Midrange Weekly Nov 1

Your Weekly Roundup On What’s Got The Midrange Staff’s Attention

Hello friends and welcome back to Midrange Weekly; we hope everyone had a fun and safe Halloween. The squid game costumes were out in full force, the drag queens were given full jurisdictional authority of the greater Vancouver area as is clearly for the best, and the Ghostbuster’s theme song saw a roughly one billion percent uptick in streams over the weekend. Not everyone went smoothly- there is a special place in hell for anyone that set off fire works and scared any dogs in the area. Speaking of which, please enjoy a photo of a dog dressed as Phoebe Bridgers who has clearly won Halloween this year. Better luck next year to all of the humans. Now that spooky season is over let’s see what else is out there that is sufficiently terrifying. Mickey and Jamie are indisposed with other projects this week so you’re stuck with whatever Tristan saw online.

 

Zuckerberg: Into The Metaverse

The big news this week is also the worst. Like the harbinger of some kind of tech-apocalypse, Mark Zuckerberg had an announcement to make. After several weeks of hinting, and a surprisingly swift company wide overhaul, the Zuck has proclaimed to the world that Facebook is no longer the hierarchal zenith of his algorithmic empire. The Facebook media group will now go by an over arching new name and organizational structure: Meta. While the app Facebook and its vestigial offshoots like What’s App and Instagram will still exist and presumably operate in the same ways, they are now subservient to the larger entity Meta. Under this new banner and operational vision, Zuckerberg’s Meta will seek to expand into and develop technologies and services that further integrate social interaction, entrepreneurial ambitions, and the more rarefied distinctions of human connection into a cohesive, virtual taxonomy. Zuckerberg wants us to exist in his metaverse, a neoglism that was once an exciting frontier for exploring the intersections of psychology, perception, and innovation, that has now been annexed in favour of the banality of being stuck in a literal second life, of which he is the overlord. This all sounds horrible, yes- more so when you realize how it’s sort of the logical conclusion of where Ryan from The Office was going with his Dunder Mifflin Infinity scheme. 

Before one considers the very real and very pernicious psychosomatic implications of being subsumed by a virtual facsimile of life curated by a famously disingenuous and untrustworthy person, this is all just also very obnoxious from a vulture capitalist perspective. To anyone paying attention, which I offer with no heir of pretention but rather the resignation that Facebook- err Meta- is so ubiquitous it’s impossible not to, this pivot to Meta, and the attendant PR campaign comes at a suspicious time. While inundated with scandals since at least the 2016 election, ranging from unethical data harvesting, to revelations of insidious algorithmic manipulations of the most hostile and sectarian animus in online discourse, none of this impropriety has really seemed to stick. For the first time however, the powers that be at Facebook appeared concerned about the revelations of astonishingly onerous wrong doing as revealed by whistle blower Frances Haugen and what’s colloquially being called the Facebook Papers. A series of internal document dumps and a subsequent interview on 60 Minutes have revealed our clearest insight yet into the internal mechanizations of Facebook’s mendacity and malignancy. A panoply of racist, bigoted, or otherwise venomously charged content is prioritized by an omniscient and omnivorous algorithm because Facebook discovered long ago that acerbic content boosts engagement, with no regard to the mental health and societal erosion it fosters. Internal research clearly charted the direct relationship between picturesque IG content and an increase in anxiety and resentment among youth, with their rational faculties still very much incubating, and decided to peruse this demographic even more aggressively. This is likely only scratching the surface of their unscrupulous conduct. 

It’s within this context and under the shadow of our metastasizing grievances against the social media monolith that Zuckerberg makes this announcement on the pivot to Meta. Rather than coming to us with an air of contrition, admitting his company’s prodigious shortcomings, and vowing to be better, we get a name change instead. New name, same horrible company and attendant values, to put it succinctly. Rather than being manipulated by memetic propaganda in a dissociated online space that at least had the antiseptic barriers defined by a screen and us, that same manipulation will be a feature of our virtual lives, which apparently is the way of the future. Such an announcement is the equivalent of waving something shiny in front of us to distract from the dumpster fire behind him, which if the lack of congressional oversight is any indication, is a rational strategy. All of this is a cynical distraction from Facebook’s multitude of PR woes and blunders, but that’s only a best-case scenario. A far worse consideration is that Zuckerberg wholly intends to go through with this. 

