If you don't try to understand it very deeply, and maybe only pay about 20% attention to it, you might find that at the end you get a "YES!" moment when the character puts on the device and the music kicks in and he's got the little happy foot stomp going on.
That's really all I got from it. Good music, good times, with the device on. Terrible times without the device.
To me it's just the same old "you need this in your life" bullshit that advertising is all about.
It kind of riffs with me. Music gives me Black Mirror vibes. In postive San Junipeiro way. There's sad descent and degradation but not of the world. Only personal. World around develops and changes leaving you behind. It changes to the point where you can have vr to feed your mind, stuck in old and damaged body, reconnecting you with your old pals with similarly aged bodies, like it's the old times. High note nostalgia towards the end.
This ad is targeted at boomers and older millenials.
Very few people like being reminded of their mortality.
As an older millenial who already lost a loved one and got out of the job treadmill I say I get it because awarness of mortality became my middle name. I think this tech is crap because it's to limited, but I get it.
I disagree. I think it was made by millennials, aimed at Gen X or boomers, but expressed pity instead of empathy which is why people don't like it.
It might be useful to compare and contrast other ads that have tried to do something similar.
There was an ad a while ago for Cialis or Viagra, that said stuff along the lines of "you've reached the age of getting things done". Nothing about sex per se, just a middle-aged guy and a subtext of competence, and doing what it takes for relationships and other responsibilities.
That seems to me to be focusing on something that older people take pride in, that even though they may not be physically capable of everything younger people are, they have lost some of the vanities and insecurities.
It's not just saying "how sad is it that you can't get it up, you need our product".
> I disagree. I think it was made by millennials, aimed at Gen X or boomers, but expressed pity instead of empathy which is why people don't like it.
I'm not sure why you think that. There's nothing it this ad for Gen X. Not a single hook for them.
So either the ad agency that Facebook hired is incompetent, or Gen X are not a target. And Gen X being offended by it is just a side effect. Maybe not a desired one but acceptable because they were out of scope.
> There was an ad a while ago for Cialis or Viagra, that said stuff along the lines of "you've reached the age of getting things done". Nothing about sex per se, just a middle-aged guy and a subtext of competence, and doing what it takes for relationships and other responsibilities.
I think you made a very good connection. "you've reached the age of getting things done" explicitly reminds you that you are not like you used to be. You are aging and things just don't work for you the same way they did. You need to step up. Get your sh_t together. And if you wan't to live again like you did in your youth, where sex was great because you could satisfy your partner you should buy our product. This ad is strongly negging just like the Facebook ad is. It's knocking you down a peg under the pretense of complement. There's also a callback to good old times, times when competence came naturally, of times when you were proud of yourself. And it is also disparaging the young people overtly as "the ones that don't get things done". but that's just a pose that the ad wants to imprint on you, the real middle-aged guy. To mask your fears that it was actually the young who got things done and you are less and less able to do that.
When John Hughes released The Breakfast Club, teenagers were all Gen X. A discount Chuck E. Cheese playing the big hit in a video arcade is not very subtle.
The Breakfast Club from 1985? Sorry, I messed up generations. Thought Gen-X came after millenials not before.
Oh well, maybe the ad missed the mark because Gen-X are already so old they firmly started telling themsrlves fantasy that there's something noble about having your body wrecked by age and knowing better than younger generations and dismissing the notion that changing world brought anything of value. And they just hate this ad for trying to pull them back into reality. Then offering virtual salvation falls flat because they already have estabilished virtual reality in their minds that setves them well.
>There's nothing it this ad for Gen X. Not a single hook for them
You've lost track of time, like many of us. Even the youngest Gen X'ers are old enough to be grandparents now!
The oldest Gen X'ers are in their late 50s. Staring down retirement and the old folks' home. The youngest Gen X'ers are mid 40s, and likely evaluating their mid-life situation, even if it's not a "crisis". Very likely have a "pre-existing condition" of some sort. If they aren't grandparents, they're probably parents, and if they aren't parents, they probably aren't going to be. Things are pretty much settled at any rate. Some of the people who were never going to own a home changed their mind a few years ago. Some have gone through the death of both parents and most of their generation.
>This ad is strongly negging just like the Facebook ad is
But where's the positive in the FB ad? The only positive is in what they're selling. There needs to be something positive about the audience, the target viewer.
The Viagra ad may be manipulative, heck you can call it "predatory", but it is still appealing to something that older people take pride in. A self-image of doing what has to be done, not letting embarrassment stop you, accepting everyone has bodily functions. Being able to dismiss what other people may consider "cringe" and bullshit in general. Understanding what is important and what is not.
Now, you may roll your eyes at that, at how gullible and hidebound and stupid old people you know are. But that's not the point, the point is that people who get to a certain point feel like that is the justification for whatever hardships and physical deterioration they have experienced.
Another example that comes to mind is the flyers I get in the mail for life insurance, that seem to be aimed at older people who vaguely remember providing for their family, and love their grandchildren, and want to do something even if they can't recall the logic.
That seems exploitative to me, but it's still an example of advertising that's based on enough empathy to make it effective. (I assume it's effective just because it's been around so long)
>To mask your fears that it was actually the young who got things done and you are less and less able to do that
Well, that's to the point; it's the attitude that prevents making an effective ad. If you are thinking that, then you're almost certainly unable to see things from the other perspective.
If a typical young person was able to see things from an old person's perspective, then it would prove that old people have gained nothing in compensation for being old, wouldn't it?
I don't think anyone involved in metaverse knows what they're doing though. You look at VR game devs and there's been a ton of incredible, genuine creativity building compelling experiences within the limitations of the platform - there's wide understanding of the limits, what works, what doesn't etc.
I have no idea what Metaverse is supposed to accomplish: what they put out doesn't look good graphically, and with ads like this one there's a whole level of just "who is this even appealing too?"
On some level I think they're stuck because "live a fantasy" in VR has the problem that it's not marketable - I don't need to own virtual property when I can sculpt my own planets or whatever (speaking of, why the hell has the Black and White franchise not been resurrected in VR?)
Horizon Worlds is doomed because it doesn't have any story.
I've been studying theme park design and the thing that sticks out is even things like Space Mountain that are basically a thrill ride can be built to have a story that is really compelling.
VR experiences like that can be really compelling but an imaginary world that is too much like this one is just a snoozer.
Are there any ethical differences between the escapism offered by VR games vs movies or books? Hollywood has certainly done its share of crafting the current world we live in.
I largely agree they're in the same realm, but not exactly the same. With TV or books, you're still in the current world, visually. You can still see your aging paint, dirty floor, etc. You can also do them with others, watching movies together or reading books aloud.
VR is completely self isolating. And I think that's the point, at this point.
Ethically, who knows. Compare how you'd feel with two friends, sitting around watching TV together, versus the same setting but each is on their own phone. That already happens today and is incredibly alienating, so this seems like that feeling on steroids. It -feels- incredibly unethical to me.
There are multiplayer VR games and experiences. Either ones interacting with remote players in VR, or asymmetric games where one player is in VR and one or more use a monitor and controller(s). The latter are actually really fun party games.
Can someone tell me, does the metaverse exist now? Like can I go and be like the wolf or squid in the commercial and wear goggles and walk around?
I searched just now, and five or six articles down (after headlines like "the metaverse is stupid") I see a link that talks about what the metaverse will be, and lets me buy a headset. Is that where we're at? Why are we talking about something that's just made up, that's been made up for years. Or is there actually some product or service I can join here?
