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Newsticker, link list, time machine: HOLO.mg/stream logs emerging trajectories in art, science, technology, and culture––every day
“Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. I call this enshittification.”
– Canadian sci-fi writer and tech pundit Cory Doctorow, on the decay of social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook and the following mass exodus, or “social quitting,” of users that Doctorow suggests is currently underway
“This POV camera was a little creepy, because it didn’t notify others when it was turned on. When I revealed I was recording, people would sometimes shout, ‘she’s a fed!’ and run away.”
– Privacy reporter Kashmir Hill, describing folks’ cheeky reaction to her recording interactions in the Metaverse. Seriously committing to her story, Hill spent more than 24 hours logged into Horizon Worlds, Meta’s VR social network, to get a sense of who the early adopters are, and how they feel about virtual reality.

“What would your avatar look like with dedicated artists and several weeks of iteration?” sneers Apple engineer Dimitri Diakopoulos on Twitter, after the origin of Mark Zuckerberg’s updated Horizon Worlds avatar is revealed. According to a LinkedIn post, 3D character artist Dylan Dunbar “sculpted, modelled, lit, textured, rendered” the Zuck from scratch, after an earlier version drew widespread ricidule. “We went through probably 40 iterations before landing on something we were happy with.”

“Now look up at the sun, close your eyes, feel completely wrapped in virtual goods and commerce. That is the ultimate expression of social networks. That is the metaverse.”
The Guardian’s own Zuckerbot, on Facebook’s future. As the real Zuckerberg wasn’t available for commentary, technology reporter Julia Carrie Wong worked with Botnik Studios to create “a predictive keyboard trained on the past two years of Zuckerberg’s public statements” and interviewed it instead.
“Cities are the result of a meticulously managed infrastructure. They need a sanitation department to make sure that garbage doesn’t pile up in the streets, and transit authorities to keep the trains on time. They need bureaucrats, not visionaries.”
– Writer Charlie Warzel, commenting on Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg’s retreat “from their bloated, boring second incarnations of the internet” for Web3’s greener pastures. “It’s the dreamers moving on,” he writes of the CEO duo, abandoning the mess of Twitter and Facebook for shiny new vistas.
“Clickbait actors cropped up in Myanmar overnight. With the right recipe for producing engaging and evocative content, they could generate thousands of US dollars a month in ad revenue, or 10 times the average monthly salary—paid to them directly by Facebook.”
Karen Hao, MIT Technology Review’s senior AI editor, on how Facebook and Google not only amplify but fund disinformation
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“Although Facebook plans to delete more than one billion facial recognition templates by December, it will not eliminate the software that powers the system. The company has also not ruled out incorporating facial recognition technology into future products.”
– Technology reporters Kashmir Hill and Ryan Mac, parsing Facebook’s decision to shut down its decade-old facial recognition system over societal concerns
“Since there seems to be growing confusion on this: I have nothing to do with anything that Facebook is up to involving the Metaverse, other than the obvious fact that they’re using a term I coined in Snow Crash. There has been zero communication and no biz relationship.”
– American scifi writer and Snow Crash (1992) author Neal Stephenson, going on the record
“No matter what Mark Zuckerberg calls it, it will remain Zuckerberg Inc. until he relinquishes some power and yields to functional corporate governance.”
– Social media researcher Jennifer Grygiel, on Facebook renaming itself as Meta (for meta-verse) amidst waves of backlash, condemnation, and revulsion
“If realized, the metaverse would become the ultimate company town, a megascale Amazon that rolls up raw materials, supply chains, manufacturing, distribution, and use and all its related discourse into one single service. It is the black hole of consumption.”
– Author Ian Bogost, on silicon fantasies of power. As rumours of Facebook’s metaverse rebranding propagate, Bogost warns: “A metaverse is a universe, but better. More superior. An überversum for an übermensch.”
“In the metaverse Facebook envisions you are the Neopet, and your in-game activities may affect every sphere of life that Facebook already touches: careers, relationships, politics.”
– Writer Kyle Chayka, on the looming “blue-and-gray virtual universe.” Chayka considers Zuckerberg’s plans for an “embodied Internet” by looking at its predecessors, including Fortnite (2017), Second Life (2003), and Neopets (1999).
“Facebook’s problems today are not the product of a company that lost its way. Instead they are part of its very design, built atop Zuckerberg’s narrow worldview, and the careless privacy culture he cultivated.”
– Senior editor Karen Hao, in her review of Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang’s new book An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination. “Between the lines, the message is loud and clear,” Hao concludes: ”Facebook will never fix itself.”

Marking the 37th birthday of Mark Zuckerberg, The Wrong kicks off a four-week long 24/7 stream of Ben Grosser’s ORDER OF MAGNITUDE (2019), a 47-minute supercut of every time the Facebook CEO said the words “more,” “grow,” or metrics such as “one billion” between 2004 and 2019. The piece premiered as part of arebyte On Screen and “acts as a lens on what Mark cares about, how he thinks, and what he hopes to attain.” Now you can now subject yourself to 750 minutes of it—it’s “more more than ever before.”

“There is only one space currently showing a serious commitment to democratically governed user-owned protocols, fair payment for digital labour, data unions and revaluing the arts, and that is the Web3 space.”
– American musician and technologist Mat Dryhurst, on why he believes in the blockchain future
“We’re in the CompuServe age of this stuff. Like, we haven’t even gone to AOL or MySpace or, you know, even Facebook yet in terms of lineages, of how technologies develop.”
Gray Area Executive Director Barry Threw, on the transformative potential of NFTs. “It’s an asset bubble, it’s a hype bubble, and it provides some opportunity for artists to have some traction,” Threw explains. “[But] it’s a market that’s just as interested in buying memes as it is in buying art.”

In the second of a three-post series revealing their spatial computing roadmap, Facebook Researchers reveal in-progress gestural and neural interfaces. One demo shows expressive wrist and finger control mediated by a watch-like wearable reminiscent of the Myo armband; supporting concept videos telegraph aspirations for neural keyboards and that old AR chestnut: a user manipulating GUI elements in 3D space in front of them. However far off the tech is, it’s immediately satisfying to watch one of the researchers gush about the shiny future of neural interfaces where “you and the machine are in agreement about which neurons mean left and which ones mean right” without any mention of data harvesting or his employer’s long history of malfeasance.

“But the truth is Facebook has always been a problem. There is no good Facebook that Facebook can return to being.”
– American writer Joanne McNeil, revisiting early Facebook criticism published in Katherine Losse’s The Boy Kings (2012), Alice Marwick’s Status Update (2013), and Rebecca MacKinnon’s Consent of the Networked (2012)
“I have personally made decisions that affected national presidents without oversight, and taken action to enforce against so many prominent politicians globally that I’ve lost count…. I know that I have blood on my hands by now.”
– Former Facebook data scientist Sophie Zhang in a 6,600-word memo on the company’s failure to combat public opinion manipulation. Shared internally on her last day, the memo is filled with concrete examples of how governments and political interest groups used the platform to consolidate power.
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