Thread: Met Averse? The future of VR?

Otherland - Tad Williams

Facebook Launches Major Corporate Rebrand To "Metaverse" As Zuck Tries To Move On From Scandals

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After announcing plans to hire 10,000 workers in Europe (despite a looming global corporate tax agreement that could substantially increase his firm's tax burden) to get to work on building the Facebook Metaverse - before Microsoft or Roblox, or - even worse - some scrappy newcomer, can beat them to the punch - Facebook has just leaked a massive scoop to the Verge.
In a move that, in a way, resembles Google's big corporate re-brand to 'Alphabet' in 2015 (and also, in a way, the defense contractor formerly known as Blackwater's numerous name changes over the years to help move past reputational damage) the social media behemoth has decided to 'rebrand' and change its official corporate name from 'Facebook' to, well, something having to do with "the Metaverse."


In keeping with the 'rebranding' theme we mentioned above, some high-level source at Facebook (Zuckerberg?) told the Verge that the decision is meant to "signal the tech giant's ambition to be known for more than social media and all the ills that entail."

The coming name change, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg plans to talk about at the company’s annual Connect conference on October 28th, but could unveil sooner, is meant to signal the tech giant’s ambition to be known for more than social media and all the ills that entail. The rebrand would likely position the blue Facebook app as one of many products under a parent company overseeing groups like Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, and more. A spokesperson for Facebook declined to comment for this story.

Of course, we'd be remiss without sharing a few notes on the timing of this leaked announcement. Facebook's attempt to publicly pivot away from its social media mainstays comes at a time when:

• Antitrust regulators have been trying to break up the company for some time now
• Whistleblower Frances Haugen's explosive claims, in leaked documents and in Congressional testimony, are only a couple of weeks in the rearview
• Just yesterday, Democratic Sens. Warren and Brown demanded the company halt its stablecoin pilot project meant to provide virtually free remittance payments between the US and Guatemala.

Even without the new hires in Europe, Facebook already has more than 10,000 employees building AR glasses that Zuckerberg believes will eventually be as ubiquitous as smartphones. In July, he told The Verge that, over the next several years, "we will effectively transition from people seeing us as primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company."
But here's the real key line in the Verge report: "a rebrand could also serve to further separate the futuristic work Zuckerberg is focused on from the intense scrutiny Facebook is currently under for the way its social platform operates today."
As for what Zuck is saying, he told the Verge over the summer that the metaverse is "going to be a big focus, and I think that this is just going to be a big part of the next chapter for the way that the internet evolves after the mobile internet," Zuckerberg told The Verge’s Casey Newton this summer. "And I think it’s going to be the next big chapter for our company too, really doubling down in this area."
Put another way: Facebook is moving on from all of its past scandals involving its social media platforms - whether it's antitrust, or evidence that management does virtually nothing to stop human trafficking around the world, or teen girls feeling bad about themselves on Instagram. Zuck is officially done talking about it. So don't even try dragging him in front of Congress for another hearing.
But don't worry, because there's already been plenty of new criticism for Zuck to answer to regarding his new favorite obsession. Tuesday evening, Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted a crack suggesting Facebook's metaverse will be just as "dystopian" as science fiction writers imagined it would be 30 years ago.

As for what the new name might be, well, we imagine there will be plenty of speculation about that.

The future of VR is remote sex.

