“In Zuckerberg’s hands the vision of sociality, community, and experience existing on this frontier will be devastatingly limited…”
Yale Cultural Anthropologist & Assistant Professor, Lisa Messeri
My Which is the Next Big Tobacco - Petroleum or Facebook blog was posted last Halloween… a statement scarier than any diabolical haunted house or malevolent cosplay character. We live in an age of fractionalized homogenization, not the oxymoron it appears to be; social media has pushed us to “pick a side” or grouping and to follow, like and participate in that world accordingly. It is an era of megalomania – autocratic leaders promising the impossible, purging inconvenient truths, fabricating “facts” and blaming and excoriating anyone who disagrees. Social media has been the great enabler of concentrated power, disinformation and exceptionally and perhaps irreversible polarization. “If you aren’t with us, you are against us! And we must crush you!”
Our era of intolerance is marked by the loud, sometimes piercing screams of minorities, terrified of unstoppable change, fearful of their own increasing irrelevance and willing to engage in whatever it takes to run society in their image. Solely in their image. The ends justifies the means, even if that represents the end of American democracy, which itself seems to have faded away. It’s not about voter disenfranchisement, stopping abortions, cancelling culture, banning critical race theory or even the rise of an exceptionally un-American autocrat who has completely usurped a major political party entirely to do his bidding and support his incredible fabrication of election fraud.
It’s about a pervasive attitude that a minority of old-world “thinkers” – mired in a past that cannot sustain in the changing world – believing that they have a God-given, constitutional right to impose their vision on the entire country, a belief born of conspiracy theories, falsehoods and rising acceptance of violence as a politically appropriate vector. This trend towards megalomania does not just rest with the Recep Erdogan’s, Xi Jinping’s, Vladimir Putin’s, Kim Jong-un’s, Nicolas Maduro’s, Viktor Orban’s or Donald Trump’s – political leaders – but in the hands of those with the greatest influence of our social systems. Individuals like Rupert Murdoch and Mark Zuckerberg, kings in mega media empires with profoundly disproportionate power over vast and most powerful followers (worshipers?) in their chosen spheres of influence.
I am sure I will get flack for adding a former American president to the above political list, but it is the dramatic intolerance of anyone who opposes or disagrees with them, combined with a willingness to take extra-legal steps to repress that opposing force, that is the defining characteristic. That democracy supports such political diversity is why democracy is an inevitable victim. Zuckerberg’s singular vision of a merged, mega digital universe – the metaverse – has been a particularly great enabler of repressive autocracy. And as my noted blog cited above suggests, he has only allowed token, highly ineffective controls and filters to carve out socially damaging disinformation and calls to violence from Facebook, now “Meta.”
The January 6th edition of Yale News explores Professor Messeri’s examination of Zuckerberg’s vision in her academic course, Technology and Culture. It is an insightful monitoring of rising cyber-domination, led fiercely by Meta’s founder and chief executive officer. Messeri describes her approach: “We start with the ways in which technology affects our understanding of ourselves. Then we zoom out a little bit to think about technology’s role in shaping the communities in which we live. Next, we switch over to thinking about the virtual spaces that we occupy, and we try to understand the distinction between the physical world and the virtual world and how that divide is increasingly less obvious…
“There are a lot of [underlying false assumptions to these rising networks]. One is the myth that technology is apolitical. It’s not. It embodies the values and perspectives of those who create it. We also try to demystify the idea that simply building a new technology creates a better world. Why have we allowed ourselves to believe this? Why does creating new human resources software, for example, necessarily make the world a better place? There certainly are technologies that can improve the world, but there’s nothing inherent in new technology that makes the world better…
“When Zuckerberg uses the term [metaverse], he’s imagining a world in which we’re somehow all equipped with a digital layer, whether it’s through glasses or contact lenses or something else, that provides access to a landscape that seamlessly integrates the physical and digital for social purposes. Currently, wearing a VR headset fully immerses the wearer into a virtual world, but there also is blended or augmented reality (AR) that overlays the virtual world onto the physical world. The Pokemon Go gaming app was one of the first and most successful augmented reality experiences. Using your smartphone, you activated an augmented reality where Pokemon characters were overlaid onto the physical world around you.
“To Zuckerberg, the metaverse is this seamlessly integrated VR/AR landscape that also includes collaborating and socializing with other people inhabiting this metaverse. But beyond Zuckerberg, what ‘the metaverse’ means is still being debated. It mostly exists now as a marketing and branding idea…
“When Zuckerberg talks about the metaverse, he’s laying out a vision for how humans are going to relate to each other and socialize in the future. And given how much money he’s willing to invest in this concept, we ought to be nervous. It’s unsettling for one individual to have so much dominion over this technology. What does Zuckerberg know about human connection? He’s an engineer. He’s a great coder. Clearly, he’s a shrewd businessman. Time and again, he has demonstrated that he has little true sense of what it means to be social and to build community.
“Consider that Facebook originated as an incredibly obnoxious ‘hot or not’ site where guys could rate whether women were attractive or unattractive. Is that his idea of what it means to be social? I’m sure he’s matured, but we should be nervous about the prospect of his company dominating the metaverse because it will be his model of human sociality that gets baked into the code, the infrastructure, and the platform.” It’s not just Meta. Social media in general has placed generating profits over truth, stopping those who threaten minorities and even democracy itself and those who promulgate horrific conspiracy theories, prejudice and deeply impactful falsehoods.
We have legal restrictions on what government can to contain any form of expression, notably the First Amendment, that is being relied on by autocrats and single vision technocrats in a way that was hardly in the minds of our Founding Fathers when then passed the Bill of Rights in 1789. This limitation on government action has taken what was supposed to be the great communication/information dissemination platform ever imagined and turned it into a vital means for unscrupulous power mongers, a democracy killer like no other. Instead of revealing the untruths of malevolent autocrats, social media has become their most powerful tool. We must either figure out how to contain this malignancy or lie down and accept the crush that continues to build.
I’m Peter Dekom, and just listening to the ironical misuse of the word “patriot” in common right-wing speech, and you know that our democracy is teetering on the brink of breakage… with social media pushing hard to topple what’s left.
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