Second Life and VRChat exist. Of course, Facebook would prefer that we imagine their metaverse will be materially transformative in some way that even they can scarcely yet imagine.
Not really, "Facebook Horizons" is like a cheaper knock-off version of Rec Room. Laggier, buggier and feels very very corporate. You walk around and feel stalked by these "Community Leader" facebook employees and it just feels ick. Hard to explain. I recommend you try out Rec Room. Infinitely better.
I own both the index and the quest 2. The quest 2 is less powerful objectively but it's ergonomics are on point. It's so much easier to pick up and play.
Yet every time I put it on I lament how it's owned and created by Facebook. What a travesty.
I hope Valve makes an Index 2 and pushes VR forward again.
The metaverse exists right now. It's called Fortnite. It's got a ton of distractions and an amazing variety of art in a somewhat-consistent art style and handles a ton of interactions and options.
Most people ignore it because it's a terrible interface once you go beyond the games it was built for, as can be seen by their "Imposter" mini game (an ape of Among Us, and skewed by dunkey[1]... By simply giving an accurate representation of how it plays)
The portability and (ironically) fungibility of assets between games is going to increase as games become parts of a platform and maintenance of engine and servers continue to be commoditized but consolidated.
What won't happen is that you'll never file your taxes on Fortnite, because it's stupid.
I think the Minecraft Beta might be my favorite experience with gaming. I feel almost as if I'm "chasing the dragon" trying to find something to emulate it. Even if I were to spin up my own server of the Java version, it wouldn't be quite the same as it was then.
I had the same kind of feeling when Garry's Mod was new. Every day you could browse servers and find new interesting experiences. A roleplaying map like an elaborate small town, populated with other players. A competitive bridge-making minigame. A minimalist flat plane to build in. It crashed constantly. Structures would glitch out at random. Most servers were crawling with trolls and misanthropes. Still, from time to time you'd luck upon a few moments of nirvana. Easy to forget and forgive all the jank, and remember those feelings of endless possibilities.
> The metaverse exists right now. It's called Fortnite
This is such a ridiculous take. Sure, it’s what the CEO of Epic want people to repeat. But to actually believe that? That’s another story.
Fortnite is a video game. Period. It isn’t what people mean when they talk about the metaverse. The only way you can claim otherwise is to completely ignore peoples intent when they say “metaverse” and instead substitute in your own definition. A definition that apparently means “fairly popular video game with in game currency”
- Is a metaverse a VR replacement for the entire online experience? This is most likely unattainable and unrealistic. Full immersion is undesirable and impractical for many, if not most, of the things people do today on the web.
- Is a metaverse "less gamey" than a game? Not a useful distinction to draw. You can hang out with friends in Minecraft and ignore any aspect of the game you don't care for, if you wish. Having mechanics is usually a benefit and not a hazard. Take most of the features of a game away and leave only a first-person chat room, and the result is anemic. VRChat already exists and handles that niche well, anyway.
- Is a metaverse an "open market" with many federated members? Facebook isn't trying to do this. Everyone shilling metaverses wants lock-in and exclusivity.
- Is a metaverse a "closed market" in which smaller economic players can participate, like the iOS store? How is this fundamentally unlike e.g. Steam, with a social network and chat features that span games in an ecosystem that includes third party vendors?
Metaverses are just a buzzword dreamed up by people who don't play video games, but have a strong opinion for what would be the "best ever" multiplayer experience. As a consequence, all the focus is on things that have nothing to do with a game or an experience; just monetization models, restrictions, marketing.
>A metaverse is a network of 3D virtual worlds focused on social connection. In futurism and science fiction, it is often described as a hypothetical iteration of the Internet as a single, universal virtual world that is facilitated by the use of virtual and augmented reality headsets.
The term was coined by Neal Stephenson in Snow Crash, so if you haven't read that yet, you should.
What part of Fortnite doesn't fit that definition? It's definitely focused on Social Connection - It's multiplayer only, and while you can drop solo, all of the features are around interacting with your friends or bragging to your opponents. It is not just one 3d world, there are many game modes that are accessible through a virtual lobby.
Is it lacking VR integration? It's already playable on many VR headsets as a cinema experience, but that is truthfully no the primary experience. It seems only a matter of time, though, as Epic has already teased and announced a number of VR projects and tooling for their engine.
>A metaverse is a network of 3D virtual worlds focused on social connection. In futurism and science fiction, it is often described as a hypothetical iteration of the Internet as a single, universal virtual world that is facilitated by the use of virtual and augmented reality headsets.
You're sitting in your virtual bedroom, and your virtual laptop doesn't like or allow your choice of porn, or any other subject of interest.
You're in your virtual work shop, and your virtual bench and tools do not approve of the device you are building, or taking apart.
You're sewing a virtual dress and your virtual sewing machine doesn't allow you to make that design because it violates community standards, maybe by cultural appropriation, not that it tells you why...
No community established those standards, so the term is a lie, but your virtual telephone doesn't let you bring this complaint against the owners of the universe to anyone.
Taken a bit further, when you are uploaded, and the owners of the universe even own the medium you think in.
I agree that this will be a next level of getting owned same way Facebook was next level of getting owned (in comparison to web pages and disjointed services). I vividly remember trying to send some message to a friend over Messenger and getting blocked because of something Facebook didn't like in the message. Don't quite remember what it was. Maybe a computer program, maybe a link to copyrighted content.
> ... virtual sewing machine doesn't allow you to make that design because it violates community standards, maybe by cultural appropriation...
In this world you can still make all the stuff you physically can if you let anyone see it you might get all sorts of backlash from "the community".
Everything that can be owned is currently owned. We formed the basis for society on the idea that ownership is liberation and we shouldn't be surprised that this is where we ended up. Good for the people who bought into it 100% though. It must feel amazing to them.
There is a different old science fiction story, from 1951, where a sociopathic con artist from the present day is put in suspended animation and revived in a future that's mostly "idiocracy" with some genius overlords that don't know what to do about all the idiots.
The guy from the past, who is familiar with 20th century dictators' methods, gets them to set up a program to brainwash the masses into emigration to Venus, and then they build fake spacecraft that don't go very far but the passengers don't return, and they send letters home saying everything is great (inspired by the Nazis sending fake letters from euthanasia victims).
The end is when he thinks he's on top of the world and essentially world dictator, but the people that he was advising politely force him onto one of the "spaceships" because his job "thinking outside the box" is finished and they have no more use for him.
The following comment from “Big Dick Nick Cage” on the post says it all. Pasting it here in full because Y combinator types need a dose of cold hard reality once in a while.
—
I think like all Libertarian projects, this is the rich guy's version of Going Galt. Instead of declaring themselves the Emperor of Cincinnati and a sovereign citizen, they declare that THIS world is stupid and GAY and they're going to make a NEW world on Mars/the metaverse/wherever where they don't have to deal with things like dumb ol' REGULATIONS and TAXES with the subtext that, of course, the right people will be in charge this time, which is to say, them.
What is truly depressing about this generation of oligarchs is their fantasies are all from 80s sci-fi movies and aren't anything interesting. At least Carnegie built some damn libraries. At least the Gilded Age monarchs endowed universities and art galleries and other things to show their Big Shot Rich Guy fantasies. I mean, Christ, at least be a Batman villain. Drop hundred dollar bills from a helicopter over downtown just to watch the proles scramble. At least Trump ran for president. Zuck was too weird and offputting for that! Imagine being weirder and more offputting! These dudes have more money they can ever spend and still want to be the Big Shot Business Guy sitting in meetings 18 hours a day. Imagine winning the lottery and being like "Hmm, yes, I want to make everyone come into the office to sit around in a conference room and nod at me while I talk. FOR HOURS."
