>... but I think beyond that, deep down, he's just a nerd who wants to live in a VR dreamland to shut out the millions of people who call him a weird lizard.

I mean, in his defense he might be pretty normal by lizard standards, I don't know. Calling him weird just seems unnecessary in that context.

>He of course wants every human interaction to be monetizable by Facebook, total control of our dopamine channels, ...

I agree. It'd be a much better future for everyone if he'd just throw his advertising biz in the garbage. Apple is going to kick Meta's ass in the long run just by virtue of their privacy stance—which isn't all that great to begin with, but it sure does beat "our intent is to sell every iota of information we collect on you."

> Apple is going to kick Meta's ass in the long run just by virtue of their privacy stance

I think you're discounting (ha) the allure of free/cheap to people who don't have disposable income. Which is to say, most people.

It'll be interesting to see where this goes. If VR becomes a big thing and we get to the point where an appreciable chunk of social interactions start to take place over it (huge if), the device would at least be as significant as your phone.

People in the US are willing to spend extra on the Apple phone. There's already drama over the stupid blue text/green text thing, imagine a world where you know that your social interactions with a Facebook user are snooped on. I think it could lead to some significant ostracization. Private party -- no Facebookers.

Reality shaping, not snooping, will be the primary concern.

What's reality shaping and why will it be a concern?

There’s a Philip K Dick line that goes - “reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away”.

Reality shaping is like that - but coercive and in reverse. How much do I need to nudge your perceptual world with ubiquitous, desirable lizard-brain augmentations before you stop believing in reality?

I mean, we already have religion, advertising, and "influencers" so I guess this is a current problem. With VR, at least it will be obvious when headset is on.

A problem as old as humankind.

Ideally, one would attempt to tie the user’s livelihood to the platform to keep them engaged.

Isn't part of the reason people are spending on iPhone that they can signal wealth to friends? From what I remember Apple always sells more when then introduce new golden colors so people can show they have the new device.

Have you ever been in the Apple ecosystem? Its not perfect but it beats anything else as far as UX is concerned.

I have an iPhone and I like it. I have little need to update it even though it is almost 3 years old.

I also agree it is far from perfect but pretty good. Used to be on android but it was easier to use the same devices as my wife.

I have never seen a gold iPhone in real life, even though more than half of my friends/family have iPhones. IIRC they did better overseas(?). Not sure.

I don't think iPhones signal much (in the US at least) -- they have like 50% market share here.

Inside VR you can have a phone with diamonds for no extra $.

Thinking about it, those diamond-lacking iPhones look quite shabby, already!

Wow. I've just had a glance at the not too distant future!

You're probably right, though I don't think it all comes down to disposable income.

Laziness, apathy and network effects are perhaps equally powerful forces. After all, I continue to use Google and Instagram despite my knowing how the sausage is made there.

But there is zero money to be made out of people who have zero money.

>But there is zero money to be made out of people who have zero money.

That's not true. That's why credit exists. Selling poor people shit they can't afford with terrible terms is a long-standing American tradition.

When a debtor is unable to pay (often times through no fault of their own), the creditor eats the cost because their margins are good enough to allow for it. That effectively represents a wealth transfer between corporations providing the services and the corporations providing the credit.

The creditor doesn't put a lien on the debtor's house, repossess their goods, or take them to court?

Obviously this happens with mortgages, cars, and other extremely high value things. IRS debts, student loan debts...

But what about credit cards? Don't they have mechanisms other than tanking your credit report? And if not, why don't poor indebted people simply default all the time to remove debt?

Sure, but you also can't squeeze blood from a stone.

That said, I was mostly talking credit cards, since that's what most tech services would fall under in a zero-money consumer situation.

>And if not, why don't poor indebted people simply default all the time to remove debt?

Some do, but having your credit ruined for seven years sucks for most people. Likewise the courts don't exactly smile upon those who run up huge debts with the intention of defaulting.

