Hi Felix, Good stuff!
> On 10/29/2021 1:40 PM Felix Stalder <fe...@openflows.com > mailto:fe...@openflows.com > wrote: > > > I'm sure most of you have heard by now that Facebook is renaming itself > "Meta" and promoting a platform called "Metaverse", basically, a shared, > but heavily customizable VR/AR world. > > If you haven't seen the video from the keynote, have look. You won't be > able to get through the entire 80-minute show (I tried, and failed) but > here are a few minutes to get the flavor of how dated this future feels. > There is nothing in there that you couldn't do in Second Life and it > even looks pretty much the same. > > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gElfIo6uw4g > What i found most, err... 'remarkable' is how much Zuck looks like an avatar. cartoonish, as you wrote. Funky: the next YT clip that YT's AI proposed was titled 'I am worried for humanity's future' ... I stopped long ago to be. I just know ;-) > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gElfIo6uw4g > > The best way to feel of the emptiness of the vision is probably through > a series of super-cuts of the most frequently doled out platitudes: > experience, the physical world, commerce/community, the future, and a > few more. > > https://twitter.com/sam_lavigne/status/1453901401977937921 > > The sheer backwardness and ugliness of the entire vision are depressing > no matter whether you look at it from an aesthetic, social, or economic > perspective. And all of this is made worse by the company's track record > on these things so far. > > The plan is pretty obviously a land grab by the company but the curious > thing is why they believe that such land would exist in the first place. > > This happens exactly at a moment when the political class seems to have > given up preventing global heating to pass dangerous tipping points of > no return. So, this is clearly meant to paper over an increasingly > dystopian world to keep selling the promise of "creativity" and > "self-expression" as a carrot, and a "new economy" as a stick. With > Uber's and Airbnb's promise to monetize your spare resources as a way to > deal with real-life precarity ringing hollow (indeed, monetizing your > life _is_ precarity), the new economy of 3D creators is another promise > to pull yourself up on your own bootstraps. > > But is not just the dated dream of virtual reality replacing physical > reality. What's more, chasing this dream will make physical reality even > worse. For a lot of reasons, waste of resources, diverting attention > towards crap, universalizing bias, and so on. > > Underlying all of this is this notion of the world as a model. Sure, we > all operate with (implicit or explicit) models of the world in order to > make sense of it and be able to act in it. I'm not advocating for some > sort of unmediated "real". > > The problematic element is to have a single model which is supposed to > replace all others. It's not just that such a model is necessarily under > complex (the metaverse is cartoonishly so), but that very notion of a > single model is biased, violent, and will create ugly backlashes. > Perhaps this is the lasting influence of cybernetics, which as its > ultimate horizon has such a unified vision where everything could be > brought into its purview based on the reductionist notion of "information". > > Against this, a plethora of voices -- feminist, anti-racist, ecological, > indigenous, and more -- have sprung up to argue against the > impossibility of such a unified view (often denounced as colonialist). > They advocate for the co-existence of a wide range of > "being-in-the-world", each embodying a different model of the world, if > you will, that cannot be flattened into a single one. Rather, they > retain a considerable degree of incommensurability (the tick sees the > world like no other living being, as J.v.Uxeküll argued as early as the > 1930s) that can only be brought into one to the other through practices > of mutual respect (because one can never fully grasp or contain the > other) and care (because each model/world is in itself incomplete and > depended on others as environment). > > Against this life-affirming irreducible complexity that escapes > cybernetic control is the sad vision of the metaverse, which is both > extremely reductionist and centrally controlled. Yet, even in its most > glossy presentation, this vision is utterly unconvincing. Perhaps this > is a reason to be optimistic and continue to seek ways beyond > "communication and control". > > Back https://cyberpeaceinstitute.org/teams/stephane-duguin/ to Jo Nesbo 'The Leopard'! Cheers, p+7D!
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