The legacy of Bezos/Musk etc. is going to be space debris and cars that make fart noises.
Aside from plenty of bad arguments in this rant, the oddest one is that it's somehow wrong for someone who's reached the pinnacle of success by society's standards to continue working hard for something he values. I'm no fan of Zuckerberg and I generally dislike defending him, but if he's spending 18 hour days directing a multinational corporation all while preventing the company from collapsing within, he's certainly earned his seat. I don't see how having the Joker run the company is preferable.
Ahh spot on. ASPIRE to make a billion then STILL go into the OFFICE.
LOL. Talk about the disease of the winner who will never actually be a winner in there own head because doing stuff and acheiving stuff doesnt make up the PTSD they harbor
>The story begins in a future world where global temperatures have risen so high that in most of the world it is unsafe to be outside without special cooling gear during daylight hours. In a desperate bid to preserve humanity and ease population burdens on Earth, the UN has initiated a "draft" for colonizing the nearby planets, where conditions are so horrific and primitive that the unwilling colonists have fallen prey to a form of escapism involving the use of an illegal drug (Can-D) in concert with "layouts." Layouts are physical props intended to simulate a sort of alternative reality where life is easier than either the grim existence of the colonists in their marginal off-world colonies, or even Earth, where global warming has progressed to the point that Antarctica is prime vacation resort territory. The illegal drug Can-D allows people to "share" their experience of the "Perky Pat" (the name of the main female character in the simulated world) layouts. This "sharing" has caused a pseudo-religious cult or series of cults to grow up around the layouts and the use of the drug.
Honestly this is pretty akin to the "why do poor people have cellphones?" argument. We're way more likely to be able to give people Oculus Quest's then decent real estate or furnishings.
The Quest 2 is cheaper than the cheapest iPhone or the latest generation of game consoles, so probably quite a few people (if they had the inclination)
It doesn't have anything to offer. A world where all you can do is look and listen is of very little marginal interest to almost anyone. We all have televisions and stereos. I don't dream of having larger TVs and louder stereos.
It's a lot easier to have a shitty life online in VR than to have a shitty life in real life. In real life you can have a sandwich, and it's a richer, more fulfilling experience than anything VR has to offer.
It's gamers (and buzzword investors) who love VR, and they'll get bored with it. Not every game should be first person; it's kind of a local maxima and a contemporary rut.
> The vast majority of people in the world live shitty lives.
I'm not sure this is even close to true. How shitty your life is or is not is based on an individual's perception. You can have a person who should be happy - wealth, relationships, fame and are so miserable they nearly killing themselves daily with alcohol and other drugs. You can have a person, who by all abject means of judgement should be miserable, and has somehow found a way to be happy with their life.
> Metaverse doesn't seem so bad for some.
This is probably true, but the question is, will it really be all that different than real life anyway?
It was triggering for me in a couple of ways. So content warning for anyone reading, is the shit that brought all kinds of suicidal thoughts.
1. Being thrown away and having everything you love being taken from you by an uncaring world.
2. You’re about to die and it’s all going to be finally over. (Major trigger: death is the only way to find relief from the pain of existing.)
3. The only reason you don’t is because someone wants you on display.
4. Everyone ignores you. No one cares. You do not matter to anyone. You are alone.
5. The only escape from this tortured endless hell is a virtual world that is a shadow of the real thing.
Of these, only the second is likely to trigger me normally. Usually I’m fine and can see this coming and pause whatever I’m watching for a second to process it. This ad completely blindsided me with five things I couldn’t process in rapid succession.
It took a while to get back in my feet and not have it ruin my evening. At least I wasn’t a Bengals fan. That loss hurt to watch.
I tend to be verbose, but then I read word explosions like this essay...
TLDR:
Paraphrased: Meta makes a lot of money, even when it has a bad year. And then,
> Anyway, this is all kind of a long way of explaining how Meta chose to make and air this advertisement for itself during the Super Bowl on Sunday:
Then TFA basically says that the ad illustrates a future where your normal life no longer exists, but you can thankfully reminisce with a friend or two, virtually -- thanks to Meta.
Pretending that an ad (especially in a medium like TV/video) has a message aimed at the rational brain and analyzing it from that assumption is a good way of generating negative emotion toward the advertised product to counteract the positive emotion it is designed to generate, but it's not a real analysis of the ad, because ads, especially video ass, aren't aimed at your rationality, they are aimed to produce emotions and disengage rationality.
The internet and social networks nowadays are probably not a healthy place for people with depression or suicidal tendencies.
This is strange. In the beginning, there was a feeling that the internet would be the ultimate tool to unite like-minded people. It probably is, the question is what like-minded people do when they get together. It can be the wonderful software I'm using or millions of dollars for unethical business.
> In the beginning, there was a feeling that the internet would be the ultimate tool to unite like-minded people. It probably is, the question is what like-minded people do when they get together.
It turns out that the answer is filter bubbles and Twitter mobs. Heterogeneous minds are really a good thing.
But overall it's hard to say that the internet is a bad thing. Sure, it came with terrible downsides, but it also brought us as a species forward by quite a bit.
It's incredibly clear they're only doing the Meta/Metaverse thing to a) try to avoid regulatory scrutiny (so they think; this will have the opposite effect of what they intend) b) distract the public from the toxic Facebook brand c) both (my money is on c). Zuckerberg is never ever to be trusted with anything given his history - and it shows.
There is no way in hell this ad was actually written to attract people to VR. This is, like, the dystopian version of VR. The physical world crumbles around us as we live in a poor digital rendering of our nostalgia. Somebody must have been super psyched that Facebook was huffing their own farts so hard that they didn't realize this was a critique of their vision.
A better version of that story would really sell the addictive escapist appeal matched with the social incentives of participation (and maybe - more subtly - the coercive disincentives of non-participation) while allowing the dystopian reveal to happen gradually.
This comment[1] from a previous thread on the "metaverse" has stuck with me: there are real, living people who think that the world of Ready Player One is a valid aspirational goal, and some of those people work on projects like this.
It's been a decade since I've read it, but my recollection is that the book tightly conjoins the success of VR to the crumbling of the world's institutions and societies: there's a positive feedback loop between VR escapism and not tackling the world's problems.
I'm not sure that "fully immersive VR" is intrinsically bad, at least not any worse than our current less immersive digital world. But it's not hard to see how VR can make a bad situation worse.
True, but you can use that argument against most forms of entertainment. Books, movies, video games, DND, sports, etc... VR is just another thing people can do in their leisure time.
Everyone here is freaking out "oh no, Facebook is going to make something so entertaining society will collapse". I would be so proud of myself if I created something so entertaining society collapsed, lol.
And why is that do you think? Is it inherently better, or is it only temporarily better? Have the social creeps, corrupt bastards and rapacious motherf*ckers arrived yet, or are they next year's customers? Because, I can guarantee you right now, unless someone's developed some kind of psych-AI to filter out those folks, there is NO WAY, your utopian VR world will stay "better than" the real world (assuming it even is "better than" in its most ideal form).
I have a belief - you can call it "phs318u's law" - There is no system, no structure, no belief, and no technology that can solve for the worst of humankind. Period. Eventually, bad humans > everything else. Kind of like a social entropy - its a one way journey.
