I'm hard pressed to think of a person more responsible for our current world having already swung into uncomfortably dystopian tendencies than Dorsey.
The fact that Mark Zuckerberg is targeted by the media and the activists while Jack Dorsey is not, I don't think it is because Facebook is worse than Twitter. Rather, it is because Mark Zuckerberg tries to make Facebook political neutral while Jack Dorsey donated $10million to the "Antiracist" center and openly makes Twitter left leaning.<p>The only way for Mark Zuckerberg to be left loose, is do something similar to Jack Dorsey.
A few days ago I randomly read about how Zuckerberg tried to serve Dorsey a goat he killed. Seeing their names in the headline just made me think about it again:<p><a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/24/mark-zuckerberg-once-killed-a-goat--and-served-it-to-jack-dorsey-.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/24/mark-zuckerberg-once-killed-...</a>
I used to work on and with a lot of folks over at Roblox and still don't understand the metaverse hype, when you ask them to explain it they go off into these speeches that make me think they don't even understand it themselves.<p>To me, it feels like a lot of the metaverse hype is just companies (and their founders) looking for some higher purpose, rather than just saying "we're a social network" or "we're a gaming platform".
I've been wondering about who's going to use it - especially by the time it ships. People can be surprisingly unpredictable so it seems like a big bet in a very specific direction. Meanwhile, a lot of teenagers around me (I'm not living in/around SV) are flipping completely back to Real Life socializing and, too some extent, are even anti-tech. They're acutely aware of privacy issues in using any sort of connected technology and want to limit their use and exposure. There's selection bias in my sample, but it makes me wonder about the longer term future of "social media", especially large scale green-field social media like a new metaverse.
I don't really understand this critique. Isn't Twitter a metaverse of sorts? And It's a fairly dystopian one at that. I have no doubt these online environments will continue to get more sophisticated as time goes on.
The lack of self awareness is staggering. I struggle to think of a single website that has done more damage to western civilization than Twitter.<p>Facebook is a disgusting mess, but a bunch of out of touch old people sharing propaganda pales in comparison to journalists, celebrities, and politicians actively coordinating witch hunts.<p>I've said it before, but it's quite telling that the current political drumbeat is set on destroying Facebook, but never mentions Twitter.
People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.<p>The joke here is that Jack, Mark (and others) already live in an unreal metaverse. These people are so far out of touch with reality that they're thinking about creating an even deeper virtual world than the fakeness they live in, just to escape it.
In general I dislike FB, using it less than one hour a month. I do like Oculus VR, and worked for a few years doing VR (SAIC and a project for Disney), and maybe I have read too many William Gibson SF books (all of them, actually), but I see a future where I spend a couple of hours a day in a metaverse. I live in the mountains with a hiking trailhead 200 feet from my front door, so I don’t personally worry about losing touch with the physical world. I can imagine some people becoming addicted to a good metaverse implementation.<p>When I see some peoples’ sick addictions to constantly using their phone, I sometimes feel compelled to tell them about the <a href="https://freedom.to" rel="nofollow">https://freedom.to</a> service (I am a happy customer).
The term "metaverse" is a strange choice. Feels like there was a room of engineers advocating for this term, based on some obscure sci-fi author they all enjoyed.<p>Not sure what the right phrase is, but this feels like "metaverse" is a going to be an uphill battle for users to embrace.
I feel like Jack Dorsey is one of the more "human" billionaire tech bros, but he also has no clue what to do with his platform. He strikes me as someone who's good at his job and enjoys being chill.
Given Dorsey's track record on shilling cryptocurrencies as the solution to social problems I'm not sure he should be calling others dystopian.