Humanity. I Can’t Wait.’
By Choire Sicha
‘Facebook changed the world permanently and kind of horrifically. If Zuckerberg is still showing up to work, it’s actually because he wants to do it all again except bigger. This is how the real supervillains originate.
I’m excited!’
Facebook is now an old and old-fashioned company. It’s a wildly successful advertising company with incredible tools for marketers.
But Mark Zuckerberg and the voices in his ear — or so I think! I don’t know him! — have to know that almost everything we’ve made in our digital world is sad and rapidly aging. The digital future can’t be just Epoch Times links and an ugly screenshotted meme that your racist uncle posts of Tony Fauci and Hillary Clinton necking in a pizza parlor.
That Facebook is dying, and it’s at least in part because that Facebook’s users are (literally) dying. And there’s nothing our tech overlords want more than (1) to be cool and (2) to achieve the melding of philosophy and technology.
Facebook, a trillion-dollar monopoly, needs to build the next Facebook.
After the Verge broke the news that Facebook may announce a new corporate name next week, tech journalist Casey Newton gathered a bunch of other tech reporters in a live audio-chat hangout on Twitter. What was notable: Nobody knew nothin’. (Or if they did, nobody was saying.)
So far, they’ve figured out:
• It’s possible the name hasn’t even been settled on.
• If it’s real, this is happening quickly — like, next week.
• This is fun! It’s just a little adventure for all of us.
But it’s also a signal about the future. And it’s true that the constellation of Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and various and sundry groups from VR to currency don’t make sense as an entity named Facebook.
Many people have pointed out that Zuckerberg’s frequent invocation of the metaverse could be related to the potential renaming. While that’s all just reading tea leaves, the only reason to evolve something as huge as Facebook would be to create something as ambitious as a metaverse. A next internet that eats travel, banking, entertainment, workplaces, education, health care, maybe even religion and friendship. An Amazon for your mind. A whole world where the phrase logging out can’t even exist.
If you had all that money and infrastructure and all those grumpy, rock-climbing engineers and lobbying connections, you’d make the biggest swing imaginable.
That’s why some of the most important signals for the near future are Facebook’s early experiments with a digital wallet called Novi, for which it brought Coinbase on as a partner, and the company’s slow but steady move toward a proprietary coin called Diem.
READ THE FULL ARTICLE AT INTELLIGENCER
The Haunted Typewriter’s take:
“So you don’t much like civilization, Mr. Savage.” –
See ‘Brave New World’ – conversation between Mustapha Mond and John the Savage – written by Aldous Huxley – for insight.
The tech companies are coming to save us from ourselves. If only the knew the first thing about humanity.
If you want to start a new religion, you’re going to at the very least need to prepare for a crusade to spread it against the opposition.
Not to mention to need to conquer all the outdated religions you have come in NEW and IMPROVED to replace.
I’ve been getting into studying Judaism. In Jewish philosophy, apparently they even teach you how to properly, piously, tie your shoes. We’re going to need something like that when we lose our minds to the technoculture that will steal everything from us in the end. Humanity is forgetting itself, but what can you do. Come back, Shane! Shane! Come back!
God’s a monster. Any man who wants to think he’s God, is a mental ward visit waiting to happen. No matter how much power he surrounds himself with. You and Me, my friend in the Joker cosplay, We will conquer the coming Cyberpunk Dystopia, with the aid of God, and a few space marines.
God has a hard on for Marines.
Is this gonna be a stand-up fight, sir, or another bug hunt?
The Haunted Typewriter 