Given the rare earth metals and countless other resources needed to run all the necessary technology, the two "real worlds" would not look the same. And that's not even factoring in the effect of having countless people checked out of real reality in the VR case, with correspondingly less desire to fix it.
It is always weird to me how some people see the dystopian aspects of dystopian fiction as inspiration. They will see cautionary tales about certain technology and respond by trying to build that technology. It is even more bizarre when these people will openly admit it and name their product something like "Soylent".
The universe isn’t black and white. Hell it can’t seem to quite agree on where it’s particles are at a fundamental level (until we figure out what measurement is - see latest Sabine YouTube video). Further things are often negligible for some scale, great/useful for some scale, then outright horrible past some other scale.
Though naming something Soylent did always seem too on the nose.
It's not all "black and white". But this suggests a very superficial reading of source material this is purportedly based on. It's saying "Hey that future looks kinda cool!!!" at a very superficial level without a deeper reading of how peoples' material conditions are affected.
You can see that through Cyberpunk. People will think that if a world like that exists it’s exiting it’s full of challenges and amazing. Instead of having to leave a “boring” life in a “boring” world with all these limits.
The creator of Cyberpunk said that during the hype of the video game he was so sad to see that people really wanted to see it happen in real life because when he created this universe it was suppose to be a critic what the future with technology can bring instead of wishing it to become true.
I have to say Elon Musk and his fans doesn’t help.
The problem is that the physical world crumbling around us is something that we can all see with our present eyes. That now those of us who live outside of East Asia are in the middle of a plunge into the abyss is plain as day. Simple things like visiting a grocery store or driving down the streets of ones childhood home are extremely alienating things that generate nothing but loathing and regret. Nobody is selling any solution better than escapism than this, and indeed, most people who say we should restore society to the standards of the times where we were building material prosperity and social fabric are called all called all sorts of pejoratives, banned from the workplace and financial services, and even subject to violence by mobs and militias that the state seems to either ignore completely or sometimes nod and winkingly support. All of society screams to you to shoot dope and put on the headset, and no other alternatives are given.
You haven't seen any of this stuff? There's been multiple frontpage articles on HN alone about financial institution based censorship. The Canadian government is gloating in public about banning people from the banking system and getting them fired from their jobs in the past week. I am absolutely stunned you haven't heard about any of this happening.
>There's been multiple frontpage articles on HN alone
I was replying to your original comment, focusing on the real world around me.
You wrote "the physical world crumbling around us is something that we can all see with our present eyes"
And "Simple things like visiting a grocery store or driving down the streets of ones childhood home are extremely alienating things that generate nothing but loathing and regret"
I live on the edge of a small American city (roughly 1 million greater urban area) where it's only a few miles between downtown and the suburbs so I do errands anywhere in the vicinity.
Early in the pandemic, it was the suburban grocery stores that had significant numbers of people who seemed pushy, vaguely angry at the world, and maybe 1/4 of them not wearing masks.
I was more comfortable going to the inner city grocery store because everybody was wearing a mask and keeping their distance. Not that I was particularly paranoid about the virus, just because it felt less hostile and less crowded.
The scariest thing I've seen there was a pickup truck plastered Florida-style with graphics and lettering about somebody's paranoid fantasies, vendettas, and politics. It straight up looked like someone who might randomly murder you if they learned you worked for state government because they think the governor is some kind of evil dictator coming to take their guns.
I don't see my neighborhood crumbling. Haven't been to my "childhood home" but I don't think anything in particular has happened to the street it's on.
What specifically do you want to restore? Cheap colleges, social safetynet, unions? People will (often incorrectly) call you a socialist for supporting that kind of stuff, but just don't think of it as a pejorative.
What I want is irrelevant. The point is a good half of the population in the United States believes that the social and material landscape they grew up with is in profound decay. What I specifically perceive to be the issue is much less important than the fact that lots of people think their lives are being trampled upon, but if we're asking me personally? For starters, I want the businesses of my home that were shuttered due to arbitrary restrictions that were not levied upon megacorporations over the flu to be reopened and fully compensated at the expense of the people that made trillions. I want them to go back in time and prevent the government subsidized section 8 housing that infested my town and skyrocketed and filled it full of fentanyl and methamphetamine and subsequent overdoses and rape and murders to be prevented in the first place. That would also have prevented it from being later burned down in riots as well. I want public schools that enrich the cognitive function and knowledge of my kids instead of trying to convince them they are racist and transgender. I want there to be a steady supply of goods on store shelves again, and not incredible supply chain crises created by an intentional multinational campaign of The Great Reset. I want Klaus Schwab to not be able to publicly gloat he controls the elected representatives of G5 nations. I want to be able to travel freely without having my family's medical decisions scrutinized. I want the free as in freedom Internet I grew up with back before 5 companies controlled the entire social graph. I would like more manufacturing backbone and jobs in the United States, like before we shipped everything to Mexico and China. I would also like 95% of H1Bs to be banned, and the sponsors penalized by the government for immigration fraud. I want housing to cost the same percentage of the median income as it did for my grandparents. College, the same.
I don't see the world crumbling in any permanent way. I just see the conventional liquidity costs problem where people hold onto money to avoid storage costs and capital depreciation. This can lead to a war until artificial capital scarcity sets in and the accumulation game starts from scratch. The truth is that this is not a good reason to advocate for VR because the solution is pretty simple. Internalize capital depreciation and storage costs involved in maintaining liquidity of physical goods by introducing holding costs onto money and land ownership.
What I gathered is "trade your lower half for a second chance at living your life, since the current one is a total failure, you worthless suicidal puppet".
Not entirely sure how the flowchart takes me from this to an Oculus purchase though.
What's the point of being a life-sized plush in that context? Why is it that you're both a human giving concerts and a toy to indicate directions to people passing by? Why include a scene about getting yourself trash-compacted in a state of anhedonia?
I'm completely likely to be more cynical than your average person out there since due to personal mental health issues, however none of the questions I just asked seem to have any connection at all with the blindly optimistic take you seem to be having.
Not to mention that Facebook already exists for the purpose you indicated and is even owned by the same people. Presumably Mr Dog Plushie could have had the chance to reconnect with old friends already there, yet instead he was about to literally trash himself and die. How is that not alarming as hell?
I think it's because the ad ignores the obvious fact that the puppet's life at the end--when it can only connect to its friends in VR--is obviously so much worse than its life at the start of the commercial, when it can perform in real life. The ad presents the Metaverse as an "upgrade" from real life, but it seems from the ad that the Metaverse is only an improvement after your life has gone seriously downhill.
When I’m shown an anthropomorphized dog puppet thrown away, dropped haphazardly from a truck, put into a trash compactor, and then treated like a mannequin I’m not being primed to think “reconnect” with anyone. This is a weird depiction of despair to which Meta is the drug to pretend to escape.
Roth is an incredible diarist of modern dystopia who's always ready with a deft turn of phrase, if you enjoyed this piece at all I would highly recommend checking out his other work. He's a co-owner of Defector (where this was posted), which is essentially the worker-owned co-op spiritual sequel to Deadspin.
A really good piece of writing with one nice little tidbit, because it feels true:
> you will never see a commercial for anything that is actually and authentically liberating while watching the Super Bowl; that space is just too expensive, and too valuable, for anything but the institutions invested in the opposite of liberation to be able to afford access to it.
