Just Say No To the "Spiritual Opium" Pushers: End The Metaverse. Stop the Activision Blizzard-Microsoft Merger. Or Just Totally Regulate It.
AR, not VR, is the future. A world of remotes, not goggles.
I don’t think it a coincidence that Activision Blizzard’s CEO Bobby Kotick and Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg dated. They are the biggest drug dealers on the planet.
Nor do I think it coincidental that both Sandberg and Kotick are facing scandal right now and trying to find an exit. These dopamine-pushing drug dealers aren’t exactly known for their empathy and we should give them no sympathy as they plot their escape.
The Federal Trade Commission has a choice before it: allow the merger between Microsoft and Activision Blizzard for $75 billion — 3 times more than they have ever paid for an acquisition! — and trust to public health or do the right thing and shut it down. You shouldn’t allow executives who cover up rape, like Bobby Kotick, to be able to sell out.
No, you shouldn’t be able to make money addicting people en masse. No, we don’t need what Satya Nadella called “Netflix for video games.”
We need fewer video games. China calls video games “spiritual opium” and watching the effect it has had on my generation and on the one after me, I’m inclined to agree.
We have hitherto eschewed calling these “tech executives” drug dealers because well, that’s not very nice now, is it? But, alas, addiction is what they have in store for all of us and they’ll get it any way they can.
For Kotick it started early and with another drug — sugar — before moving on to the hard stuff. He even staged a walkout over his middle school’s decision to push healthier options for children.
Later Kotick ran night clubs, and sold tax shelters and ultimately partnered with alleged mobster and casino operator Steve Wynn on a computer venture. Wynn, of course, would later be forced by the US government to register under FARA for all the close ties he had to the Chinese dictatorship.
Here’s the discussion about how Wynn’s dirty money caused all kinds of problems. Just read this part about their technology company “Jane” and how Kotick actually cultivated Wynn. (His other investor was Arthur Solomon, honorary managing director of Solomon Brothers.)
Last November Kotick was exposed by the Wall Street Journal as exactly the sort of person you’d think he was. Yes, it’s disgusting that Kotick is set to receive $400 million windfall payout after lying to the board and covering up wholesale sexual mistreatment of employees. Shame on you, Satya Nadella!
If this deal goes through I will do my utmost to have nothing to do with Microsoft.
It was already pretty bad that Microsoft had all these weird ties to Jeffrey Epstein. In addition to Gates we could point to Epstein’s close personal relationship with Reid Hoffman, the cofounder of LinkedIn.
We might ask if Microsoft was good for the world. How should we take its investing in AnyVision, the controversial Israeli facial recognition company, from which it has since divested? Or its backing of a dubious project like Open AI to the tune of a billion dollars?
These are not the sort of things that responsible players do. So I hope you’ll join me, dear reader, in doing all you can to avoid Microsoft products until Microsoft chooses to behave ethically again.
Who am I kidding? Even if you wanted to live without Microsoft you simply couldn’t. Just look at the sensational reporting of Kashmir Hill on this very topic of trying to keep the Big Tech companies out of every day life.
But Microsoft shouldn’t kill its brand. Microsoft was about making us more productive, not addicting us. It was about doing things.
If Satya Nadella, who came up from the small business division of Microsoft, doesn’t get that Microsoft is about making us better, he should leave as CEO.
Maybe he could take with him Brad Smith whose male feminism needs to be seriously examined in light of the awful comments he made to another female Microsoft exec and his constant traveling with his female assistant. Smith, who loves virtue signaling, is the worst sort of hypocrite.
You’re going to condemn American facial recognition companies while investing in Israeli ones, Brad. Really?
How should we response to a technology that leads to less empathy by literally cutting you off from the world by immersing you in another? That’s really the question of video games, a question that’ll be much harder to avoid when we all plug into the metaverse.
We have before us the hyper addictive world of video games, themselves a part of a mobbed up order.
I know of what I speak here. Once upon a time I got addicted to video games and, along with alcohol, video games are totally banned from my home.
So, too, did my then-middle-aged father. I once threw a copy of Microsoft’s Age of Empires out the window. What is the heritability of video game addiction anyway? Are our brains just hackable as Yuval Harari says?
I get the attraction of video games. The gaming world with all its rules is so much more appealing than everyday life where anything seemingly goes. I think the reason we love games so much is that they have rules.
But high scores lead to low activity and ultimately low status. A man should run to opportunities to distinguish himself.
A friend of mine in the VR space once told me that he believed that pornography was a psyop and that if we wanted to reduce population we ought to make it compulsory.
As usual, Silicon Valley seems to have misunderstood the purpose of the science fiction. Ready Player One’s trenchant social commentary. It’s become a sort of road map to something terrible.
Why is Mark Zuckerberg buying up Hawaii if he believes in the metaverse ?
Why is Meta buying up so much real estate in Austin if the future is remote and virtual?
Let’s recall that this wasn’t even Zuckeberg’s idea to begin with — but Palmer Luckey’s. Zuckerberg doesn’t have ideas; he just steals them.
Zuckerberg’s reality is pretty good. But how will ours be once we accept the Metaverse? A spoof suggests one future.
In all seriousness though. We regulate drugs and so too should we regulate its electronic equivalent. We have a food and drug administration. Ought its scope be extended to video games? I think it must.
You should not be able to sell it to those who are addicted.
I’ve become more or less convinced that the Chinese are right — video games are a kind of “spiritual opium” that robs young men of ambition and makes them less impressive. The “Xi or me” feint that so many tech executives claim doesn’t work because they are so unwilling to help the U.S. government. How quick they become American companies when they want something!
We don’t need or want a national champion in video games.
By robbing men of ambition you make them both unworthy and unnecessary.
You turn them into simps and makes them an easy mark for the Only Fans economy. Can you really blame women for hoping to cash in as the men have tuned out?
Do we prefer the simulacrum to the real thing? Perhaps we do. Because it’s safer. Because it’s in some sense consensual.
No, I believe in turning real life into a sort of video game where you get points for doing the right thing. To some extent the gamification of society is having some positives — Duolingo helps you learn languages whilst Peloton helps you stay fit.
In the early days of Clearview I imagined a world where you could wear a pair of glasses and see everyone’s IQ on his or her forehead.
You could expand this idea out further.
The Germans call it Umwelt — the world as it is experienced by a particular organism.
That’s the gist of the idea of Malcolm Gladwell’s What the Dog Saw. Haven’t you wondered what it was like to see the world as an animal?
I want to see what you saw. And I want you to see what I see.
Modern life has become a lot more of seeing things from other people’s perspectives and as we diversify we may have no choice. Sci fi author (and CIA consultant) David Brin points out that that’s the real progress we’ve made since 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Imaging a future, à la Star Trek, where we are all working together despite our differences can, in turn, build empathy and help bring about that better world.
You don’t want to cut yourself off from the world. You want to bring more people along. You want to use your phone as a pointer, highlighting the world rather than hiding in it.
We live in a world of remotes and zappers but we still want to change the channel.
