In just the last few days, something strange has happened to my Facebook account — someone has been looking at The Shelton Bumgarner Show a lot, 24 times total! It’s very strange.
I say this in the context of me living in oblivion and any — ANY — attention being of note. I really live in a deep state of oblivion and the idea that someone would go out of their way to look at so many of a podcast-like thing I used to do is very curious.
Very curious.
I will also note that I’ve lost a few Facebook friends in the last few days, so it’s possible, if not probably that it’s all a lulz — someone who was a Facebook friend was curious why I was their Facebook friend, didn’t like what they saw and unfriended me.
I’ve reached a Singularity of the Martha Mitchell syndrome — absolutely no one listens to me for any reason. But, nonetheless, it does seem as though we’re on the cusp of a major disruption in, well, everything between now and about 2030 because of LLMs.
Using existing LLM technology — or, more specifically, open source LLM technology — some plucky college student could design a Apple Knowledge Navigator-like personal agent that could totally disrupt Facebook.
Or, as Claude LLM would tell us:
This is an interesting question that touches on several cutting-edge areas of AI and technology. Here’s an overview of how a college student might approach creating an Apple Knowledge Navigator-like personal agent using open source LLM technology, and how it could potentially disrupt Facebook:
Core LLM: Start with an open-source large language model like LLaMA, BLOOM, or GPT-J as the foundation. These models can be fine-tuned or adapted for specific tasks.
Personalization: Implement techniques like constitutional AI or parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) to customize the model to individual users’ preferences and interaction styles.
Multimodal capabilities: Integrate open-source computer vision models (e.g. CLIP) and speech recognition/synthesis systems to enable voice and visual interactions.
Knowledge integration: Develop a system to continually update the agent’s knowledge base from reliable sources, perhaps using retrieval-augmented generation techniques.
Task automation: Create APIs and plugins to allow the agent to interact with various services and perform tasks on behalf of the user.
Privacy and security: Implement strong encryption and local processing where possible to protect user data.
User interface: Design an intuitive, conversational interface that makes interacting with the agent feel natural and effortless.
Potential for disrupting Facebook:
Personalized content curation: The agent could provide a more tailored and diverse feed of information than Facebook’s algorithm.
Privacy-focused social networking: By prioritizing user privacy, it could appeal to those concerned about Facebook’s data practices.
Intelligent task assistance: Offering more practical help in daily life could make it a preferred platform over traditional social media.
Decentralized communication: The agent could facilitate direct peer-to-peer interactions, reducing reliance on centralized platforms.
Enhanced productivity: By integrating with work and personal tools, it could become a more essential part of users’ digital lives than Facebook.
Emotional intelligence: With advanced natural language understanding, the agent could provide more meaningful social interactions.
Ad-free model: If monetized through other means (e.g. premium features), it could offer an attractive alternative to ad-driven platforms.
While ambitious, this project would face significant challenges in terms of computational resources, data collection, and user adoption. However, the potential for innovation in this space is substantial.
Facebook is very much for The Olds now. So much so that I could see the rise of AI on the Apple Vision Pro being The End for Facebook as we know it. It may be revived as an app on the AVP because it’s something of a utility, but there could be a little bit of a bumpy period between now and then.
We’re about to lurch into the future in a big, big way and there will be winners and losers. And there is at least a possibility that Facebook could turn into something akin to Blockbuster and it just not survive the transition into this new era.
Everything is about to change very quickly. All that has to happen is, say, AVP 4.0 come out with a $1,200 price point and a lot lighter headset and wham! We wake up and everyone is wearing one of the damn things. There will be a huge vibe shift to the point that people will think, “Gee, I remember before everyone walked around with what looks like a Star Trek Visor.”
It will be interesting to see how things play out going forward.
Facebook (Meta) has a problem. In fact, it has a specific problem, one you might call the Blockbuster Conundrum. How do you innovate when you have a vested interest in pretty much keeping things exactly the way they are? With Blockbuster, they struggled to the advent of streaming. Meanwhile, Facebook (Meta) is having a real problem with how the audience they want — tweeners — have moved on to various other networks including Tik-Tok.
Network of the living dead.