I would argue there is money to be made out of people with zero money. Student loans are an example. Instead of zero money, they now have negative money. This is terrible ofc.

Zero money now - but one must be ready to skim the cream off their raw human potential.

You refer to poor people.

"You're forgetting the poor people"

Facebook does not sell users’ information. It uses their information to target ads, which it sells.

You might also be against the latter, fine! That’s a perfectly reasonable position to hold. But don’t muddy the waters by calling it something fundamentally different.

>But don’t muddy the waters by calling it something fundamentally different.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-46618582

"In total, it said the social network had special arrangements with more than 150 companies to share its members' personal data. Most of these, it said, were other tech firms, but the list also included online retailers, car-makers and media organisations, including the NYT itself, among others."

Suffice it to say Facebook's track record with PII is pretty terrible. At some point the word sell really becomes a matter of semantics.

Again you are bumping the waters. Users were asked permission for Facebook to share their user data. Saying Facebook has a poor track record because they had a more open platform in the past isn't true. Now Facebook is more closed and locked down because giving people the option to share their information is apparently a bad thing according to the public.

I don't buy that narrative. As if things were somehow fine until the stupid public ruined it all.

Facebook is and always has been deep in adtech, which is fundamentally slimy. It's no surprise that led to a history littered with data privacy blunders.

>Again you are bumping the waters.

On the contrary, my chemistry knowledge is too poor to do such a thing.

Apple scans your iCloud for illicit photos and sends them to police. I don’t think Apple has any privacy stance worth recognizing.

https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/05/apple-icloud-photos-scanni...

It may not be good enough, but I think we can acknowledge that caving to political pressure is a very different posture than building your entire business model around monetizing antiprivacy.

Right, but the comparison here is that Meta also does this, in addition to selling every iota of information they have you.

Content scanning is just an assumed part of every major tech platform these days. That of course doesn't necessarily make it right, but it still places Apple's privacy stance significantly ahead of Meta.

People keep repeating the refrain of Google/Facebook selling your data, but is there any evidence of a single case where this actually happened? They use your data, to let advertisers target specific subgroups of the population. The companies that you should be concerned about selling your data aren't the advertising companies, they're the financial companies that are literally selling your transaction data to those and other companies.

I think it's a rather common dysphemism used in context of targeted advertising. Monetizing user data—while not actually selling the data (in the literal sense of the term)—is considered by many to constitute having their data sold, albeit with a layer of indirection.

My understanding is that while this is certainly superior to your data being actually sold, privacy is nonetheless adversely affected in fairly significant ways.

Yep, just like Google, Dropbox, Box, Microsoft and pretty much anyone else who wants to store photos in the US.

One month later…

> Apple delays plans to roll out CSAM detection in iOS 15 after privacy backlash

https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/03/apple-csam-detection-delay...

That article is talking about the on-device scanning which IIRC never actually rolled out. That's separate from the iCloud scanning which they still do.

They poisoned the well by showing they were willing to do it in the first place.

Instead of the baseline being they probably are privacy first, now it is "carefully inspect every announcement to see if they are backtracking yet again"

I don't really envy their position; if I built a business that sold hardware and software and found out that customers were using my product to distribute child porn, I would probably be willing to abandon lesser principals too.

There's a reconciliation, necessarily in a civil society, between promoting privacy and doing what's possible to stop child abuse. Should Apple allow child porn to be hosted on its cloud servers since that's the pro-privacy stance?

I don't think they should knowingly allow it. On the other hand I don't think they should do anything about it proactively.

> Should Apple allow [child abuse material] to be hosted on its cloud servers since that's the pro-privacy stance?

No they should not.

I've never heard of any other lizard that eats Sweet Baby Rays. By lizard standards that's pretty weird.

>their privacy stance

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM

There's an alternate universe where Zuckerberg takes Yahoo's $1B offer for Facebook in 2006 (which Yahoo sells a decade later to Pinboard for $100k) and becomes more of an Elon Musk figure, investing in and running a handful of forward-thinking businesses.

