Does anyone remember the Metaverse?
It was Mark Zuckerberg’s grand vision for giving everyone digital avatars in virtual reality. Basically a bad cover version of Second Life which no-one remembers either.
A measure of its awfulness was when Zuck tried to impress everyone that Meta had invented legs.
He even changed the name of the company to Meta, which was in no way* related to the fact the company named Facebook had been caught out accepting billions of dollars from bad actors trying to influence to 2016 US presidential election.
Zuck was
obviously the only person in the world who cared about the Metaverse and the
various departments of Facebook Meta tasked with making it work referred themselves unofficially as MMH or Make Mark Happy.
It was eventually Elon Musk who saved Zuckerberg from himself. As Musk was incinerating Twitter, Zuckerberg launched Threads. And in the smartest move he’s made in a decade, Zuckerberg tied Threads to Instagram, which still has some cachet with young people, instead of Facebook, which is now social media for boomers.
Meanwhile,
the whole Metaverse folly has been quietly buried.
Now Zuck
has had another epiphany. In the Zuckiverse, the result of the 2024 US election –
which he seems not to have interfered in this time – means truth is out of style.
With his typical awkwardness, he accused his own fact-checkers of bias in a deadpan echo of Stephen Colbert’s ironic assertion that reality has a liberal bias.
And also, “please don’t crush my business, King Donald.” This is notwithstanding the fact that the incoming president has no legal way to crush Facebook. It would be easier to make the Metaverse happen.
While
billionaires act in what they think is their own self-interests and bugger the
other people it affects, their interpretation of self-interest varies.
Elon Musk has quite obviously decided it’s in his self-interest to proactively support populist right wing causes. Zuck’s method is to curry favour with whatever he believes to be the dominant paradigm.
While Musk, like Trump, thrives on bad press, Zuckerberg is clearly terrified of it, while still lacking the social and political skills to know what kind of bad press to care about.
Ultimately, Zuckerberg is a weather vane. I don’t believe his latest pivot to unmoderated speech and MAGA-lite notions of masculinity is the beginning or continuation of a post-truth dystopia. It’s just the current focus of the Make Mark Happy department and will eventually go the way of the Metaverse.
It might take until the US mid-term elections, but eventually he will post another awkward and out of touch video apologising for the current policy and announcing a new focus on whatever he thinks will make him popular again.
