Tag: Meta

A Meta Death Spiral: Imagining A Post Facebook World

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

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.

Facebook Has Ossified

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

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.

What The Success Of The Internet Can Tell Us About The Possible Future of The Metaverse


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

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.

Jesus Christ, Is Meta Thirsty About Being Considered Hip


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

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.

Of ‘The Unincorporated Man:’ My Hot Take On ‘Meta’


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

A book that I really like is the scif novel “The Unincorporated Man.” It’s set in the far future. One of the interesting plot points is the world was radically transformed because of a “VR plague.” It’s treated as something akin to a global holocaust in the book.

What happened was, people got so wrapped up in the virtual world that they stopped eating, drinking, taking care of themselves or anyone else for that matter. Billions died as a result of this. It’s a huge deal in the book’s fictional future.

It’s a very interesting plot point, given that Facebook, er Meta, wants us to live our entire lives in the metaverse. The idea that we may be careening towards a dark future by embracing the metaverse, as is suggested in The Unincorporated Man, is something to think about going forward.