Imagine Oculus becoming Meta without the Facebook baggage – a hardware-focused company with a major services play, but no adtech business.

>Imagine Oculus becoming Meta without the Facebook baggage – a hardware-focused company with a major services play, but no adtech business.

I think this was called Magic Leap. I don't know, I think I still prefer Rony Abovitz awkwardly dancing around in a space suit rather than Zuck.

There's only a hand-full of companies that can make the kind of investment that VR will require. FB is one of them. So is ByteDance.

A cautionary tale - for a certain kind of person.

This was legitimately the most humanizing piece of media I’ve seen from Zuckerberg. It helps that I find VR fascinating, and seeing him engage with it beyond a superficial corporate level like I’d expect was refreshing.

I found his recent conversation with Lex[0] interesting (though I haven't listened to all of it). It is obvious that he is personally interested in the future of VR. When he talks about it, he seems more relatable than usual.

[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zOHSysMmH0

Worth watching his interview with Lex Fridman. He seems like a decent guy, genuinely nerdy and smart.

It's a really good example of how media shapes our perceptions of villains in a way that makes us unable to see how villainous behavior works in the real world. In short, the tendency to reinforce attributive simplicity especially in moral terms, means that a decency and relateableness become ineffective socio-moral proxies.

Good if someone like him cares about something.

It would be much greater if he actually cared for society and would fix what he did with facebook, addicted mobile/facebook games and fake news.

But hey now the poor can have a 1-2k high quality VR Headset with full immersion to see others in a VR Chat while living in a dumpster.

---

On a more non emotional side: Of course i like the idea of a high quality VR Headset but i'm not sure what FB thinks what this will do for FB. Those millions/billions they invested in their Metaverse will not become something great.

I'm still very confinced that VR is a novelity and nothing people will just be in all day long. Why would they?

Lets compare it to others:

Apple key notes are about new hardware, new usability.

Google IO has a ton of diversity, doing things for society. They talk about taking good pictures of people with all type of skin tones. They talk about 24/7 sustainability, better and easier security, protecting their users, skin mold detection and they have android.

What is Meta talking about? How to put all of us into a VR world with probably a ton of monetarization. Awesome \o/ the poor who can't afford their own house/home are then sitting in a cheap/bad flat, sitting in a chair with a VR Headset on?

And of course there will be a handful people playing around with this, but you know Second Live is also probably still running...

Google is one of the few companies were their Keynotes are so boring because they actually fix real life boring shit which affects us all.

There exist people now who spend all of their sleeping time, and the majority of their waking time in primitive virtual environments while wearing incommensurately cheap hardware, speaking with almost nobody, over Internet connections barely fit for the task of voice, let alone streaming video. There exists appeal, for a few. You can do a lot with an avatar making one of two faces.

Depressing somehow.

As said, imagine we would spend our energy in our society to actually bring poeple back together.

Social hubs just in a way that people want to go there. Imagine what you could build up with that money

No I'm pretty sure his only interest in VR is to control our dopamine channels as completely as possible. He may be a nerd, but he's Machiavellian to the core and will do anything he can to amass power to control other humans. Things like legality and morality merely provide guidance to him on how other people will react to his efforts. His biggest challenge has always been convincing his employees that what they're doing has merit and is not pure evil. Generally that has worked by paying them tons of money and telling them they're special snowflakes.

I think it’s so strange that people are calling him a “Weird Lizard”. “Weird Lizard” is a mouthful - plenty of other names worth calling him and his monopoly. I highly doubt his VR dream is anything more than an anti-antitrust maneuver.

How about "Sauron".

[] https://www.google.com/search?q=zuckerberg+sauron

I’m kinda surprised, I’d have guessed Smaug if people were going to associate him with a Tolkien villain.

I dunno… big eye that can see all over the world through palantirs