Facebook and its plan for “proper empires”

Submitted by AWL on 9 November, 2021 - 7:02 Author: Matt Cooper
Meta

The future is not what it used to be. The tech giants were once seen as harbingers of a new utopia even by some leftists, but no more.

Facebook has seen its moral stock crash, first with its role in the election of Trump and the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Social media is now subject to harsh criticism even by some of those who made it (see Netflix’s The Social Dilemma). In recent weeks, the cache of documents released by ex-Facebook employee Frances Haugen has further damned Facebook. At the same time, Facebook’s rebranding as Meta points to plans that will make its commercial proposition even more harmful.

Haugen’s revelations were not the first time that Facebook has been shown to be aware that its products (which include Instagram and WhatsApp) were causing harm, but now the degree of Facebook’s knowledge of the extent and nature of this harm is clear.

Damaging

The most immediate revelation was that Facebook was pushing ahead with rolling out Instagram Kids (for ten to thirteen year olds) when it knew it had unresolved issues with the impact of Instagram on teenage girls’ mental health. One document reported over a third of Instagram users in the UK who struggled with mental health found that Instagram made this worse, but felt compelled to return to the site for fear of missing out.

Other documents implicated Facebook in human rights abuses around the world. Facebook’s investigators uncovered Facebook and Instagram being used by Mexican drug cartels to recruit and train hit men, by the Ethiopian state to build sectarian armed militias, and by human traffickers in the Middle East. In each case, Facebook’s reaction was slow and inadequate.

The use of Facebook by Myanmar’s military in whipping up hatred against the Rohingyas is well established. Facebook did too little too late, and was forced to admit as much in 2018. That Facebook is playing the same role in Ethiopia now shows that it has not learnt the lesson.

The Haugen papers show WhatsApp being used in India to spread anti-Muslim hatred, playing an important role in the violence of February 2020 that left 53 dead. India is Facebook’s biggest single market. Here, it has staff on the ground and considerable infrastructure. The reason for inaction was not lack of capacity, but a wish not to antagonise the Hindu-chauvinist BJP government.

The list goes on: it is long and revealing of Facebook’s attitude.

In the midst of the Haugen accusations, Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg chose to announce that his company would now be known as Meta (although individual applications will continue to be known as Facebook etc.).

Meta

This has been interpreted as an attempt to rebrand Facebook and distance it from the opprobrium of the Haugen revelations. But it may be the opposite of this: an act of arrogant defiance. Facebook, as Haugen has amply shown, is not fit to run social media sites. The announcement of the creation of Meta indicates that Zuckerberg now has his sights firmly on what comes after social media: the metaverse.

No-one knows what the “metaverse” is, or if it will ever exist. But many think that it is the next stage in the development of people’s digital lives.

First, in the late 1960s, came the internet. This was wires (and now wireless connections) joining computers up, for the military, scientists and a few geeks. In the early 1990s: the World Wide Web. Through telephone modems, home computers connected to other computers. This needed addresses (http), and so directories (Facebook was initially conceived of as one) and then search engines became central to the web. This was the “information superhighway”, largely a process of finding fixed data (text, pictures) and a little retail.

Then around 2000 came Web 2.0, characterised by social media (like Facebook) and sites for user-generated content (then My Space, now TikTok). These structures focused less on finding data than users sharing “content”. The emerging giants learnt to monetise their user base largely through data collection to target advertising and refining the “attention economy” to hold their audience. There have been important developments since - the internet of things, Siri-type voice-controlled devices, and streaming - but they have not transformed the internet that people see.

The investors in tech are now convinced that the next leap forward will be into the metaverse, where the interaction will not be through a phone or a keyboard but Augmented Reality (AR) (that is superimposed on what you see) or through immersive Virtual Reality (VR). The VR version is the more complete metaverse, and that is where Facebook-Meta and many investors focus. The pathfinders for this are “massively multiplayer online games” where a large number of players interact in an online digital environment. While many of these started as shooting games, some always had a more social agenda. The Fortnite group of games built in sociability, many users using the game as a hangout. Fortnite expanded, even before Covid-19 lockdowns, into activity such as online concerts.

Facebook has been developing the potential for this kind of interactive environment for some time. It bought the VR headset company Oculus in 2014, and in 2017 changed its mission statement from “connecting people” to “building communities”. It has since developed Horizon Worlds, a VR platform an the basis for such an online community. Metaverse developers are seeking to create a virtual space where real people can interact, shop, consume media, play games and perhaps even work.

Of course, no-one knows if this is the way that social media will develop. No-one in 1990 had conceived of social media or search engines let alone that they would be the source of grotesque wealth. But now tens of billions dollars in R&D funding are shaping what will come next. The future is no longer being botched together in garages and college dorms.

The danger is that every current problem with social media and exploitation of data will increase exponentially if the metaverse develops as its financial backers wish. A few examples will have to suffice here.

Problems

First, as internet and the web developed, they retained some aspects of being a public space. The metaverse will be the product of huge investment and will exist inside huge servers with highly sophisticated software and hardware. The metaverse will be to Facebook as a modern factory is to the handloom. It will immediately and aggressively seek a return.

Second. Facebook and the other giants are the tech companies that have been the most ruthless in their drive to become monopolies, to amass a global user base, hold its attention and monetise it while matching this with an utter disregard for the personal and social consequences of these actions. As one of the venture capitalists pushing investment into the metaverse has written, “the Metaverse will be a place in which proper empires are invested in and built, and where these richly capitalised businesses can fully own a customer [and] control [their] data”. The metaverse will be Facebook on steroids.

Third. Social media’s problems may well be amplified in the metaverse. The launch of Meta featured Zuckerberg interacting with a younger, thinner, pastier-faced Mini-Zuck avatar. In this vision of the metaverse users will be represented by avatars of themselves. If self-presentation on Instagram is a source of body dysmorphia, how much worse will it be if you spend time with an idealised avatar representation of yourself?

Haugen’s point is more than that Zuckerberg is not fit to run Facebook. Even more importantly, he is not fit to run what will come next. It does not look like capitalists generally will be more responsible.

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