It feels true (with pithy, bonus), but now I'm uncertain. What does "authentically liberating" even mean? Which institutions are "authentically liberating"? What do those look like, communes? Collectives? Medical aid NGOs? Maybe more interesting: can liberation be a product?
It reminds me of the "Tenryuubito" from One Piece, elites who put their heads in bubbles to breathe only their own air because they are too good to breath the same air as the common folk, but its kind of the inverse. They'd like the common folk to wear the "bubble" which will inevitably convey implicit connotations of inferiority. "Nobody wants to see your face".
I had the exact same thought! More was also re-licensed as the music video for the song "Hell bent" by Kenna, to (in my opinion) greater emotional effect: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5mmgow
It was played a fair bit on MTV2 late at night in the early aughts. It's entirely possible this Super Bowl commercial was made by someone who saw that video 20 years ago. A deeply depressing dystopian vision.
I couldn't handle the meta commentary of trying to watch that video. Microsoft azure adds periodically covered half the screen. When the music video hit 2.5/ 5 min it paused to give me give an actual drug video commercial, and I closed the window.
Something along the lines of your last question is the key: can a product be liberating?
Super Bowl ads are overwhelmingly going to be brands or products, because of the economics - I agree with the that far on what the price restricts things to.
But if you believe a product is liberating, then you would have to disagree with the author, I think. Sticking with a famous Super Bowl example: was the Macintosh liberating? Were cell phones liberating? (If you take the AT&T commercial that Wikipedia tells me aired in 2003 at its face value, where Gilligan from Gilligan's Island uses a phone so they are all rescued... yes? ;) )
I would grant a commercial selling a lifestyle like scene with family or camping or adventure as … touching on a topic that could be called “liberating”.
I know they are selling me a car but that’s about as close as it gets for a commercial.
I also wonder what that phrase is supposed to mean.
Planting your own vegetable garden is authentically liberating. Going for a run is authentically liberating. Learning a language is authentically liberating. Reading a book is authentically liberating.
I can't really give you a definition of "authentically liberating" but I know it when I see it.
I've bought some Meta stocks when it dipped, as I figured they were "too big to fail" and would eventually go up. However, I've been contemplating selling all the stocks I've bought because of this and the previous ad.
If these are kind of the ads that comes out after millions of dollars spent and hours of collective thinking; I don't think whatever they are building now will be appealing to people. As another comment HN have put it: they've lost all touch with reality.
When you buy stock you stop caring about what the company does. You only care about what the market thinks about what the company does. If the stock price goes up you sell for a profit.
For companies that don't pay dividends, the stock price is driven purely by the expectation that somebody will pay you more for the stock than what you paid for it.
> When you buy stock you stop caring about what the company does.
> You only care about what the market thinks about what the company does
I’m not sure I’m getting your point. What the company does affects what the market thinks what the company does. I mean sure, feedback is not instantaneous and there have been quite a big mismatch especially recently. But I think it still comes down do execution in the end.
> For companies that don't pay dividends, the stock price is driven purely by the expectation that somebody will pay you more for the stock than what you paid for it
Yes this is why people buy stocks. What the company does will affect the future expectation.
Like you, I seriously considered that idea (buying while it's low), but I decided not to, because that'd be like supporting that company in some way -- as if I were helping bankroll (admittedly, t a very tiny extent) its perverse vision for the future.
This is actually great as an ad for a gamified retirement village. I'd take Geezer Fortnite over bingo and shuffleboard myself, given the choice. That sounds like a Valhalla I could even look forward to visiting, on my way back to dust.
I'm just not ready for Valhalla yet.
So this is Facebook, the empire of targeted advertising, badly missing the target with its own advertising.
If Facebook in its current incarnation is any indication, the metaverse retirement village is going to be like the Matrix except they're going to harvest old people rage instead of energy.
I could see that. For a nominal fee they'd put retirement age Millenials and Zoomers into states as close to "brains in a jar" as they can manage. Then they'd cultivate their consciousnesses in a rage-cycle hell for profit. It gives me the same vibes as "Argent Energy" from Doom.
I liked the ad. (even though I dislike Facebook and Zuckerburg with at least a bit of passion)
I see a ton of comments about how it encourages people to escape the depressing real world.
How many of you play deeply immersive video games? I don't, but so many of my friends do. It depresses me sometimes, for the same reason that people find that video depressing. I really don't see the difference.
That's not to say immersive video games are bad, or even that taking a break from often-shitty reality is a bad thing. I just think perspective and balance is needed.
My biggest issue with the concept of Meta-verse (which to me is nothing different Second Life almost 20 years ago, albeit the tech has improved), is that it will be owned by a company that values engagement so much higher than the overall well-being of its users. If it was anyone but Facebook (and it's still freaking Facebook, despite their renaming of the company when they were in the middle of a publicity crisis), I'd be a lot more excited about it.
Still, whoever put this video together deserves some kudos. I thought it was very well done. I think the "wouldn't it be nice to die?" angle was undeserved and highly biased.
"I don't, but so many of my friends do. It depresses me sometimes, for the same reason that people find that video depressing. I really don't see the difference."
The difference is I felt guilty as hell when I sacricied things I could look forward to in my real life day for a one day 20 hour DOTA binge.
The greivance the author highlights in the article that Meta seems to paint a picture where the Metaverse is the only palatable escape from a cruel, indifferent world that has no place for you.
Me playing too much DOTA -> wasting time that couldve been put to better use making a better more fulfilling life for myself in exchange for a dopamine hit.
Me engaing with the Metaverse too much -> No such thing. You're real life is depressing, intractable and out of your control. This is the last place you'll be able to find any semblance of joy.
Thats not to say that any engagement with the Metaverse will be inherantly unhealthy. If Facebook's history of increasing user engagement with little to no scruples is any indication I don't blame people for being concerned about a dangerous flavor of escapism being promoted.
"The difference is I felt guilty as hell when I sacricied things I could look forward to in my real life day for a one day 20 hour DOTA binge."
That's how I would feel too.... I just get the impression that most here don't have that sort of negativity toward video games (and the way they can pull you away from "real life" things) but meanwhile feel such hostility toward this.
> But if you were where Meta currently is, which is presiding over a hugely profitable but ungovernable, unwieldy, widely detested derangement engine ruled by a sociopathic algorithm and an overbearing cadre of psychotic power users, reviled and abandoned by younger users and in every sense but the most literal a haunted space station overrun by goblins and skunks, you too would want to live in the future.
Wins the Internet.
Story time:
I just deleted my "Featured Collection."
Facebook scraped my GitHub page for my face, and automatically attached it to my account (where I seldom go, so it's probably been there, for some time), as full public (everything else on my account is "friends-only").
So, they grabbed an image of me that I NEVER UPLOADED TO FACEBOOK, and then shared it as "full public," on my timeline.
184 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 193 ms ] threadIt's like the people involved with the "metaverse" have never heard of market research.
That's really all I got from it. Good music, good times, with the device on. Terrible times without the device.
To me it's just the same old "you need this in your life" bullshit that advertising is all about.
And that's a very twisted and pathetic sort of sense, if so. They can't have that deep a corporate persecution complex, can they?
Very meta lol.
I really hope that the ad agency is secretly making fun of Facebook and intentionally framed it this way
I don't think it was supposed to be that way, but who knows what lurks in the hearts of the people who made the ad?
Reddit
This ad is targeted at boomers and older millenials.
