Metaverse of deception

The future is metaverse, says Mark Zuckerberg. The Facebook founder and CEO on Thursday announced that the beleaguered social media company will no longer be called Facebook but Meta.

If there was one thing that stood out in last week’s announcement, it was the unspoken rather than the spoken. What Zuckerberg said: “Facebook is an iconic social media brand. But right now, our brand is so tightly linked to one product that it can’t possibly represent what we’re doing today let alone in the future.”

What he didn’t say: “We’re just going to try to sweep under the rug the scandals that have recently plagued Facebook. We’re moving on to create the metaverse hoping that you’ll just forgive and forget the bad things we did or have caused to happen.”

The promise of more advanced computer-generated technology to create a seamless immersive virtual reality is nothing new. And if the latter is going to be built with Zuckerberg’s technology anyway, I have reason to feel worried rather than excited.

Zuckerberg’s act reminds me of an oft-repeated campaign line being mounted by supporters of a Philippine presidential candidate. “Forgive and forget because it’s time to move on to the future.” It is a future, they failed to say, that will be directed by the same shady and unrepentant characters of the past.

Social media platforms like Facebook have allowed such characters to unleash an army of trolls, fake followers, and social media bots (sets of algorithms that mimic human behavior) in order to spread fake news and create an appearance of genuine engagement around a revised version of the past.

Facebook employees have recently blown the whistle on how the company repeatedly failed to ignore warnings that it has become a platform for hate speech, misinformation, and societal polarization. “As Facebook becomes Meta, it seems Zuckerberg is hoping a new name will spell a new beginning for the beleaguered social media giant,” reports DW News, a German public broadcast service.

But there is no such new beginning if a heedless and reckless computer genius like Zuckerberg continues to overlook the secondary effects of new technology. Facebook was undoubtedly created to replace the old ways of communicating and social networking. In an instant it connected us to past and present friendships and kinships. In it we shared so much of ourselves and our curated lives to our friends and even to the whole world.

Yet its side effects are more significant than the old constraints it has freed us from. Before we realized it, deception has invaded where we have been communing. Mesmerized by digital technology, many of us can no longer recognize what is fake and what is authentic.

By simply rebranding Facebook as Meta, Zuckerberg is signaling more of the same lack of values and recklessness that have defined his company. Only this time, the company is levelling up the ecology of deception and personal data exploitation into the entire spectrum of augmented reality.

The future that Zuckerberg envisions is where we can live inside a virtual reality rather than meet up with people in real life. Judging from Facebook’s shady record, that virtual reality can set you up in an environment of targeted advertisements, disinformation, and dopamine-inducing features that Facebook is already known for.

If I’m worried, it’s not for myself. I have seen enough people, young and old, getting distracted from their physical, tactile world and are helplessly transfixed into blue screens, and making real-world choices based on a digital platform that Zuckerberg is now envisioning to be in a 3D environment.