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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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Looks like the war against advertising is continuing to fail, predictably. Google Chrome is now banning restricting ad blockers starting as early as next year. (1) I am not convinced this model of: create a free, ad-free service to get users --> slowly pull in ads for $$$ --> eventually become an ad-riddled hell is the best model. I often balk at paying for services up front, but if a service as essential as google is now bowing to the pressure, when will it end?

Advertising definitely has some uses in connecting buyers to sellers, and informing consumers about the market, but I'm convinced it's a bit of a 'tamed demon.' If we don't want to devolve into a horrid anarcho-capitalist future, we need to get serious about restricting what advertisers can do, and where they can advertise. I predict advertising will become far more ubiquitous with the rise of Dall-E and similar image producing AIs. The cost of creating extremely compelling, beautiful ads will plummet, and more and more of our daily visual space will become filled with non stop advertising.

On top of this, we have Meta and other tech oligarchs attempting to push us all into the Metaverse. I am no detractor of AR/VR, in fact I think utilized correctly it could solve many of our current problems. However if the Powers That Be take over the metaverse, we will soon have ads that engage all of our sense - not just vision and hearing.

Given how powerful advertising already is, can we really afford to let it run rampant in an age where we have such powerful technologies?

1 - https://developer.chrome.com/blog/mv2-transition/

tech oligarchs attempting to push us all into the Metaverse

Can you give me a plausible narrative about how we will be "pushed" into the Metaverse?

Currently I have no plans to ever buy a VR helmet. I don't want one. What will make me change my mind?

The obvious business use-case is meetings and the like. As technology advances I expect the ability to do in-person meetings virtually to be a huge draw (though adoption will be incredibly slow as dealmakers and salespeople are rarely first adopters of technology - if we reach the ability to do this in 2040 it's only going to be a major thing in 2060-2070 and will probably only reach the majority of first world people by 2080 at least) especially with WFH offices.

Because all the Cool Kids are doing it, and if you don't join them then you'll find all your friends have disappeared.

I've lately begun to realize that I don't actually need a phone for anything I do by myself. Sure, I sometimes need to provide a phone number for government forms, buying airplane tickets, etc. but that could easily be done through Google Voice or throwaway SMS receivers or something like that. I know my way around town well enough not to need map apps. If I want to listen to music I can use an MP3 player. Etc.

The only problem is social: the norm of making plans and sticking to them is long gone. If I make arrangements to meet someone at location X at time Y, about half the time I'll get a text message while en-route saying "Let's meet at location Z at time W instead". If I later complained that they didn't show up to X@Y as planned, they would accuse me of being unreasonable for not getting with the times and for deigning to leave home without an always-online communication device.

I got rid of Facebook years ago and never looked back, but I have been burned at least once, when I tried to go to an event at the time that had been conveyed to me by word-of-mouth but was later rescheduled via Facebook without my knowledge. Imagine my embarrassment when I was the only person who showed up at the original time!

When COVID began, I finally relented and signed up for Discord to stay in touch with my local friends. What else could I have done? Should I instead have been all alone through that time of crisis, because of my "weird insistence" that my social life should not be mediated by unfriendly third-parties?

Don't get me wrong; I know where you're coming from. But let's not delude ourselves that it's just a matter of our own individual choices. Resistance to the digitization of social life must take place collectively, or not at all.

The only problem is social: the norm of making plans and sticking to them is long gone. If I make arrangements to meet someone at location X at time Y, about half the time I'll get a text message while en-route saying "Let's meet at location Z at time W instead". If I later complained that they didn't show up to X@Y as planned, they would accuse me of being unreasonable for not getting with the times and for deigning to leave home without an always-online communication device.

The question is, would they still act that way if you didn't have (and they knew you didn't have) such a device? Certainly nobody in my life would. In my experience, the norm is that cell phones enable changing plans, but do not remove the requirement to stick to agreed-upon plans. If you propose a new time/place for a meeting and don't get a confirmation that the other party is OK with that, then you stick to the original agreed-upon plan (or you're a dick and nobody is going to associate with you).

I suspect that my amount of social activity would drop by about half if I tried to enforce this norm on my friends. I've had people no-show with no notice (text message or otherwise), and when I see them again later they seemingly have no memory of ever having made plans. Can I afford to cut all flaky people out of my life? It seems like a losing battle, but maybe I'll feel differently as I get older.