Maybe thr RT twist

Having bulldozed most real-life relationships already, Mark Zuckerberg is now moving to strip away what’s left of our expectations of privacy by dragging us kicking and screaming into an online padded cell called the ‘metaverse’.
The emergence of all-too-perfect whistleblower Frances Haugen, backed by a bevy of PR valkyries declaring Facebook a profit-seeking hive of hate, might suggest to some that the social network’s goose is cooked. But while the government and censor-happy NGOs delusionally battle over how best to carve up Facebook’s carcass, CEO Mark Zuckerberg is busy leveling up, leaving the wreck of real-life social interaction behind while he crafts a new virtual holding pen for the millions daily glued to Facebook and Instagram.
Under fire politically for putting profits before users’ welfare – an attribute that describes every corporation in existence – Facebook’s m.o. has been clear since the platform’s early days. The platform exists to slurp up as much data as physically (and metaphysically) possible before the user realizes he’s being used and stops logging in. Now that there’s no longer any doubt about that in the public eye, Zuckerberg is free to go full Manifest Destiny, reaching into users’ minds in search of ever more data to pimp out.
“They trust me, the dumb f**ks,” Zuckerberg acknowledged confiding in a friend back in the platform’s early days, when Facebook was still busy wrenching social norms in the direction of full disclosure. But after more than 15 years of data leaks and other ‘accidental’ info spills, users no longer have any expectation of privacy. This places them in an ideal frame of mind to join the Facebook CEO’s metaverse. After all, if you’re going to pilot a virtual version of yourself around a virtual world, wouldn’t you want to tell the software as much about you as possible? Just to get the avatar right, of course.
Facebook has all but reduced online socializing to a choice of five reaction emojis, actively discouraging the expression of meaningful sentiment. Anything that forces the reader to think for more than a few seconds, let alone type out a response, reduces the potential of a “like” or reaction GIF. Users are thus encouraged to fill their timelines with as many banalities as possible. In the metaverse, the user won’t even have the option to display a complex emotional state – their avatar will presumably come with a fixed set of expressions, and the more time spent jacked into the system, the less likely the user will be able to actually feel emotions they can’t display online. Imagine forgetting what it’s like to feel nostalgic for pre-Facebook social interaction – you can bet the metaverse won’t offer that option.
The metaverse will also deal the killing blow to logic and reason, already dangling by a thread after Facebook taught users to outsource their critical thinking to dodgy ‘fact-checkers’. This insidious process began in earnest following the 2016 election and has left users unable to judge new information for themselves. Rather than teach critical thinking – or at least a healthy suspicion of whatever they read on the internet – Facebook and its partners in crime promised an angry Deep State that they’d protect Our Democracy™ itself by walling off controversial ideas. Multiple studies conducted since then have shown users actually becoming more trustworthy of fake news that fact-checkers haven’t gotten around to labeling. Oops!
The platform’s rogue’s gallery of ‘fact-checkers’ include the Atlantic Council (a warmongering think tank sponsored by the likes of NATO and Lockheed Martin), Snopes (run by a prostitute-loving cretin and his overweight cat), and Lead Stories (a group of embittered CNN employees determined to crush conservative viewpoints). They will be the gatekeepers of Zuckerberg’s metaverse, where their opinions, presented as facts, will become even more effective at crowding out reality.
Literally faced with the dilemma ‘Who’re you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?’ metaverse users will have the vision in those ‘lying eyes’ corrected with a few tweaks to their Oculus headset. One need only think of the entire avenues of discussion that have been cut off since 2016 by newsfeed censorship and deplatforming alone to get a chill thinking of how easily ideas (and the people behind them) can be memory-holed in Zuckerberg’s digital playground.
And it’s not just adults who will be lured into the maw of the metaverse. An entire generation has grown up screen in hand, documenting their most intimate moments without a clue as to the outmoded concept of ‘privacy’ their parents once enjoyed. Facebook’s long-standing claim it’s not for kids was finally shredded for good earlier this month, and the platform is unlikely to receive even a slap on the wrist for turning a generation of children into dopamine-deficient zombies with the attention span of goldfish. After all, with kids already being shoehorned into online schooling thanks to governmental overreaction to Covid-19, it’s only a natural fit that they should be given VR goggles and the opportunity to scamper around the metaverse while ‘learning’ – it’s certainly more exciting than sitting in an interminable Zoom ‘classroom’ watching one’s classmates pick their noses.
A theory that has grown almost impossible to deny holds that Facebook is merely the private-sector incarnation of a mothballed DARPA program called LifeLog. That sinister government op was put to bed in 2004, around the same time Facebook went live, and aimed to include every aspect of a user’s life – from what they ate for breakfast, to who they socialized with, to the movies they saw, the books they read and, ultimately, to what they perceived through their sensory pathways. This was to train artificial intelligence to predict their future actions better than the individual themselves.
LifeLog was spiked because Americans traumatized by the Patriot Act were righteously horrified by yet another intrusive government program aimed at slurping up their personal data. But 17 years into the Facebook timeline, a shockingly large percentage of humanity has learned to stop worrying and love Big Brother. Even if Facebook’s resemblance to LifeLog is merely a freakish coincidence, the platform’s recent partnership with Ray-Ban, which created sunglasses capable of surreptitiously recording any given event in the wearer’s life, has made it indistinguishable from that Pentagon project. Given Zuckerberg’s documented willingness to cooperate with the NSA and FBI, as well as its funding links to the CIA, it’s not hard to imagine the glee the US intelligence apparatus feels thinking of billions of Facebook users from all over the world jacking in to a perfectly-backdoored metaverse.
Just a few short years ago, Zuckerberg was flying around the country on what he called his ‘listening tour’, photography team in tow, as he appeared to lay the groundwork for a presidential run. While being blamed for Donald Trump’s 2016 electoral victory may have briefly derailed his megalomaniacal ambitions, his latest power grab could hardly have come at a more advantageous time. With Facebook users spending more time on the platform than ever, forbidden in many cases from socializing with their friends in real life, they’ll be begging to jack into the metaverse. Once inside, however, it remains to be seen whether they’ll be let out.

As mooted and heavily trailed turd polisher extraordinaire Murk Feckerburg has ditched flailing ailing Farcebook seen by the young as their parents channel for new Cy Burr sex machine .
The up side It may soon be possibe for our peek posters to mud wrestle in 3D just in time to save TD
Reg and Chiity in Technicolour, LD and Ant in Technipalor

A less forhtright view here

BREAKING: Mark Zuckerberg announces that Facebook has changed its name to '''Meta''' | The Post Millennial

On Thursday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company would be changing its corporate name to Meta.




Zuckerberg stated during Thursday's online event that the old name of Facebook "doesn't encompass everything that we do." Facebook includes its namesake social media platform, Instagram, and WhatsApp.




According to the New York Post, the new name comes as part of Zuckerberg's push to emphasize a virtual reality world where users can socialize, work, play games and create art, called the "metaverse."
"Our mission remains the same, it's still about bringing people together," said Zuckerberg, noting that the company's apps and brand would be remaining the same.




Meta's logo features a warped infinity logo shaped into the M of the name.
The name change comes after so-called whistleblower Frances Haugen testified before a Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, revealing large issues with the social media company's platforms.