As an older millenial who already lost a loved one and got out of the job treadmill I say I get it because awarness of mortality became my middle name. I think this tech is crap because it's to limited, but I get it.
It might be useful to compare and contrast other ads that have tried to do something similar.
There was an ad a while ago for Cialis or Viagra, that said stuff along the lines of "you've reached the age of getting things done". Nothing about sex per se, just a middle-aged guy and a subtext of competence, and doing what it takes for relationships and other responsibilities.
That seems to me to be focusing on something that older people take pride in, that even though they may not be physically capable of everything younger people are, they have lost some of the vanities and insecurities.
It's not just saying "how sad is it that you can't get it up, you need our product".
I'm not sure why you think that. There's nothing it this ad for Gen X. Not a single hook for them.
So either the ad agency that Facebook hired is incompetent, or Gen X are not a target. And Gen X being offended by it is just a side effect. Maybe not a desired one but acceptable because they were out of scope.
> There was an ad a while ago for Cialis or Viagra, that said stuff along the lines of "you've reached the age of getting things done". Nothing about sex per se, just a middle-aged guy and a subtext of competence, and doing what it takes for relationships and other responsibilities.
I think you made a very good connection. "you've reached the age of getting things done" explicitly reminds you that you are not like you used to be. You are aging and things just don't work for you the same way they did. You need to step up. Get your sh_t together. And if you wan't to live again like you did in your youth, where sex was great because you could satisfy your partner you should buy our product. This ad is strongly negging just like the Facebook ad is. It's knocking you down a peg under the pretense of complement. There's also a callback to good old times, times when competence came naturally, of times when you were proud of yourself. And it is also disparaging the young people overtly as "the ones that don't get things done". but that's just a pose that the ad wants to imprint on you, the real middle-aged guy. To mask your fears that it was actually the young who got things done and you are less and less able to do that.
Oh well, maybe the ad missed the mark because Gen-X are already so old they firmly started telling themsrlves fantasy that there's something noble about having your body wrecked by age and knowing better than younger generations and dismissing the notion that changing world brought anything of value. And they just hate this ad for trying to pull them back into reality. Then offering virtual salvation falls flat because they already have estabilished virtual reality in their minds that setves them well.
You've lost track of time, like many of us. Even the youngest Gen X'ers are old enough to be grandparents now!
The oldest Gen X'ers are in their late 50s. Staring down retirement and the old folks' home. The youngest Gen X'ers are mid 40s, and likely evaluating their mid-life situation, even if it's not a "crisis". Very likely have a "pre-existing condition" of some sort. If they aren't grandparents, they're probably parents, and if they aren't parents, they probably aren't going to be. Things are pretty much settled at any rate. Some of the people who were never going to own a home changed their mind a few years ago. Some have gone through the death of both parents and most of their generation.
>This ad is strongly negging just like the Facebook ad is
But where's the positive in the FB ad? The only positive is in what they're selling. There needs to be something positive about the audience, the target viewer.
The Viagra ad may be manipulative, heck you can call it "predatory", but it is still appealing to something that older people take pride in. A self-image of doing what has to be done, not letting embarrassment stop you, accepting everyone has bodily functions. Being able to dismiss what other people may consider "cringe" and bullshit in general. Understanding what is important and what is not.
Now, you may roll your eyes at that, at how gullible and hidebound and stupid old people you know are. But that's not the point, the point is that people who get to a certain point feel like that is the justification for whatever hardships and physical deterioration they have experienced.
Another example that comes to mind is the flyers I get in the mail for life insurance, that seem to be aimed at older people who vaguely remember providing for their family, and love their grandchildren, and want to do something even if they can't recall the logic.
That seems exploitative to me, but it's still an example of advertising that's based on enough empathy to make it effective. (I assume it's effective just because it's been around so long)
>To mask your fears that it was actually the young who got things done and you are less and less able to do that
Well, that's to the point; it's the attitude that prevents making an effective ad. If you are thinking that, then you're almost certainly unable to see things from the other perspective.
If a typical young person was able to see things from an old person's perspective, then it would prove that old people have gained nothing in compensation for being old, wouldn't it?
I have no idea what Metaverse is supposed to accomplish: what they put out doesn't look good graphically, and with ads like this one there's a whole level of just "who is this even appealing too?"
On some level I think they're stuck because "live a fantasy" in VR has the problem that it's not marketable - I don't need to own virtual property when I can sculpt my own planets or whatever (speaking of, why the hell has the Black and White franchise not been resurrected in VR?)
I've been studying theme park design and the thing that sticks out is even things like Space Mountain that are basically a thrill ride can be built to have a story that is really compelling.
VR experiences like that can be really compelling but an imaginary world that is too much like this one is just a snoozer.
Hey, let's run an ad admitting the world sucks, in part due to companies like us, but you can escape that reality if you put our headset on.
Replace that last 15 seconds with a bottle of Whiskey instead of a VR headset and the message is about the same.
Indeed and this seems to be consistent with their past messaging that "the answer to Facebook problems is more Facebook."
VR is completely self isolating. And I think that's the point, at this point.
Ethically, who knows. Compare how you'd feel with two friends, sitting around watching TV together, versus the same setting but each is on their own phone. That already happens today and is incredibly alienating, so this seems like that feeling on steroids. It -feels- incredibly unethical to me.
I searched just now, and five or six articles down (after headlines like "the metaverse is stupid") I see a link that talks about what the metaverse will be, and lets me buy a headset. Is that where we're at? Why are we talking about something that's just made up, that's been made up for years. Or is there actually some product or service I can join here?
I own both the index and the quest 2. The quest 2 is less powerful objectively but it's ergonomics are on point. It's so much easier to pick up and play.
Yet every time I put it on I lament how it's owned and created by Facebook. What a travesty.
I hope Valve makes an Index 2 and pushes VR forward again.
Most people ignore it because it's a terrible interface once you go beyond the games it was built for, as can be seen by their "Imposter" mini game (an ape of Among Us, and skewed by dunkey[1]... By simply giving an accurate representation of how it plays)
The portability and (ironically) fungibility of assets between games is going to increase as games become parts of a platform and maintenance of engine and servers continue to be commoditized but consolidated.
What won't happen is that you'll never file your taxes on Fortnite, because it's stupid.
[1] https://youtu.be/82oJt2enz8A
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29083271
This is such a ridiculous take. Sure, it’s what the CEO of Epic want people to repeat. But to actually believe that? That’s another story.
Fortnite is a video game. Period. It isn’t what people mean when they talk about the metaverse. The only way you can claim otherwise is to completely ignore peoples intent when they say “metaverse” and instead substitute in your own definition. A definition that apparently means “fairly popular video game with in game currency”
- Is a metaverse a VR replacement for the entire online experience? This is most likely unattainable and unrealistic. Full immersion is undesirable and impractical for many, if not most, of the things people do today on the web.
- Is a metaverse "less gamey" than a game? Not a useful distinction to draw. You can hang out with friends in Minecraft and ignore any aspect of the game you don't care for, if you wish. Having mechanics is usually a benefit and not a hazard. Take most of the features of a game away and leave only a first-person chat room, and the result is anemic. VRChat already exists and handles that niche well, anyway.
- Is a metaverse an "open market" with many federated members? Facebook isn't trying to do this. Everyone shilling metaverses wants lock-in and exclusivity.
- Is a metaverse a "closed market" in which smaller economic players can participate, like the iOS store? How is this fundamentally unlike e.g. Steam, with a social network and chat features that span games in an ecosystem that includes third party vendors?
