The problems at Meta

 Meta-tastophe!

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, we lived in the reign of the mega-empire known as the 'Facebook' supremacy. A time where all lived under the purview and 'grace' of our poorly-masked cybernetic overlord Mark Zuckerberg, whom harvested the data of his citizens for capital sustenance. His was a total and unending reign, entwined like a spiderweb around every online service in all the Internet. You want to interact with the news- 'Share to Facebook' would present itself as a pop-up. Show off a funny video- whilst you share it to Facebook. Maybe even skip the arduous process of making another damned website password, for why bother when you can send that login token to your Facebook account? I'm sure Overlord Zuckerberg would treat that data fairly... but as with all those driven by hubris; a fall would inevitably come. But whereas Rome fell to destructive whimsy of a spoilt and cruel Emperor Commodus, albeit through the bleeding of several proceeding regimes, Facebook died to the machinations of the same man who rose it. Perhaps an even greater betrayal, in the grand scheme of things.

You see, Mark Zuckerberg had an idea. Not really. Mark Zuckerberg stole an idea and proved to be better at selling it than it's original creators, both of which are so monumentally dense that they were key cheerleaders to the NFT boom of 2021. But the problem with Facebook, was that it became too big to stay ontop of the game. Like the mile-long ship that takes a week to turn, Facebook found it's next generation of potential users stolen away by fresher and differently attuned social media apps. Platforms that always seemed one step ahead of Facebook, and whenever Zuck tried to steal their ideas, suddenly that feature became pastiche or 'uncool'. That was how Facebook slid behind in the culture war; all it's other failures were purely of it's own construction. The failures in moderation, lack of foreign language development, facilitation of a real world genocide in Myanmar, and the whole widely exposed data selling side gig that Facebook was living off all tainted the seemingly unfellable monolith.

Because whilst not a single one of these issues could have single-handily defeated the cultural phenom that is Facebook; all of them mixed together could certainly chip enough away at the impenetrable armour to do much worse than kill. They could chip deep enough to cause doubt. And doubt is a weed. It's digs and it entwines and when it's stuck in deep and sturdy enough that weed will grow, feasting on your healthy thoughts and dreams like a leech. Those who ignore it, will some day become a slave to it. And those who try to blindly fight it, may just end up becoming it's fool. I believe Zuckerberg to be a reformed victim of the former, now entrapped by the latter; and his billion dollar unsinkable ship has been brought along for that ride, aware but unresponsive to the iceberg of their own creation the monolith is deftly sailing towards. 

And to what do we owe this sinking of fortunes? A simple change in direction. When the 'endless growth' model of Facebook prime began to taper off, Mark did the thing that truly desperate 'visionaries' do; he snatched ahold of a wisp out of the air and declared that if he threw enough money and attention to it, then that wisp would one day become the life raft which saves him from his predicament. That wisp was VR, and his life raft was called the Metaverse. And the reeds and bamboo sticks bashed together to try and keep his rickety dreams afloat are the hard works of the Oculus team which he bought to build off, and the engineers he has haply ignored in the many years since. All those billions sunk are slowly becoming little more than bobbing refuse drifting apart from Zuck's ramshackle life raft and the billionaire cyborg has no one else to blame other than his own misfiring sub-routines. 

In this mess and chaos it becomes easy to forget that Palmer Lucky is not the only significant tech-space fellow who slipped into the Facebook vortex before being spat out. So was John Carmack, lead programmer of some of Id Software's most influential and iconic titles. (I'm talking Wolfenstein and DOOM) Apparently the man was a genuine believer in VR and it's applications and really wanted to make something transformative and bettering through his time as head of the VR department. Of course, one might ask why someone with an ostensibly moral outlook on his life goals would work for a company who facilitated a genocide; but we all have our dichotomies we must wrestle with in life, now don't we? Sometimes we work with monsters for the good of everyone.

But it hasn't been good, has it? Facebook have changed it's name, it's focus, but never the colour of it's own muddy. blood-splattered stripes. How could it ever? Meta is just a front to extract even more intrusive data packets out of users for a better market cap to keep the tech-giant solvent for the next decade. All the talk about making life easier and revolutionising the way that the world interacts with one another fails to live up to the slightest of scrutiny. And for those like me who stood about aghast wondering how it is that no one within the company could see the utter gibberish their CEO was spewing; turns out there were! John Carmack was the little voice inside the machine trying to fix the particulars of a flawed construction. He even claimed to have been ignored by Mark himself, although it's hard to know whether he's conflating upper management with Mark or if he literally had meetings that went nowhere with the metal man.

From Carmack's accounts, sent in an internal memo that he later published on Twitter after fearing that the leaks to the news weren't providing the right context; Meta is an absolute money dump. A garishly huge organisation that wastes money and manpower on ineffectual policies and bad-faith ideas that end up going nowhere. Not least of all the Metaverse avatar controversy, which shook the company into a state of self consciousness that has them promising simply impossible fidelity for the platform they seek to make. It sounds as if the key decisions are being made purely by people who have literally no idea how the nitty gritty of actually coding and building the product actually works; which leads to an impassable gorge between expectation and reality which, through the magic of marketing, is starting to seep into the public too. Mark is the architect of his own mockery.

Meta's 'Horizon Worlds' metaverse is something of a disaster. The common man can't afford to interact with it thanks to the prohibitive software and hardware price, the tech hobbyists know about better competing products they'd rather spend their time enjoying and the tech curious are finding empty worlds that fail to hold their attention for more than a month. Yes, Horizon worlds has an average turn-over rate of one month. For the apparent future of social interaction; that isn't exactly great. Now Carmack has had enough and fled for greener pastures, and Palmer Lucky is still busy trying to actively break international morality conventions by designing a VR headset that can kill you- (Yes, he's a weeb for the single worst popular Anime ever; SA:O) there really is no more superstar VR cheerleaders left for Mark to alienate. Which leaves the metal man alone to drag what's left of his reputation into the dirt with more bad decisions piled atop more failed ideas. There's something to be said about commitment and dedication, but knowing when to quit is it's own strength too. Maybe someone should program that life lesson into the Zuck.