Meme posted by Elon Musk with the text “If you die in the metaverse, you die in real life.&rdq
Meme posted by Elon Musk with the text “If you die in the metaverse, you die in real life.” put over a screen capture from Mark Zuckerberg’s video announcing that Facebook would be renamed Meta, October 28-30, 2021. Bottom, photograph by Emilio Morenatti/AP, Ash covers chairs on the terrace of a house, La Palma, Canary Islands, November 5, 2021. Via.–Throughout the presentation, Zuckerberg is fixated on the notions of “presence” and “shared sense of space,” as if the metaverse could somehow provide us with a way of logging off the Internet rather than sucking us deeper in. Watching his video inspires an intensifying sense of cognitive dissonance: very little technology is pictured in the renderings of spacious metaverse homes and offices—in fact, the C.G.I. interiors appear quite analog, with pleasurable glimpses of plants, natural light through wide windows, and textured wood furniture that might have been designed by Charles and Ray Eames. What goes barely acknowledged is the fact that accessing this hypothetical world would require sitting on your couch strapped into a V.R. headset and wearing motion-tracking gloves—not a particularly “natural” state. A single reference to “immersive all-day experiences” suggests that Zuckerberg, far from helping us escape mediating technology, expects that we will be engaging in it for many hours straight.Kyle Chayka, from We Already Live in Facebook’s Metaverse - Who among us wants to inhabit an even more virtual world of Mark Zuckerberg’s creation?, for The New Yorker, November 4, 2021.See also, Either he’s invisible, or he’s everywhere. Either everything’s a mirror, or nothing is. He who knows subjectivity burns at the Subjective Fog’s glance. -- source link
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