In the early 2010s, Beta was the word. All new disruptive technology claimed to be on beta mode, meaning constantly improving and learning, growing a bit every day. Never done, never finished.
“Perpetual beta," a term used by software engineers to indicate the process of releasing a software update at about 80% completion and then continuing to improve it based on incoming customer data, became essential for leaders given the rapidly changing world we live in. This mentality helped launch some of the most successful disruptive businesses of the decade, including Uber, Testa, and Airbnb. Some veterans also shared the same mindset, like Amazon and Facebook.
Fast forward to Meta, Facebook Company's new handle. Meta is short for metaverse, which, according to Mark Zuckerberg, "is the next evolution of social connection and 3D spaces in the metaverse will let you socialize, learn, collaborate and play in ways that go beyond what we can imagine." (I'm getting Second Life vibes here)
From a constant technology disruption to virtual reality space, from Beta to Meta seems like a natural evolution.
This is the stuff that fictionalized future is made of. After all, speculating about how the future will look has always been one of fiction's favorite topics. Legendary and visionary artist David Bowie said once that “We were creating the 21st century in 1971”. So it's interesting to observe the narrative arch evolution in fiction over the late 20th to early 21st century. From Jetsons to Black Mirror, entertainment has offered viewers a wide range of possible future outcomes. Still, the narrative has shifted from an idealized 1950s lifestyle transported to another century to a dystopian world not too far away in the future.
Watching creepy Zuckerberg announcing the endless possibilities of the metaverse gave me the chills. Not as much because of the dystopian undertones in his science fiction vision of the future, but mostly because of what's happening in the present.
Recently Time magazine posted an article laying out the 5 most shocking revelations from the Facebook whistleblower. Among them, Facebook's own research indicates that the like button negatively impacted young users' well-being. However, Zuckerberg's company ultimately decided to keep it because they found out that removing it would decrease engagement. Together with the News Feed, share and like buttons are the core of what makes Facebook.
According to Jane Lytvynenko, a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy Shorenstein Center, "The crux of the problem here is the infrastructure itself." In order words, what Facebook is known for and what makes it so successful is ultimately harmful to people. Now imagine Facebook on acid with virtual reality?
But if Facebook triggers a common negative trait on its users, and they are almost 1 trillion people worldwide, how can we fix this? And worse, for an entire generation, the 17 years old social platform has been decisive in shaping their interaction with the world since their most formative years. In other words, they are who they are also because of Facebook. So is it possible to even consider reverting it back to something they never knew before - a world where social media didn't exist?
According to Meta, the world is about to change again, propelled by another technology leap into the future. So, there's no point in looking back and glorifying how it was before. Nostalgia won't take us anywhere. There isn't a world without Facebook, and for better or worse, mankind has been fictionalizing the future long enough that it started to become real. But now that Pandora's box has opened, the question is, what are we going to do next? But one can also wonder, has social media and Big Tech become the scapegoat of all the evil in the world?
Tech giants, such as Facebook, Amazon, and Google are poorly regulated by governments. Most governments, in fact, rely on their technology and expertise, from satellite systems to national security. Venturing beyond their core digital products and services and into real-world and expanding into fields once owned solely by governments, including defense, diplomacy, citizen services, and public infrastructure. Big Tech became "net states."
This is no fiction; this is the reality today. And as much as tech giants aren't all evil, they certainly don't look very friendly right now.
In his 2017 book “Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow”, historian and best-selling author Yuval Harari, says "in the end, it's all a question of authority. A thousand years ago you'd turn to the church. Today, we expect algorithms to provide us with the answer—who to date, where to live, how to deal with an economic problem. So more and more authority is shifting to these corporations."
With fiction becoming a reality, It looks like we are living on the first part of The Matrix saga, and the choice we have in front of us is which pill we are going to take. Both of them seem hard to swallow.