So, in a panic, Meta is scrambling to turn not just Instagram into a Tik-Tok copycat, but Facebook itself. This is potentially a recipe for disaster. We’re talking potentially a MySpace death spiral.
All of this leads to the idea of what might come next?
Well, given how much money Facebook has, I think it’s safe to say that whatever happens, Meta can just buy itself out of the situation eventually. That’s why they’re trying to be cool and call themselves “Meta.” But there is a real risk that the gap between the MySpace-like death of Facebook and the real birth of the metaverse might be so long that we live in a “post Facebook” era for a little while.
What that look like?
Well, in a sense, we’re already in that era because only the Olds still use Facebook and that’s because of a combination of entropy and the fact that Facebook serves the same social purpose as the phone book to Olds.
So, in a sense, while Facebook is very unhappy about losing all that sweet, sweet tweener eyeball traffic and disposable money, they’re doing just fine and will probably continue to do so.
I was one of the first people to use Facebook when it left the confines of universities. Now, of course, eventually I got “zuccked” when my ranting against Trump grew too virulent.
Facebook is in trouble.
Flash forward and we find ourselves in an interesting situation. But for many billions of dollars, Facebook would be in deep, deep trouble. Facebook has always been a utility that served a social purpose. And, yet, we find ourselves in a situation where Facebook is very popular — among Olds like me.
Young people, meanwhile, have migrated towards things like Tik-Tok.
With that in mind, Facebook is working on becoming more like Tik-Tok — whatever that means.
And, yet, I would suggest that Facebook may be doomed. It’s doomed because it has a vested interest in staying pretty much like what it is now. It can only change so much. If they do too much of a change, then they risk the alienated of Olds who, by definition, don’t like change.
In a sense, Facebook faces a Blockbuster problem, where their legacy business is so powerful that they just can’t innovate like buying Netflix or go into streaming. But they do have many, many billions of dollars and they can always just buy or innovate their way out of things.
But it definitely seems as though Facebook faces gradual, then fast decline. Of course, it’s possible that Facebook’s parent company Meta is going to take things to the next level by cornering the metaverse market. That’s a very real possibility. That is, at least, what Zuck is hoping for.
When I was in college at JMU, I was obsessed with the Internet revolution that was going on around me, to the point that I studied every little morsal of news about it thinking I might see something unexpected about to take off. If I had had any ability to learn software, there’s a chance I could have become some sort of dotcom billionaire before the whole thing was over.
The kids of Meta.
But, sadly, just like how I’m not fond of little kids who aren’t mine and they aren’t all that fond of me, either, I’m a writer of words, not code. This, however, did not stop me from ending up my college newspaper’s first online editor.
The interesting thing, and the thing we can learn the most from, is how it was not inevitable that cyberspace’s endgame would be the public Internet and, not, say, AOL, CompuServ, Prodigy or even AT&T / Ziff Davis’ Interchange. There definitely was a huge amount of momentum that was in the public Internet’s favor in the mid to late 1990s, but nothing is inevtiable.
It could be suggested that because the rise of the Internet was a unique thing event unto itself that it was given a breaks that it otherwise would never have gotten. If the powers that be — especially in the media — had truly understood how “disruptive” the Internet would ultimately have become, they likely would have tried to throttle it while they still had the opportunity.
So, this brings us to the Metaverse.
Meta is playing the part of 1990s Microsoft in this example of history repeating itself. This go round, because of what happened with the Internet, the Powers That Be know the potential power of this very disruptive concept and, as such, want to make it closed and proprietary so they can control it.
If you wanted to make yourself feel better, you would believe that despite this willful sabotage, all we might need some scrappy startup to use existing open standards for Web 3.0 (if they exist) in such a way that what happened to the Web when Netscape was released will happen to the Metaverse.
Or not.
It could be that Facebook, er Meta, will always control the Metaverse and that will be that. It will be interesting to see how things play out going forward.
Because of my fucking severely broken right ankle being in the process of healing, I’m stuck on the couch writing, developing, reading — and watching TV.
While I love the idea that, essentially every waking hour is now going to be focused on working on one of my four thrillers, or a scifi pandemic novel or a scifi screenplay or a short story, I fucking hate watching TV.
