When I first watched the insanely-terrible cringe-fest of a promotional video for Meta, I had two reactions. First, I felt like I was watching some cornball Nineties CD-ROM game promo, which it was absolutely identical to in every single, solitary way and fashion.
Second, I quietly thanked God I didn't own any stock in that bloated pyramid scheme of a company, because it was clear that total catastrophe was on its way. I just had no idea it would get here this fast.
Even when you understand how bloated and fraudulent Big Tech is, even when you realize what a scam the so-called "tech boom" has been, even when you realize that real innovation is dead and buried, and even when you understand that the mother of all corrections is about to come smashing down on Silicon Valley's head, the bloodbath at Meta is legendary. Their losses are the worst in history.
And you can feel it- it's almost like all the air has been sucked out of Facebook, and Instagram isn't a sure bet either.
This is literally nothing but PR hype
The utter desperation of the vaporware people are mindlessly calling the "Metaverse" is so blatant, so painfully obvious that Wired Magazine - WIRED MAGAZINE! - is opting out of shilling for Zuckerberg's Waterloo.
Wired, mind you, a magazine whose only reason for existing in the first place is to mindlessly shill for Big Tech.
According to the ever-swelling ranks of Metaverse analysts and chin-strokers, NFTs, a type of cryptocurrency tokens regarded as digital title deeds, will be core components of the Metaverse.
That is when and if such a thing ever exists, of course.
What is most striking about the buzz around the Metaverse is that everyone claims to be building it, but no one knows what it really will be or what it should look like—and whether people will ever want to use it. As WIRED’s editor in chief Gideon Lichfield put it, we are witnessing “a terminological land grab”: Companies and entrepreneurs have sensed some kind of change coming in the air, and they are scrambling to call it the next big thing, put their label on it (in some case going to Meta-rebranding-level extremes), and find ways of monetizing it.
The question is whether we—the intended users—will go along with it.
And the answer is no, of course we won't. How can you go along with some pie-in-the-sky Hail Mary pass that even Zuckerberg himself warns won't even be fully operational until 2030?
For those of you new to the game, when someone like Zuck says something will be this or that by some distant date like 2030, they are actually telling you it's never, ever going to happen. Also, they hope you forget all about it long before their promises turn out to be the total fictions they actually are.
We're at the end of the rainbow now, friends, and there's nothing there but a heap of broken dreams.
Metaverse may well have been whipped up because Zuck and Co. knew that Apple was about to drop the hammer on their shenanigans and it was gonna be bad. Or maybe it's because the entire Facebook experience is dreary, ancient and stale - like the old dial-up AOL without the nostalgia value - and people are getting very sick of the incessant stalking and harassment the company's algorithms and blue-haired commissars unleash on Facebook users.
It's a truism to point out social media platforms like Facebook are just data-mining ops, but it gets to the point that how much data does anyone actually need? If any corporation buying data from Facebook doesn't already know every single thing they would ever possibly need to know by now, they should immediately shuttered and liquidated.
And most of them will be soon enough, don't you worry about that.
How bad is it? Meta recently got up on its high horse and threatened to pull out of Europe unless the EU caved on data-mining. In response, the EU duly told Meta to go fuck itself with a hammer. And how did the Zuck retaliate? Did he start playing hardball? Did he unleash his secret army of ratfuckers on them?
Hardly. The once-mighty Meta folded like a cheap suit.
No, that's not quite strong enough: the once-mighty Meta bent over like a ten-dollar whore in a truck-stop restroom and took it. Every inch of it.
And now Peter Thiel - who some have argued is the real power behind the Facebook throne - is quitting the board to go into politics or something. I don't know if I buy that; I bet Thiel has all the time he needs to do his thing. I just think he's getting off the Titanic while the getting's good.
There's gonna be a lot of fail-stink to go around when the bottom fails out of this thing, and Thiel doesn't want to get any of it on him.
Bluechecks are all wacking each other off in a gleeful circle-jerk, since they're under the strong delusion that Zuck is to blame for Trump. Never mind the fact that their own little dinghys are all headed for a ruinous rock-dashing with Orangey Orangeson gone, there's also the fact that Zuck ponied up over half a billion dollars to buy the election for Biden and the Dems.
Which means he fed into the ecosystem that feeds them. Which means when Meta shits the bed, a lot of other tech companies are sure to follow.
Like maybe Twitter, which has bled out almost half its market cap in just the last six months.
And that means saying sayonara to a very, very huge chunk of campaign cash for the bluechecks' preferred party. And then all these overpaid media idiots will have to finally face up to their core political motivation: their crippling daddy issues.
Listen, I've been shouting to the rooftops for the past seven or eight years that Big Tech is mostly fake, that real innovation is dead and will be dead for the rest of our and our children's lifetimes, that our real problem is not going to be pedowank science fiction fantasies like AI and androids, but the very, very real slow and grinding decline we are facing in our technology, expertise, and ultimately, our living standards.
It brings me absolutely no pleasure to say so. Why would it? I bought into the techno-hype as much as anyone. I don't want people to get wiped out financially or have their careers destroyed. That doesn't do me any good. We're all better off when we're all better off.
Unfortunately, there's a cottage industry out there selling scary stories of secret super science stockpiled in underground bases just waiting to be rolled out for Project Blue Beam, or some equally-ridiculous hoax. But I think these are really just comforting fantasies; The Matrix in place of The Road Warrior, or God help us all, The Road.
Make no mistake: the real fourth-dimensional chess Big Tech has been playing is not about hiding the truth about their secret wonders, it's about hiding the truth that they don't have any secret wonders left. The hat is officially out of rabbits.
Has some crazy stuff been tested? Sure. But it's looking more and more like most of it failed those tests.
It's also looking like Meta - and more besides - are about to learn why our forebears gave up gods like Mithras a long time ago. Because those gods are fickle, capricious and cruel. And their favorite pastime is roto-rootering their own acolytes, out of pure spite as much as anything else.
Curse their names in the Den of Intrigue.
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