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A video about The Metaverse, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook and the future of capitalism.

Chapters

00:00 Mark Zuckerberg
04:08 1. YouTuber Burnout
10:27 2. Platform Capitalism
15:07 Surfshark Spot
16:41 3. The Bare Extractive Minimum
22:15 4. Monopoly Men
29:16 5. Into the Metaverse

Some Copy about the Video for the YouTube Algorithm

In this month’s video, we’re looking at “the metaverse”. This October, Facebook (since renamed Meta), released a video presentation titled “The Metaverse and How We’ll Build It Together” to serve as the keynote for the social media company’s annual Oculus Connect conference. The presentation saw Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announce the company’s ambitions to build “the metaverse”, a proposed evolution of the internet in which Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality technologies enable us to interact in more immersive ways.

To be able to engage in debates surrounding “the metaverse”, however, it’s first important to have a decent grasp of how big tech has already reshaped the economic structure around which our society is built: capitalism. We therefore go on a trip through the history of what Nick Srnicek calls “platform capitalism” to consider how technology companies such as Facebook (or, Meta), Amazon, Twitter, Apple, Microsoft and even the Roblox Corporation have fundamentally changed the world in which we live—and what this might reveal about the intentions behind this proposed shift to “the metaverse”.

This video is, in some regards, a spiritual successor to my video about Tesla CEO Elon Musk (The Fake Futurism of Elon Musk), as well as my more recent video about the science YouTube channel Veritasium and their partnership with Waymo (the successor to the Google Self-Driving Car Project). It picks up similar themes of techno futurism and the partial futures offered to us by our new tech overlords, and asks who those futures will really serve.

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