Metaverse? Nope, real life please
This is my weekly newsletter for members of Reaction, but don’t miss out on all the wonderful stuff on our Weekend section, where Adam Boulton’s weekly column is on Impeachment and the Clinton era. Jenny Hjul says we Brits will miss our reticent monarch. She’s right. We will. Why are the heir to the throne and his son being so explicitly political in the run-up to COP26? They both seem convinced that their pious campaigning on climate change is somehow above politics. It isn’t. It’s about bills, taxes, economics, well-being and policy choices: it’s inherently political and they’re supposed to be apolitical.
Elsewhere on Reaction Weekend, there’s Walter Ellis’s weekly dispatch from rural France – French letter. There’s a guide to the Booker prize short-list. Harry Cluff tells a ghost story. Allan Massie writes on rugby’s Eddie “tough guy” Jones. Our opera columnist Gerald Malone sticks it to the director of a new Wagner production. Leading art expert Andrew Wilton walks us through a picture. Saffron Swire’s weekly column on food featuring interviews with chefs is unmissable and life-affirming. This week it’s especially good. And there’s more too. All this put together for you by our young and talented Reaction team. Don’t miss it.
Anyway. Right, the sodding Metaverse…
It’s easy to make jokes about the attempted rebranding of Facebook. As of this week, the company is now called Meta, Metabook, or Metasomething. Amusingly, and quite incredibly considering his abject political record, Nick Clegg, the erstwhile leader of the Liberal Democrats, is involved in this great corporate overhaul. Like Penfold to Danger Mouse in the 1980s cartoon series, Clegg is ever eager.
This week, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his executive assistant, the former British Deputy Prime Minister, made an excruciating, embarrassing short film explaining why the sinister new company plan is nothing to be afraid of. They unveiled Meta, a new name for Facebook, and their vision for the Metaverse, a 3D internet universe envisaged for some time by technologists, in which those so inclined will live pretty much permanently inside a virtual experience hooked up to Facebook via glasses, headsets and presumably wearable technology. Zuckerberg said this is very exciting.
He told Ben Thompson, the Taiwan-based analyst who runs the tech newsletter Stratechery, that this will make it possible to be always receiving messages. Another threat to civility and human interaction. Just what we need.
Says Zuckerberg: “I do think that for augmented reality, for example, one of the killer use cases is basically going to be you’re going to have glasses and you’re going to have something like EMG on your wrist and you’re going to be able to have a message thread going on when you’re in the middle of a meeting or doing something else and no one else is even going to notice. Think about what we’ve had over the last couple of years during the pandemic where everyone’s been on Zoom, and one of the things that I’ve found very productive is you can have side channel conversations or chat threads going while you’re having the main meeting. I actually think that would be a pretty useful thing to be able to have in real life too where basically you’re having a physical conversation or you’re coming together, but you can also receive incoming messages without having to take out your phone or look at your watch and even respond quickly in a way that’s discreet and private.”
As Helen Lewis of The Atlantic put it:
“You know the few moments of your life where you are not staring at a screen, but instead experiencing a genuine human interaction? What if – hear me out – Facebook could monetise those, as well?”
From one angle, the Facebook relaunch looks desperate, naff. Many times of late it has been said and written that Facebook is only so keen to transform itself, change its name and pretend that makes everything okay, because it is a company with US and European regulators on its tail. Court cases are being prepared accusing it, and other internet giants, of anti-competitive practices. Isn’t it only trying to make itself seem groovier, in Dad dancing-style, because youngsters aren’t interested in its sad, old brand?
Perhaps, though what if there’s another possibility?
That sad, old brand is only seventeen years old, yet this week Facebook/Meta unveiled profits of $9.2bn in the latest quarter. Yes, that’s a profit of $9.2bn in one quarter. Sure, this has been done by having wrecked the news business and causing confused people to become addicted to cat memes and theories about lizards living under the White House. Still, it’s growth achieved at impressive speed.
Those of us old enough to have lived through several phases of media cynicism about the viability of technological advances – news online, gaming, commerce – should be a little humble. I remember when many of us journalists, me included, thought twenty years ago that the internet would never catch on, or not in a way sufficient to upend our world. We were wrong. It did.
The Metaverse may be naff, but that’s no barrier to success at scale online, whether it’s Zuckerberg who makes it work or someone else.
Those of us who don’t want to live in the Metaverse, who want to live primarily by human contact and not mediated by tech giants monetising our every move, are going to have to work out how to respond, to find ways to live together productively and usefully without being sucked in. This is going to be an even bigger ethical and political challenge in the next few decades.
The Zuckerberg/Clegg video is a joke. What they plan is not funny.
COP26 already extremely boring
It hasn’t started yet, and already it’s extremely boring.
Big Bad Budget
Did you like the Budget? I tried not to dislike it too much, on the basis that too much cynicism is awful. Probably too many times down the years I’ve hated a Budget excessively for not doing this, that or the other. Then the world trundles on and there we all are a few years later unable to remember what was so terrible about a particular Budget or Chancellor many years previously. The sun will come out tomorrow, as the song says: Tomorrow, there’ll be sun.
Or will there be? There’s not much sunshine in prospect after that dreadful piece of work by Rishi “Gordon Brown” Sunak this week. Those of us who worried about Gordon Brown’s budgets back when he was in his pomp, spending too much and boasting about it while heralding the miracle of global finance having no downside, were right to be concerned, it turned out.
Sometimes a Budget is so downright weird, or ideologically transformative, that it really stands out. This effort by Sunak was such a Budget, I fear.
Much has been said, and much more will be said, about the extent of the tax-raising and the big state policies the Tories have adopted. The country is ageing and wants endless spending on public services, so the government is giving it what it wants.
My main concern is about growth and innovation, which is needed to pay for all the stuff the country wants. How are growth and innovation to be encouraged?
The messages sent by this government are discouraging, contradictory and confusing. There is boosterish rhetoric aplenty. It is at odds with taxes going through the roof. Meanwhile, the numbers and assumptions made by the OBR, the Treasury and the Bank of England look implausible, when there is inflation out there in a stressed global economy and central banks are trying to unwind Quantitative Easing. The danger for Britain is that investors at home and abroad look at Britain and conclude it is befuddled, badly run and going through one of its downwardly mobile phases.
Watch Press Review
Did you know Reaction is now established on Youtube, or the Youtubes as an old friend calls it? One of the highlights of my week is recording the latest episode of our show, where we review the stories that have caught the attention of the Reaction editors.
Click subscribe to subscribe and get more episodes. And hit like on the video, if, indeed, you liked it. If you didn’t, don’t. Press Review is not, yet, available in the Metaverse.
What I’m reading:
Finished The Great Decoupling: China, America and the Struggle for Technological Supremacy, by Nigel Inkster, before interviewing the author this week, for something the Reaction team is making for Engelsberg Ideas – www.engelsberg.ideas – on Artificial Intelligence, warfare and espionage. Nigel Inkster was in MI6, British Secret Intelligence Service, for 31 years. He retired at the end of 2006 as assistant chief and director of operations and intelligence, having been deputy to “C” until 2003. His new book is a deeply insightful look into the technological battle now underway, and I enjoyed our conversation. I’ll link to it here when we publish/broadcast.