I keep seeing Meta’s fucking thirsty ad begging for hip POC to give them street cred. This, of course, is never going to happen. That ship has sailed. It’s all about Tik-Tok now. And should the “metaverse” take off, it’s more likely to be some small startup with really cool features that blows up and gets the street cred that Meta is begging for.
Ok, guys, we get it.
The reason why the Meta ad is so thirsty is this: they have a group of young men and women POC who are seduced by the amazing potential of the Meta platform. We see their faces in EXTREME CLOSE UP, giving us the sense that they’re about to cum because of how great and wonderful Facebook — I mean Meta — is.
It’s so over the top and transparent that, ugh, it’s just very dumb and a waste of time. Meta, however, does have a lot of money. So I guess it’s at least possible that through sheer force of will provided by a few billion dollars of marketing over a few years that they might get their wish.
It seems as though there are three possibilities before us if what I fear is happening — a soft Singularity — is happening. One, somehow we find out and there’s a regular Luddite revolt against Big Tech, or we don’t find out. If we don’t find out, then either Big Tech subtly controls us or an autocratic government does.
So, it’s very easy to imagine President Mike Pompeo in 2025 using the power of a secret soft Singularity to track not only me down, but everyone I’ve spoken to about what a big piece of shit he is. It would be very easy for piece-of-shit President Pompeo to make me “vanish” using the information he’s gathered via the Soft Singularity.
Now, again, this is the point where I point out that for the time being the Deep State or “steady state” is probably the Good Guys in such a scenario. They’re not perfect — they’ve done plenty, PLENTY of shady shit — but if I had to make a choice between piece of shit Pompeo and the Steady State, I’m throwing my lot with the NSA.
Anyway, the point is, because of this secret soft Singularity, some crazy shit might happen without us realizing it. If the Chinese Government (Tik-Tok) and Big Tech (Google, Facebook) are rooting around in my mind right now there is going to come a point where they’re going to reach out and give people like me a “love tap” in the real world. Now, that sounds REALLY PARANOID.
And it is. It’s really fucking paranoid.
And I don’t even know what I mean in real terms.
But the longer soft singularity technology is being hidden, the more it’s worth to Big Tech to keep it that way. Thankfully, absolutely no one listens to me or respects me. So I could be literally telling you something that actually exists in the real world right now….and….absolutely nothing would happen.
I simply don’t have any proof. I have a bunch of hunches.
Welp, I’m in a curious limbo with Facebook. First, some context. I’ve been using Facebook since about 2007 and as during the Trump Era all I did was rant — often with a lot of “fucks” — about how angry I was about it.
So, if that’s the reason why they’ve put me in a time-out while they “evaluate” my case, I get it. But they’ve been “evaluating” my case for six months now and even though they blame it on COVID….it definitely seems as though they don’t want me around anymore.
I guess I just they would just be more honest about it. Or, at the very least, fish or cut bait. Either let me back on the platform or tell me that I was, in my own way, being too deranged for their liking.
It’s a very surreal feeling being unable to use Facebook. I feel like the Isaac Asimov character in a short story of his who is unable even to use a computer — the court forbids is.
Tik-Tok is going to get Big Tech in trouble. Let me give you an example.
Recently, I came out of the shower and looked on the floor. I saw how wet the floor was and thought about how I didn’t want to get my feet wet.
I did not tell anyone this. I didn’t write a blog post, text any one, nothing. The concept’s sole existence was in my mind.
Within moments, I looked at my Tik-Tok For You Page and, surprise, what video do I see, but one about to keep your bathroom floor from getting wet when you take a shower.
This type of thing happens so often with Tik-Tok that they have to be reading my — and millions of other people’s — mind.
If Tik-Tok has this technology, then Facebook and Google do, too. (Facebook has a patent on such technology, by the way.) And it’s possible that was why Tik-Tok was so bent out of shape about giving its algorithm to any new American owner — they were worried their extremely good, extremely intrusive Digital Telepathy technology would fall into the hands of the Americans.
So, I suspect China’s government is using Tik-Tok to read American minds.
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