A loose translation of Meta in its original Greek etymology is ‘there is always more to build’, which sounds sufficiently inspiring in a prosaic sense I suppose. However it sounds more like a threat coming from Zuckerberg with his Sisyphean goal of dismantling our lives and reconstructing them in his anodyne image, within parameters beneficial to him and his shareholders. What’s so frustrating about this is not just the surface level foreboding of Zuckerberg essentially building a prototype of the Matrix, although it’s fitting that the person to do such a thing is someone we have all secretly suspected to be an android or something. Rather, on a more sub-textual level it’s the sheer disregard and even outright disdain he seems to have for public sentiment on a near global scale. Opinion towards Facebook has shifted either to antipathy or highly negative in recent years, something that can be measured across partisan distinctions, albeit for different reasons. Conservatives deride and resent Facebook for the imagined grievances of supressing their ideological viewpoints, which as we covered last week is simply not the case. Liberals are agog that what was envisioned as a way for disgruntled young adults to rate college girls has mutated into a virus that has become an existential threat to democracy.

Zuckerberg’s answer to this is to get even more in our faces, to try and force us to integrate even further into his company’s services. During a time when people have collectively- and rightly so- had it with Facebook, he endeavours to ensnare and entangle us within his online tendrils even more. This is all presented with the antiseptic cuteness of his online avatar presentations, of which look suspiciously like the mid 2000s Nintendo Mii characters. If there was ever a time for Nintendo’s army of litigious and fastidious lawyers to spring into action, this might be it. The idea of stridently building this verisimilitude of real life and then asking us to implant ourselves within it at a time when more of us than ever would wish he and his constructs would just go away seems subtly hostile on his part. It seems more and more we are being considered as resource to be harvested rather than a polity to be considered. 

It also just seems like he’s really bad at reading the room, when it comes to human interaction at least. Facebook marketplace remains functional as a next generation Craig’s List and Messenger is a useful P2P tangent of the actual Facebook ecosystem, but does anyone really want have a meaningful human interaction within that ecosystem anymore? More fundamentally, can one even have a meaningful interaction there? This is the immutable consequence of algorithmic moderators flattening the expressions of human connections, squeezing the nuances out of communications until we are reduced to our basest means of doing so. Conversational discourse has been supplanted by trading misleading memes and other forms of digestible disinformation. Language has been annexed by ‘like’ buttons formerly and now by angry emojis. The aperture of opinions and perspectives has been narrowed to only let the most angry and combative through, condensing our spectrum of interaction into an artificially hostile one. At least in real life we have to construct more or less full sentences. We can’t just get by in a tangible human interaction with button clicks, as few of which as possible. 

What if this wasn’t the case? What if Meta gets its way down the road and more and more of the human experience takes place in its virtual space? We load into our avatars with our online sobriquets to protect our anonymity, which further emboldens our more hostile instincts- and this is just how we do things. It will lead to the further, depressing flattening of human interaction. What interactions remain will be further defined by animus and negative engagement, further sucking us into a toxic ecosystem. If the Matrix was ostensibly benign, this sounds openly hostile. Zuckerberg presents all of this like the next frontier of digital enlightenment and luxury, but it sounds pretty dystopian to me, further indicating just how weirdly anathematized he is from the fundamental joys of actual human experience. We are already far too subservient, passively speaking, to the worldviews of people like Zuckerberg, Bezos, or Musk. I don’t want to live in their world to any further degree than I have to. And if even that’s not feasible, I certainly don’t want to pretend it’s a net positive. Much like the Orwellian initiative to deconstruct language to its most elemental and primal components, leaving us so little left in our lexical tool set, Meta seems like a stealth way to reorient our definitions of life around only what the algorithm deems functional. It’s a poor arbiter of such things; after all, like Meta, it was Zuckerberg’s creation. -Tristan

 

Things From The Internet We Liked

 

The Internet Reacts To Meta

And by Internet, in this case we thankfully don’t mean Facebook. People across the other social media platforms of which really just means Twitter and Tik Tok and have been roasting the presentation of Zuckerberg’s new project with all of the sardonic insolence we’ve come to expect from the platforms. Enjoy this content now before the Meta overlords inevitably buy these services. Here are some of our favourites.

 

To Hell With Joe Manchin (Literally)

Over at Jezebel Danielle Tcholakian has a scathing essay up targeting everyone’s least favourite senator. Joe Manchin. She rightly calls him out for his stunningly myopic cynicism and astutely articulates just what a pathetic goon he is for the fossil fuel lobby, for no better reason than the mere adjacency to power it affords him. Manchin truly is a loathsome human and this article is as thorough as it is incisive in explaining why. If you’re unsure of why this corrupt worm is in the news so much and everyone is mad at him, read this.

Donate to midrange
MIDRANGE WEEKLYdavid mcleod ringuetteMeta, Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter, Joe ManchinComment