DAVE ROSS

Ross: Facebook’s plan to move us all into the Matrix

Oct 26, 2021, 6:53 AM | Updated: 10:48 am

Facebook...

(Laurent Gillieron/Keystone via AP)

(Laurent Gillieron/Keystone via AP)

Everybody is piling on Facebook – angry conservatives, angry liberals – but Facebook is not the least bit intimidated. And here’s how I know.

On Monday, The Atlantic published its latest Facebook exposé, revealing more embarrassing internal documents, and, of course, there were ads in the article. But the ads – at least in the version I saw – were Facebook ads!

And not just ads — they were clips from a 45-minute conversation with Facebook’s head of global affairs, Nick Clegg, talking about Facebook’s exciting next phase known as the “Metaverse.”

“You can experience it now and actually you can experience it on your phone or your desktop,” Clegg said. “I do my weekly team meetings on a Monday in the Metaverse. We all have avatars, we sit around a table, we have a whiteboard.”

Yes, Facebook is creating a three-dimensional world where you won’t just share photos and news items, you will share a common environment.

Once you put on your 3D glasses, motion detector, and headphones, you won’t just look at Facebook, you will live in it. It’s called immersive technology, and it’s the gateway to the metaverse. And Nick says it’s inevitable:

“Facebook is neither going to build, own, or run the Metaverse on its own,” he described. “If Facebook did not exist, the Metaverse is going to progress anyway.”

So by clicking on an anti-Facebook article, I end up seeing Facebook’s vision for the ultimate social platform – the Metaverse, where all the tech companies will cooperate in creating the rules that will govern our alter-egos.

“And that requires standards, norms, interoperability, inspectications to allow travel to one part of the Metaverse to the next,” Clegg said. “If you, for instance, have your avatar and you buy some clothing for the avatar in one part of the Metaverse, you want to be able to move with that clothing from one part of the Metaverse to the next.”

There will be rules to protect your clothing! Which leads me to believe there will be rules for everything else too in this metaverse which we will all be a part of. Isn’t that what we might call a Universal Government? A government created by the tech companies. And no mention of it being elected! All we know is that one day we will all be immersed in it.

It’s pretty clear we’re having trouble handling the primitive 2D platforms where the user is outside the computer. What’s going to happen when we’re sucked inside the computer?

That’s why ours is the last normal generation. We, at least, have spent most of our time in the real world. If this goes according to plan, the next generation will grow up in the Matrix. And life will be a corporate-controlled hallucination.

At least if the insurrection gets out of hand in the Metaverse, you can just press the “Help” key.

Listen to Seattle’s Morning News weekday mornings from 5 – 9 a.m. on KIRO Radio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.

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