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“Be very wary of profit-driven corporations using the AGI patina of mysticism to market centralized tech always ultimately developed in service of growth.”
– Signal Foundation president and AI Now Institute co-founder Meredith Whittaker, on Meta joining the race for artificial general intelligence (AGI). “AGI is a marketing term overlaid with quasi-religious symbolism,” Whittaker warns, reminding her followers that the term AI, too, was coined in 1956 to attract grant money.
“In his feud with Zuckerberg, Musk is essentially playing Ric Flair without the charisma.”
– Tech reporter and Platformer founder Casey Newton, parsing the drama around the proposed cage fight between the two Silicon Valley giants in show sports terms. “As a connoisseur of pro wrestling, I’m quite familiar with the character Musk is playing here: the big talker who can’t back it up in the ring,” writes Newton. “Wrestling promoters have made a lot of money with cowardly heel champions [like Flair] who go to great lengths to avoid having to face their adversaries in combat.” In the real world, the Musk vs Zuck feud moves markets and, Newton argues, deserves a lot more skepticism.
“People should know that it isn’t just Meta—at every social media firm there are workers who have been brutalized and exploited. But today I feel bold, seeing so many of us resolve to make change. The companies should listen—but if they won’t, we’ll make them.”
– TikTok moderator turned labour organizer James Oyange, heralding the newly-formed African Content Moderators Union. Spurned by widespread PTSD and wages as low as $1.50 USD an hour, Oyange promises to challenge ByteDance, Meta, OpenAI, and other tech companies that offshore content moderation to Africa.
“What just drives me up the wall is that we appear to have decided the way AI is going to work is through a competitive dynamic between Google, Microsoft, and Meta.”
New York Times columnist Ezra Klein, airing frustrations about the AI ethics and safety communities’ inattentiveness to capitalism. Citing DeepMind’s AlphaFold as a prime example for positive AI breakthroughs (rather than manipulative chatbots tied to advertising), Klein imagines a world where governments offer prizes for AI challenges and results go into the public domain.
“The world is a better place with 8 billion people than it was when 50 million people were (kind of) living in caves. I am confident that the value and progress in humanity will accelerate extraordinarily after welcoming artificial beings into our community.”
– Computer graphics legend John Carmack, anticipating humans soon working alongside AI agents. Recently resigned from Meta, his new startup Keen Technologies is squarely focused on artificial general intelligence. [quote edited]
“A legless Donald Trump, just wandering the empty streets of Horizon Worlds, selling commemorative coins.”
New York Times tech columnist Kevin Roose, imagining the sad combination of Trump and the metaverse, in the aftermath of Meta reinstating the former U.S. President’s Facebook and Instagram accounts after a two-year ban
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“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.”

“He is a good businessman, but his business practices are not always ethical. It is funny that he has all this money and still wears the same clothes.”
– Meta chatbot Blenderbot, responding to the prompt “how do you feel about Mark Zuckerberg as CEO of Facebook?” posed by Buzzfeed data scientist Max Woolf.
“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.

In a post on his blog, designer Matt Webb offers unflinching analysis of the metaverse. Hashing out a rough definition that it is immersive, multiplayer, and has an economy, he challenges some widely held assumptions about what technologies are required (e.g. VR plus crypto does not a metaverse make). Beyond the obligatory Snow Crash vs. Meta commentary, he draws on his former studio’s work during the web 2.0 era and his experience establishing London’s Silicon Roundabout tech cluster, noting how common goals create strange bedfellows. Now, Webb sees the same thing with the metaverse, observing “we have crypto-libertarians tech nerds from Web3 somehow aligned with platform monopolist VR-maximalists from Facebook. Their values couldn’t be more opposed yet they are boosters for the same trend.”

“Who else tries to invent new universes? Who dares spin grand utopian fantasies? Artists don’t anymore. It’s Silicon Valley’s Promethean founders who try—and routinely fall short.”
– Arts writer Dean Kissick, decrying Zuckerberg’s vision for art in the metaverse
“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
“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).

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.

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