Mark Zuckerberg Has a Vision, and It’s Not Pretty

Mark Zuckerberg, attired in a t-shirt emblazoned with Aut Zuck, Aut Nihil (Zuck or nothing) was omnipresent at Meta Connect 2024, an event of little interest other than for the presentation of Orion, an augmented reality glasses prototype paired with a wrist band and a wireless compute puck that claims to combine the metaverse, virtual and augmented reality and artificial intelligence.

However, this is a product which Meta says will not be available until at least 2027, given that at the moment, it costs the company about $10,000 a unit to make. Nevertheless, Zuckerberg has modestly called them “the most advanced glasses the world has ever seen” sending Meta’s share price up 3%.

Although thicker and heavier even than the RayBan Meta Smart Glasses launched in late 2022, weighing around 100 grams, they’re obviously much lighter than the Apple Vision Pro and can be used to see holograms, apps and movies thanks to the inclusion of micro-prisms in the lenses, for which the company’s engineers, and several billion dollars worth of acquisitions, should take credit.

Which is all well and good, but we might well ask what Meta is actually offering us. Zuckerberg recently appeared wearing another self-designed t-shirt, this time bearing the logo Παθός Μαθός (learning through suffering), but the reality is that the new philosophy of this psychopath, a man devoid of any possible empathy for the suffering of others and capable of denying the link between social networks and the mental health issues of many young people, is “enough apologizing”, meaning that from now on, we’re going to have to settle for what he graciously offers us. All hail Caesar, sorry: Zuck.

In other words if we want a metaverse, we will have to accept his rules, and of course we will have to accept that all the information we generate will be sold to the highest bidder. Now it’s social networks, but if we want AR glasses, he’ll be watching whatever we see, which means those loathsome QR codes, reminders and videos already familiar from Facebook and Instagram. And in the future, everything we play on it, every move we make in a hypothetical metaverse or, God forbid, a neural interface that reads our thoughts will also be for sale. Every. Breath. You. Take.

In Zuckerberg’s world, we must all hail Emperor Zuckerberg: from now on, it’s no more Mr. Nice Guy: he’s had enough of apologizing. Use his technology, pay up and shut up.

God help anybody who decides to join him on this next phase of his mission to rule the world.

(En español, aquí)

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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