The tycoon of the F***book empire knows a little something about online behaviors and electronic interactions, as well as beating the Trump administration to the finish line in building a nuisance of a residential wall surround his complex and perpetually infuriating neighbors. Experts believe that the prodigious data collection firm and marketing agency disguised as a digital community, led to astray to the land of reckless unethical indiscretions that indelible CEO Mark Zuckerberg knows a little too much about the habits of his end users to the extent that it has reached the point of a self-serving fetish that boils down to control. And like all pathological offenders, the dear leader of the expansive galactic world of servers and posts drenched by a decadent syrup of raw information is running from his past by changing the name of his parent corporate nexus to the underwhelming and laughable “Meta”.
While the pun is supposed to encapsulate the essence of the “metaverse”, those with a basic grasp of HTML are snickering in their Halloween costumes, as “meta tags” were used heavily in the initial days of the internet by facilitating and interaction between web pages and search engine crawlers and increasing the chances of a website being listed on a Google, Yahoo, etc. While the blunder of the tyrannical dictator of the tech noosphere is fun, as in the city of Seattle not thinking the name of the South Lake Union trolley all the way through (SLUT), Zuckerberg’s propensity to land head first in controversy, culminates a forgettable series of miscalculations and miscues ranging from deliberately burying Conservative content, to the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
In a sense F***book’s unquestioned and unchallenged leader is attempting to flee from the scene of the crime, the latest controversy, a viral claim from former employee and whistleblower Frances Haugen that the social network empire is toxic and unsafe while promoting profits over detrimental mental health effects. Zuckerberg is wagering that the :15-second spans and waning short term memory capabilities will completely cover his tracks by Black Friday. Disturbingly, he is not wrong in having zero faith in a society which values instant gratification over critical thinking skills, and memes over novels, conjuring up the necessary lateral mental imaging strategies in embracing the concept of history. The “Meta” brand will replace the moniker of F***book as the name for the lucrative parent corporation which operates the social media platform F***Book, Instagram, WhatsApp, and a myriad of other tech ventures. Search engine universe Google made a similar play when facing a potential boiling cauldron trials of indulgence during a corporate espionage and self-driving “car wars” spat with Uber in restructuring under the parachute of Alphabet, Inc. The self-driving vehicle caper drove the entity directly into the intersection of cyber limbo, before the smartphone phenomenon kicked in, and all was forgiven.
As Zuckerberg once again deploys a cheap parlor trick in resuscitating the reputation of his hundred billion dollar sensory deprivation chamber for the ninth time in the last five years, the PR magnates are spinning the narrative to infer that the publicly traded private company is undergoing an organic paradigm shift in the next stages of evolutionary bureaucracies. In reading between the ruthless software tyrants effusive diatribe, either the sessile material of the digital creature and associated bots are clamoring for a change in handle as an indication of defiant sentience, or this whole idea of contrived descriptive psychobabble celebrating the existence of the Metaverse (no offense to William Gibson), is just a fancy mechanism of averting prolonged scrutiny.
The inexplicable consumer loyalty to social media despite the continuous changes in features and relentless additions to the already ambiguous “Terms and Conditions” policies leading to digital sanctions that include censorship or banishment, is baffling, considering the prevalent role that the domains have played in elections on all levels. While the exact scope of influence is still not fully understood pertaining to legitimate advertising and battalions of coded rogue disruptors, the surprisingly tepid response by end users to mass defect maybe indicative of a slight case of the Stockholm Syndrome and enduring the trials and tribulations of an app requiring no financial obligations, coupled with the occasional release of endorphins while reading a worn and recycled inane post that features a video of puppies.
While online habits have been studied for two decades, the craving for interaction has never been more pronounced, especially in the nightmare of Covid-19. Of course Zuckerberg through is minions realizes this truth and chooses to fight the battle of the irresponsive and attrition in appealing to the lowest common denominator and fickleness of his constituents. The connotations of the F***book brand may be tarnished with lexicon describing the out of control nature of the electronic forum, but the comprehensive perfect digital of the internet still paints the social network with an overall positive brush, despite its blatant offenses.
Metaverse aside, Zuckerberg’s myopic utopia has still managed to assault ethics, imagination, and privacy, while ushering in the onslaught of the information age. A challenge that humanity is currently not equipped to deal with as the boutique software musings of Big Brother are at the forefront of large sums of federal government grants allocated for data collection and processing. It would be of no surprise if this personal information is “leaked” for the sake of ideological warfare, or worse.
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