Zuck has never had an original idea in his head, ever. His initial claim to fame, prior to FB, at least on college campus' was making a "hot or not" clone utilizing photos from various Harvard facebooks. Every idea since then has been someone elses or he's tried to take the Apple approach of "let someone else do it first, then we improve on it" except he has never been able to nail down the second part. The only reason FB became successful was the initial exclusivity and it filled the gap of a post 20-something myspace/ICQ/AOL IM world.

I absolutely agree with you but I think that take is a bit short-sighted and undercuts just how evil this stuff is.

Tom Nicholas did a Youtube video on the metaverse a while back (oh my god it was 4 years ago, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TM00M-dRMBk) and it's been stuck in my head ever since. The pivot towards VR was an attempt to get even deeper ahold of our attention and what better way to do that than with goggles that are constantly in front of our eyes? The same with AI as it attempts to insert itself as a substrate layer of all technologies, and again with the smart glasses.

It's easy to dismiss these efforts as hilariously misguided but they're not. They're extremely calculated and he only needs it to pay off once to make everything worth it, and I think there are others that realize this as well. We just gotta keep praying that these efforts burn him out before they strike it big. I'm neither a praying nor gambling man, but praying is all we got right now to stand in his way and I wouldn't put money on the certainty of Facebook's failures ...

Those were already popular before he bought them, and then he made them worse.

He bought 100 lottery tickets through acquisition (probably more) and 2 of them hit.

And Oculus

Two other things I don't use.

How on earth can you steal the working thing but not the idea? I mean if it was your idea.

Ugh. I'm so sorry and angry every time I think on this...

...Full surveillance state. I do believe there is some end game these tech...on the horizon...matter of them making it come to fruition before reality crashes down on their heads...

We should bankrupt them faster because it's what they deserve, and the progress needs to be slowed at all costs.

But the reasons why all this is unfolding? Very clear to see, and you even referenced them without really pausing to consider.

Fascism isn't stupider this time around (in so far as being beyond the already astronomical stupidity required to believe it's a solution to fucking anything).

It's desperate. They didn't pivot away from their little spaceship dreams and into AI because it's more profitable. They don't care to come ahead in an economically sound world.

I'm sorry. Time has ran out on the climate and our biosphere, as far as them retaining the properties that allowed us the 'Modern World'.

There is no longer an avenue that averts widespread desolation, and they've known it all along because they don't actually all ignore scientific consensus, they just pay for the masses to ignore it.

It's going to be a gnarly and awful time, but humans aren't wired to just give up and die.

Hence the total surveillance state. Hence the mass casual cruelty with mass deaths. Hence the persecution of anyone who might oppose or see through it.

The world as we know it will be reduced to ashes, in our lifetimes, and we'll have to scramble to do whatever our species will do just to barely persist in some form, as that is just what we do.

They dream of a techno feudalist dreamscape where each little Dragon has their manageable fiefdom composed of a diminished and controllable populace to continue to carry out their self-aggrandizing whims. They can burn all of the economy now, because they're trying to trade it for straight power.

Joke's on them, they'll die by the masses too, and those that don't, will die by the masses. It's not that hard for thousands of angry and with nothing to lose people to go after them.

Their dream of Autonomous Weapon guardians is as laughable as the rest of the stupidity they've attempted and failed at throughout the years: It will be as imperfect a solution to what they're attempting as anything else they've ever done.

But we collectively let them have control of the playground while it was fresh and clean, so now we gotta deal with their bullshit king of the hill fantasies and the results of their evil stupidity.

I do believe there is some end game these tech billionaires believe is on the horizon

I think it's just a variant of the standard republican "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter". They think financial wealth is something they can just create out of thin air using AI (the way that government creates wealth out of thin air by printing money, allegedly), so as long as they acquire the data centers to fuel it, by whatever means necessary, they'll be all right in the end.

It’s all saturated and nobody really needs anything new anymore. There’s nowhere to go. We should expect to see some of these firms suddenly collapse like Silicon Valley Bank did.

In a sane system, he wouldn't have so much to lose.

But he's sitting on a functional monopoly bolted onto a surveillance state with infinite money. So he can keep fucking up forever.

Not when he's spending it on creating the Torment Nexus.

Why so? Hoarding money, as well as burning them, is practically equivalent to returning them to the treasury. Spending them wastes labour.

Yeah, Same here honestly

just wanted to add to the list that google bought writely and immediately started making it worse as google docs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalyr

IMO it’s almost worse than if G+ flopped completely. Google+ was actually awesome for the specific world of smalltime pen and paper RPGs. But of course, that one creative community of people designing & publishing cool stuff wasn’t enough to justify its cost, or challenge Facebook for supremacy, so they pulled the plug even though plenty of people were still using it. Just a waste.

And immediately blew it up after buying it.

What is the state of VR? Still super niche?

He needs to take a deep sea submarine trip, that’s what he needs

It extra funny when you consider a 23+ year old Virtual World is more popular than his stupid Metaverse.

In all honesty everyone of all ages here use Facebook religiously it’s kinda impressive. As an example, I have a coworker who is five years older than me. We were talking about old music from the 90s and I told him to look up a YouTube channel of old 90s rock music and he looked at me confused and said “what is YouTube?” I gave him a basic rundown of what YouTube is and his response was it sounds like woke bullshit. If it’s not on Facebook, I’m not watching it as far as I know that is his only connection to the outside world other than basic cable.

We should also mention he probably gained lots of money from low hanging non-ethical fruits like illegally providing user data to companies that analyse political motivations.

critical thinking is an old paradigm that most of humanity is unwilling to interact with

Critical thinking is a mechanism for digesting large amounts of information over time, in order to make informed policy decisions.

If you don't have useful information, you don't have spare time, and you don't have any actual input into policy, it lacks value.

I see folks consistently trying to make this an individualist problem. "I figured it out because I think critical! You didn't because you're a dumb-dumb!"

But more often than not, it's two people talking past each other, working off different bodies of data (of debatable quality) that they've incompletely digested. And then all they know how to do with their conclusions is yell "You're an idiot!" at people who disagree.

How do you reach large numbers of people to form a consensus? How do you collaborate with them towards a tangible benefit?

Curiously enough, Facebook used to provide a mechanism for this purpose. And the fact that it doesn't anymore - that it is largely a trap for weak, confused, vulnerable people to scream at one another while they get scammed - speaks more to the profit engine of the service than the core competency of any of its members

I actually don’t mind this concept of a „town square“, but I think that it doesn’t work with so many people all just shouting into the void. The best form of social media seems to be this Reddit/lemmy forum style with categoriesed conversations in sub spaces