The core idea of having a universal layer on top of reality that is owned by any company, at all, is utterly repulsive to me. I'm not sure I have the words to describe it.
The type of world Facebook is describing is always -- 100% of the time -- a dystopia if it is a privatized, corporate-controlled AR/VR layer where ordinary people need permission and contracts to interact with each-other. Anything any single company or coordinated group of FAANG companies make will be awful when scaled up to the level Mark is talking about. There's no promise they can make to me, there's no strategy they can pursue to ease my worries. Purely by virtue of a single company (or a group of FAANG companies) being in charge of it, it's already garbage.
Having said that, of all of the companies to try and assert control over a "metaverse", Facebook is probably amongst the least suited and most dangerous companies to do so. If they can't even run the Oculus platform competently, how can they possibly claim they're competent enough to run a giant industry-wide platform on top of Oculus?
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> The metaverse will be a collective project that goes beyond a single company. It will be created by people all over the world, and open to everyone.
And this stuff is just complete nonsense. No platform that Facebook has ever been involved with has ever even remotely come close to being "collective" or "open" to everyone worldwide, and it's just wildly insulting to pretend that anything about that is going to change now.
Facebook can't even launch this announcement article without making a bunch of XHR requests and falling over if Javascript isn't enabled. So sure, let's all close our eyes and pretend that they're magically capable of building an accessible, open VR platform that respects user privacy/agency. What has Facebook ever done in its entire history as a company that would make us believe that they are in any way trustworthy or qualified enough to try and build a consumer platform/medium of this scale?
The type of world Facebook is describing is always -- 100% of the time -- a dystopia if it is a privatized, corporate-controlled AR/VR layer where ordinary people need permission and contracts to interact with each-other. Anything any single company or coordinated group of FAANG companies make will be awful when scaled up to the level Mark is talking about. There's no promise they can make to me, there's no strategy they can pursue to ease my worries. Purely by virtue of a single company (or a group of FAANG companies) being in charge of it, it's already garbage.
Having said that, of all of the companies to try and assert control over a "metaverse", Facebook is probably amongst the least suited and most dangerous companies to do so. If they can't even run the Oculus platform competently, how can they possibly claim they're competent enough to run a giant industry-wide platform on top of Oculus?
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> The metaverse will be a collective project that goes beyond a single company. It will be created by people all over the world, and open to everyone.
And this stuff is just complete nonsense. No platform that Facebook has ever been involved with has ever even remotely come close to being "collective" or "open" to everyone worldwide, and it's just wildly insulting to pretend that anything about that is going to change now.
Facebook can't even launch this announcement article without making a bunch of XHR requests and falling over if Javascript isn't enabled. So sure, let's all close our eyes and pretend that they're magically capable of building an accessible, open VR platform that respects user privacy/agency. What has Facebook ever done in its entire history as a company that would make us believe that they are in any way trustworthy or qualified enough to try and build a consumer platform/medium of this scale?