Metaverses are just a buzzword dreamed up by people who don't play video games, but have a strong opinion for what would be the "best ever" multiplayer experience. As a consequence, all the focus is on things that have nothing to do with a game or an experience; just monetization models, restrictions, marketing.
>A metaverse is a network of 3D virtual worlds focused on social connection. In futurism and science fiction, it is often described as a hypothetical iteration of the Internet as a single, universal virtual world that is facilitated by the use of virtual and augmented reality headsets.
The term was coined by Neal Stephenson in Snow Crash, so if you haven't read that yet, you should.
Is it lacking VR integration? It's already playable on many VR headsets as a cinema experience, but that is truthfully no the primary experience. It seems only a matter of time, though, as Epic has already teased and announced a number of VR projects and tooling for their engine.
>A metaverse is a network of 3D virtual worlds focused on social connection. In futurism and science fiction, it is often described as a hypothetical iteration of the Internet as a single, universal virtual world that is facilitated by the use of virtual and augmented reality headsets.
You're sitting in your virtual bedroom, and your virtual laptop doesn't like or allow your choice of porn, or any other subject of interest.
You're in your virtual work shop, and your virtual bench and tools do not approve of the device you are building, or taking apart.
You're sewing a virtual dress and your virtual sewing machine doesn't allow you to make that design because it violates community standards, maybe by cultural appropriation, not that it tells you why...
No community established those standards, so the term is a lie, but your virtual telephone doesn't let you bring this complaint against the owners of the universe to anyone.
Taken a bit further, when you are uploaded, and the owners of the universe even own the medium you think in.
> ... virtual sewing machine doesn't allow you to make that design because it violates community standards, maybe by cultural appropriation...
In this world you can still make all the stuff you physically can if you let anyone see it you might get all sorts of backlash from "the community".
It is pretty weird that according to capitalists liberation is defined by the ability to exclude others from society.
The guy from the past, who is familiar with 20th century dictators' methods, gets them to set up a program to brainwash the masses into emigration to Venus, and then they build fake spacecraft that don't go very far but the passengers don't return, and they send letters home saying everything is great (inspired by the Nazis sending fake letters from euthanasia victims).
The end is when he thinks he's on top of the world and essentially world dictator, but the people that he was advising politely force him onto one of the "spaceships" because his job "thinking outside the box" is finished and they have no more use for him.
—
I think like all Libertarian projects, this is the rich guy's version of Going Galt. Instead of declaring themselves the Emperor of Cincinnati and a sovereign citizen, they declare that THIS world is stupid and GAY and they're going to make a NEW world on Mars/the metaverse/wherever where they don't have to deal with things like dumb ol' REGULATIONS and TAXES with the subtext that, of course, the right people will be in charge this time, which is to say, them.
What is truly depressing about this generation of oligarchs is their fantasies are all from 80s sci-fi movies and aren't anything interesting. At least Carnegie built some damn libraries. At least the Gilded Age monarchs endowed universities and art galleries and other things to show their Big Shot Rich Guy fantasies. I mean, Christ, at least be a Batman villain. Drop hundred dollar bills from a helicopter over downtown just to watch the proles scramble. At least Trump ran for president. Zuck was too weird and offputting for that! Imagine being weirder and more offputting! These dudes have more money they can ever spend and still want to be the Big Shot Business Guy sitting in meetings 18 hours a day. Imagine winning the lottery and being like "Hmm, yes, I want to make everyone come into the office to sit around in a conference room and nod at me while I talk. FOR HOURS."
The legacy of Bezos/Musk etc. is going to be space debris and cars that make fart noises.
LOL. Talk about the disease of the winner who will never actually be a winner in there own head because doing stuff and acheiving stuff doesnt make up the PTSD they harbor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Stigmata_of_Palmer_E...
>The story begins in a future world where global temperatures have risen so high that in most of the world it is unsafe to be outside without special cooling gear during daylight hours. In a desperate bid to preserve humanity and ease population burdens on Earth, the UN has initiated a "draft" for colonizing the nearby planets, where conditions are so horrific and primitive that the unwilling colonists have fallen prey to a form of escapism involving the use of an illegal drug (Can-D) in concert with "layouts." Layouts are physical props intended to simulate a sort of alternative reality where life is easier than either the grim existence of the colonists in their marginal off-world colonies, or even Earth, where global warming has progressed to the point that Antarctica is prime vacation resort territory. The illegal drug Can-D allows people to "share" their experience of the "Perky Pat" (the name of the main female character in the simulated world) layouts. This "sharing" has caused a pseudo-religious cult or series of cults to grow up around the layouts and the use of the drug.
It's a lot easier to have a shitty life online in VR than to have a shitty life in real life. In real life you can have a sandwich, and it's a richer, more fulfilling experience than anything VR has to offer.
It's gamers (and buzzword investors) who love VR, and they'll get bored with it. Not every game should be first person; it's kind of a local maxima and a contemporary rut.
I'm not sure this is even close to true. How shitty your life is or is not is based on an individual's perception. You can have a person who should be happy - wealth, relationships, fame and are so miserable they nearly killing themselves daily with alcohol and other drugs. You can have a person, who by all abject means of judgement should be miserable, and has somehow found a way to be happy with their life.
> Metaverse doesn't seem so bad for some.
This is probably true, but the question is, will it really be all that different than real life anyway?
1. Being thrown away and having everything you love being taken from you by an uncaring world.
2. You’re about to die and it’s all going to be finally over. (Major trigger: death is the only way to find relief from the pain of existing.)
3. The only reason you don’t is because someone wants you on display.
4. Everyone ignores you. No one cares. You do not matter to anyone. You are alone.
5. The only escape from this tortured endless hell is a virtual world that is a shadow of the real thing.
Of these, only the second is likely to trigger me normally. Usually I’m fine and can see this coming and pause whatever I’m watching for a second to process it. This ad completely blindsided me with five things I couldn’t process in rapid succession.
It took a while to get back in my feet and not have it ruin my evening. At least I wasn’t a Bengals fan. That loss hurt to watch.
TLDR:
Paraphrased: Meta makes a lot of money, even when it has a bad year. And then,
> Anyway, this is all kind of a long way of explaining how Meta chose to make and air this advertisement for itself during the Super Bowl on Sunday:
Then TFA basically says that the ad illustrates a future where your normal life no longer exists, but you can thankfully reminisce with a friend or two, virtually -- thanks to Meta.
That is hilarious.
This is strange. In the beginning, there was a feeling that the internet would be the ultimate tool to unite like-minded people. It probably is, the question is what like-minded people do when they get together. It can be the wonderful software I'm using or millions of dollars for unethical business.
It turns out that the answer is filter bubbles and Twitter mobs. Heterogeneous minds are really a good thing.
But overall it's hard to say that the internet is a bad thing. Sure, it came with terrible downsides, but it also brought us as a species forward by quite a bit.
Yes, that's the point: the metaverse in Snow Crash may be pretty nice, but the world outside the metaverse fucking sucks. That's the dystopia.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28930355
I don't think creating fully immersive VR is inherently bad.
I'm not sure that "fully immersive VR" is intrinsically bad, at least not any worse than our current less immersive digital world. But it's not hard to see how VR can make a bad situation worse.
Everyone here is freaking out "oh no, Facebook is going to make something so entertaining society will collapse". I would be so proud of myself if I created something so entertaining society collapsed, lol.
