I am a big fan of super cuts, still sacrificed last Sunday afternoon to go
through all the 60 "experiences" Zuckerberg promised "to unlock".
https://pad.profolia.org/s/experience
As at least 9000 others, I loved Sam Lavingne’s supercut of Zuckerberg’s Meta
demo.
I also see a huge therapeutic potential in it. Maybe UX designers will see
themselves in this mirror? Saying “experience” instead of “interface,”
“application,” “web,” “game,” “virtual reality,” “telepresence,” “phone call,”
“software,” etc, is an illness of the industry.
It’s a pest that broke out of UX circles a decade ago and took over big and
small tech. Zuckerberg is not the only one who is suffering from experience
diarrhea. It’s everywhere. In marketing texts, in lectures, in presentations
and conversations, and in the interfaces themselves.
I usually advise my students to pause every time they want to say “experience”
or “technology” and try to reflect on what exactly they are talking about. I
don’t think I’m in a position to suggest this exercise to Mark Zuckerberg. I
will just did it for him.
The following transcript of the Metaverse Event was copied from
https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/meta-facebook-connect-2021-metaverse-event-transcript.
I edited each of the 60 occurrences of experience in oder to reveal what the
word might have stood for, if for anything at all. Experience means correct use
of the word as a verb or a noun.
(I cut out some conversational and “metaverse demo” parts, unless experience
was mentioned in them.)
https://pad.profolia.org/s/experience#Oct-28-2021-Meta-Facebook-Connect-2021-Metaverse-Event-Transcript
---- Felix Stalder 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
>
>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".
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>--
>| |||||||||||||||||| http://felix.openflows.com |
>| Open PGP | http://felix.openflows.com/pgp.txt |
>
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