Yeah, to be blunt if I were you I wouldn't keep those people in my life. That sort of behavior just isn't acceptable, phones or no phones. Like, even if you have a phone, what if you don't see their message in time because you're driving to the meetup location? What if there's a technical glitch? What if they thought they sent a message but actually forgot to hit send? There are many sorts of reasons why one may not get a last minute change of plans like that, and in such cases the onus is on the other person to stick to the plan.

Flaky people have always existed. But I'm not personally convinced that the existence of phones has made it acceptable to be flaky when making social plans. Life happens, of course, and everyone is going to have times where they can't make it. But someone who does that regularly is being inconsiderate and is the one in the wrong, even by the standards of today (or at least as far as I've experienced them).

Work and sex, presumably. When the metaverse has useful business cases (meetings, trainings, whatever) that are universally adopted, it will be impossible to interact with the economy without it.

Plenty of people in 1998 said they never planned to get a computer, no way no how, and if they still stuck to that today they'd be severely impacted day to day. Especially as services that were once analog (movie times in the local newspaper, applying for a mortgage) have moved purely online unless you are willing to undergo great inconvenience. I'm also pretty confident that smartphone adoption was driven by tinder as much as any other single app.

I'm not sure I know what that use-case is for the metaverse yet, but it's certainly possible it's either out there, or that a critical mass of corporate types think it's out there.

They're trying to push the metaverse as the everything verse, but I think the examples people are quoting are going to be the majority use: business and work. Virtual meetings (but you'll still have the trouble of trying to schedule a time that suits the guys in Europe, the guys in Asia, and the guys across the USA so that everyone is awake and it's not sparrowfart in one place and the middle of the night in another). Virtual training. The kind of HR videos we've all had to sit through, only with bells on.

Meet all your friends and interact for a fun time? Less so. Maybe gaming, if they get it to work without lag; imagine playing as your character in a virtual world. Somebody will figure out how to use it for porn.

But if we take the current introductory videos and Zuckerberg's idea of 'fun' (oh hey, here's a cool piece of art I saw today - but if you all want to see it, we'll have to pay the artist, yeah Mark, that's precisely how sharing cool things works with normal people, I regularly charge premium fees to any poor fool I can corner long enough to listen to my raving in order that they can see the piece of visual art, or music, or book I'm trying to push on them), then no. A guy who thinks this avatar is not creepy and soulless is not someone who can figure out how to make this fun.

Steve Jobs, now, were the man still alive or had it happened in his day - this would be jam for him. Zuckerberg? A guy who can't imagine a better avatar than "this one looks just like me" is not the inspirational creative genius the metaverse needs to sell it to the general public.

I'm also pretty confident that smartphone adoption was driven by tinder as much as any other single app.

That seems really out of touch. People were scrambling to get iphones the moment they came out and cost was the main barrier. People in third world countries have smart phones now, because they serve lots of useful functions outside of hook up apps. By the time Tinder came around smart phones were already ubiquitous. If you looked at a graph of smart phone ownership Tinder coming into existence wouldn't be noticeable.

  1. Create new services on that platform.

  2. Discontinue ones off of it.

There's a simple line from yesteryear's standalone applications to today's always-on DRM/subscription services to tomorrow's Metaverse.

If you don't believe me about the previous transition, try to buy Adobe Photoshop.

stereoscopic FPV drone piloting.

Social engineering and shaming of those who push against the idea of moving to VR. The same pipeline that has successfully changed so much of our culture into a progressive direction, in such a relatively short (historically speaking) amount of time.

The same cultural mechanics that forced us to segregate our online community three times.

For better or worse we are currently sitting on a giant cultural engine dedicated to transforming what it means to be human in a time scale of decades. When I say pushed, I mean pushed.

What will make me change my mind?

You may never change your mind. In my experience Mottizens are a rare breed of folk who care about standing up to these cultural machines. Most people however have less resistance or knowledge of these cultural shifts. Slowly more and more of human society, from day to day communication, economic activity, religious activity, etc will shift to a virtual space, and if you don't like it, you will be left behind.

Whether this happens in the next 50 years or 150 years, I believe we need to put serious shackles on advertising before it does.

I think I'm fine with being left behind if that's the future.

As am I, but do you want that to be the future? I certainly don't.

Hell, if it means all the crazies of that other flavor lock themselves up in their pods and crazies of my flavor inherit the actual outdoors world, then yeah, bring it on.

That's a fair point. I'd actually think that would be the ideal future, people splitting off to whichever area they prefer. However I fear that the population in the 'real world' will slowly dwindle until it dies out.