COLUMNS

Ready for a new idea from a company that can't be trusted?

Tim Rowland
Columnist

Last week came the news that Facebook plans to change its name and get about the business of creating a metaverse. Virtual reality created by virtual idiots. 

Imagine coming down to the breakfast table and seeing two guys sitting there, one with bloodshot eyes and a goatee wanting to pick back up last night's argument over the debt ceiling, then an oily guy in a cheap suit wanting to sell you term life insurance. 

To a generation that is growing up to think that turning up the thermostat by hand is too much work, maybe the metaverse can’t get here soon enough. But to those of us for whom every day that we retain the ability to still get up out of chairs is perceived as a gift from God, a metaverse is far less consequential than 20th century inventions such as, for example, air conditioning.

The last wave of great inventions largely involved transportation — railroads, steamships, automobiles and airplanes that for the first time ever allowed people to move faster than the speed of a horse. Settlers who went west in a covered wagon were able to return east by air.

Tim Rowland

The metaverse strives to greatly diminish the need for these inventions. Instead of driving to a doctor, counselor or accountant, these people can magically appear in your living room. You will be able to sit and chat with a friend who lives across the country; sit in a board meeting or classroom; and speak to an automobile salesman and even test-drive a car.

One day, probably not that far in the future, Zoom will seem as crude as the Model T. 

The benefits, as such, are obvious, from convenience to the savings in time and energy. Those middle managers who still can’t adapt to the idea of remote work — even after the pandemic proved its mettle — will be washed out to sea like grains of sand from the beach.

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With Facebook in charge, you can be sure that the walls of your virtual doctor’s office will be papered with advertisements, and that every turn in a virtual world will be treated as a chance to sell you something or brainwash you into supporting some dystopian agenda.

Addicted to ever-increasing profits, Facebook sees nothing else of concern in this world except cash. Neither the mental well-being of its customers nor American democracy itself is of any consequence. It is the flaw of large-scale capitalism; no amount of money is ever enough, and there is no public good good enough to warrant an application of the brakes.

In 2008, former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan pronounced himself in “a state of shocked disbelief” that American financial institutions had placed short-term cash-grabs above long-term survival. Corporations wouldn’t just run over their own grandmother in pursuit of a buck, they would run over themselves.

Corporations have gone overboard before, causing the government to step in and restore some semblance of order. But there are differences. Companies that cornered the markets on oil or steel, or that made Monopoly money out of home mortgages affected their particular sectors, but not society as a whole. And in the last great wave of industrial advancement, we had a functioning government that was willing to bust trusts and believed in fair competition.

Facebook, by contrast, permeates and shapes households around the world, across all demographics, its unsavory behavior enabled by a dysfunctional government.

Mark Zuckerberg could be Thomas Paine for all we know, but by outward appearance he seems to have no particular sense of love nor loyalty toward America. If those who would subvert our nation are paying cash, it’s all the same to him. 

He jumped ship to Europe for his metaverse project, supposedly because it could offer better engineers. Curious, isn’t it, that a believer in virtual reality would make such a decision based on geography. More likely, as former Facebook employees of conscience step forward, and more lawmakers on both sides of the aisle fear losing their influence to a promoter of cat videos, Facebook understands it’s wearing out its welcome on this side of the pond.

Even more telling is that it is purging its ranks of anyone privy to sensitive information who is perceived to have a soul and might one day speak about what’s going on behind closed doors. 

The stated reason for this purge was not that it had anything to hide, but that the American people are such children they could never understand the sophisticated, linguistic nuance in which the technological savants at Facebook converse. 

This from the company that popularized “lol.”

To those of a certain age, the idea of metaverse is scary enough, The only thing worse is a metaverse concocted by an organization that has demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that it cannot be trusted.

Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.