I have a belief - you can call it "phs318u's law" - There is no system, no structure, no belief, and no technology that can solve for the worst of humankind. Period. Eventually, bad humans > everything else. Kind of like a social entropy - its a one way journey.
Though naming something Soylent did always seem too on the nose.
The creator of Cyberpunk said that during the hype of the video game he was so sad to see that people really wanted to see it happen in real life because when he created this universe it was suppose to be a critic what the future with technology can bring instead of wishing it to become true.
I have to say Elon Musk and his fans doesn’t help.
The only thing that worries me a little is the cars without license plates.
I was replying to your original comment, focusing on the real world around me.
You wrote "the physical world crumbling around us is something that we can all see with our present eyes"
And "Simple things like visiting a grocery store or driving down the streets of ones childhood home are extremely alienating things that generate nothing but loathing and regret"
I live on the edge of a small American city (roughly 1 million greater urban area) where it's only a few miles between downtown and the suburbs so I do errands anywhere in the vicinity.
Early in the pandemic, it was the suburban grocery stores that had significant numbers of people who seemed pushy, vaguely angry at the world, and maybe 1/4 of them not wearing masks.
I was more comfortable going to the inner city grocery store because everybody was wearing a mask and keeping their distance. Not that I was particularly paranoid about the virus, just because it felt less hostile and less crowded.
The scariest thing I've seen there was a pickup truck plastered Florida-style with graphics and lettering about somebody's paranoid fantasies, vendettas, and politics. It straight up looked like someone who might randomly murder you if they learned you worked for state government because they think the governor is some kind of evil dictator coming to take their guns.
I don't see my neighborhood crumbling. Haven't been to my "childhood home" but I don't think anything in particular has happened to the street it's on.
Garage band breaks up as members move away to start jobs/families. Band gets back together and plays in VR to large audiences.
The fact that no one at Meta recognized how deeply dystopian the commercial was, leads me to believe dystopian is part of the plan.
What I gathered is "trade your lower half for a second chance at living your life, since the current one is a total failure, you worthless suicidal puppet".
Not entirely sure how the flowchart takes me from this to an Oculus purchase though.
But it seems like that take is a lot less cynical than most other commenters on HN.
I'm completely likely to be more cynical than your average person out there since due to personal mental health issues, however none of the questions I just asked seem to have any connection at all with the blindly optimistic take you seem to be having.
Not to mention that Facebook already exists for the purpose you indicated and is even owned by the same people. Presumably Mr Dog Plushie could have had the chance to reconnect with old friends already there, yet instead he was about to literally trash himself and die. How is that not alarming as hell?
When I’m shown an anthropomorphized dog puppet thrown away, dropped haphazardly from a truck, put into a trash compactor, and then treated like a mannequin I’m not being primed to think “reconnect” with anyone. This is a weird depiction of despair to which Meta is the drug to pretend to escape.
Everyone floating around with no legs, cue music, real world puppet stomping his feet to the music. Arf.
> you will never see a commercial for anything that is actually and authentically liberating while watching the Super Bowl; that space is just too expensive, and too valuable, for anything but the institutions invested in the opposite of liberation to be able to afford access to it.
It feels true (with pithy, bonus), but now I'm uncertain. What does "authentically liberating" even mean? Which institutions are "authentically liberating"? What do those look like, communes? Collectives? Medical aid NGOs? Maybe more interesting: can liberation be a product?
https://media.giphy.com/media/aSeNfB1aAO7rG/giphy.gif
It was played a fair bit on MTV2 late at night in the early aughts. It's entirely possible this Super Bowl commercial was made by someone who saw that video 20 years ago. A deeply depressing dystopian vision.
Super Bowl ads are overwhelmingly going to be brands or products, because of the economics - I agree with the that far on what the price restricts things to.
But if you believe a product is liberating, then you would have to disagree with the author, I think. Sticking with a famous Super Bowl example: was the Macintosh liberating? Were cell phones liberating? (If you take the AT&T commercial that Wikipedia tells me aired in 2003 at its face value, where Gilligan from Gilligan's Island uses a phone so they are all rescued... yes? ;) )
I know they are selling me a car but that’s about as close as it gets for a commercial.
I also wonder what that phrase is supposed to mean.
I can't really give you a definition of "authentically liberating" but I know it when I see it.
If these are kind of the ads that comes out after millions of dollars spent and hours of collective thinking; I don't think whatever they are building now will be appealing to people. As another comment HN have put it: they've lost all touch with reality.
For companies that don't pay dividends, the stock price is driven purely by the expectation that somebody will pay you more for the stock than what you paid for it.
> You only care about what the market thinks about what the company does
I’m not sure I’m getting your point. What the company does affects what the market thinks what the company does. I mean sure, feedback is not instantaneous and there have been quite a big mismatch especially recently. But I think it still comes down do execution in the end.
> For companies that don't pay dividends, the stock price is driven purely by the expectation that somebody will pay you more for the stock than what you paid for it
Yes this is why people buy stocks. What the company does will affect the future expectation.
In the end, I put my money elsewhere.
I'm just not ready for Valhalla yet.
So this is Facebook, the empire of targeted advertising, badly missing the target with its own advertising.
I see a ton of comments about how it encourages people to escape the depressing real world.
How many of you play deeply immersive video games? I don't, but so many of my friends do. It depresses me sometimes, for the same reason that people find that video depressing. I really don't see the difference.
That's not to say immersive video games are bad, or even that taking a break from often-shitty reality is a bad thing. I just think perspective and balance is needed.
My biggest issue with the concept of Meta-verse (which to me is nothing different Second Life almost 20 years ago, albeit the tech has improved), is that it will be owned by a company that values engagement so much higher than the overall well-being of its users. If it was anyone but Facebook (and it's still freaking Facebook, despite their renaming of the company when they were in the middle of a publicity crisis), I'd be a lot more excited about it.
Still, whoever put this video together deserves some kudos. I thought it was very well done. I think the "wouldn't it be nice to die?" angle was undeserved and highly biased.
The difference is I felt guilty as hell when I sacricied things I could look forward to in my real life day for a one day 20 hour DOTA binge.
The greivance the author highlights in the article that Meta seems to paint a picture where the Metaverse is the only palatable escape from a cruel, indifferent world that has no place for you.
Me playing too much DOTA -> wasting time that couldve been put to better use making a better more fulfilling life for myself in exchange for a dopamine hit.
Me engaing with the Metaverse too much -> No such thing. You're real life is depressing, intractable and out of your control. This is the last place you'll be able to find any semblance of joy.
Thats not to say that any engagement with the Metaverse will be inherantly unhealthy. If Facebook's history of increasing user engagement with little to no scruples is any indication I don't blame people for being concerned about a dangerous flavor of escapism being promoted.
That's how I would feel too.... I just get the impression that most here don't have that sort of negativity toward video games (and the way they can pull you away from "real life" things) but meanwhile feel such hostility toward this.
It's funny. I remember being young and being told not to do drugs to "escape reality". Escaping reality seems to be almost sacrosanct these days...
It is saying "wouldn't it be nice to be in a nursing home, if you had VR".
Wins the Internet.
Story time:
I just deleted my "Featured Collection." Facebook scraped my GitHub page for my face, and automatically attached it to my account (where I seldom go, so it's probably been there, for some time), as full public (everything else on my account is "friends-only").
So, they grabbed an image of me that I NEVER UPLOADED TO FACEBOOK, and then shared it as "full public," on my timeline.
I'm both impressed, and horrified.