Big Tech never shrinks from pushing the envelope, or as the motto goes, ask forgiveness, not permission. We suppose that when you get away with it long enough and often enough, the lines don’t blur. They simply cease to exist.
Ask forgiveness is really understating the sentiment. In reality, their true approach is ‘why stop there?’
TikTok’s troubles just got worse: The FTC could sue them, too, Politico reported.
Given the present situation in the Middle East, it’s not easy to write about something like, say, the FEMA emergency broadcasting system test alert that we all experienced October 4, like it or not, and attention does need to be paid there – coming!
The invasion by Hamas into Israel and the attacks and wholesale murder and/or kidnappings of innocent civilians was amoral, to put it mildly. The world is gobsmacked, no matter which side you’re on, and since we opine on tech rather than politics, there is very much a lesson here for us all in tech overreach.
Huh?
Meta – the company formerly known as Facebook – has gone all in on the metaverse and judging from this past week’s press conference where Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg showcased his latest and greatest, it looks like this time, it might just have legs. Pun intended, of course, for those of us who remember his past iteration of the space and the legless floating torsos.
Now he’s back, like a bad penny, and in case you missed it, here is Everything Revealed in 10 Minutes, including “the launch of 28 chatbots (conversational agents), which supposedly have their own personalities and have been specially designed for younger users. These include Victor, a so-called triathlete who can motivate “you to be your best self”, and Sally, the “free-spirited friend who’ll tell you when to take a deep breath,” France24 reported.
“Meta sees these as “fun” artificial intelligence,” the piece continues. “Others…feel that this latest technological development could mark the first step towards creating “the most dangerous artefacts in human history”, to quote from American philosopher Daniel C. Dennett’s essay about “counterfeit people.”
What is it with that name and the need to control? Or manipulate. We refer to the Mar(c)(k)s Andreessen and Zuckerberg, respectively.
Although the spellings may be different to deceive the clueless.
Marc Andreessen, who a while back explained Why Software Is Eating the World, is now instructing us on Why AI Will Save The World. Mind you, in his earlier a16Z blog post, while he was right about how technology would take over, he didn’t bother to mention what we’d have to surrender for the privilege: our privacy and all our personal information.
From what we’ve witnessed about the tech space to date, tech is all about invention and reinvention.
Example: it’s a communications tool. How long has the telephone been around, meaning landlines? Instead of calling, we ping or email or Zoom. Nothing new, really: only the words and devices and delivery mechanisms have changed to deceive the clueless.
Tech is also about glorification and vilification – and sometimes both, in the same person. Everyone’s (former) hero Elon Musk bought Twitter and the tech media banded against him – no matter that Twitter had been a platform for propaganda and surveillance under Jack Dorsey’s tenure. Yet, no matter what, Dorsey, for some reason, can seemingly do no wrong.
At the dawn of the Age of Social, tech bros built promised the world goodness and light – to bring the world closer together; to give everyone a voice – built walled gardens, amassed billions of users, made themselves more or less the only game in town and became a vital part of life. Which made them too big to fail.
Or so we’d been told. Often.
Yet by the end of September, Facebook’s Meta Lost Two-Thirds of Market Cap Value From 2021, NewsMax reported. Mark Zuckerberg Admits He ‘Got It Wrong’ as Meta Lays Off 11,000 Employees. At Least He Signed His Name. Twitter laid off 7500 employees – but at least Zuckerberg signed his name??? Which will no doubt make all the difference, especially once the benefits run out.
If you’re wondering why Mark Zuckerberg has poured some $15B into his metaverse project despite seeing ‘no results,’ according to the tech press, we’re wondering why no one pays attention to the man behind the curtain. Following its developer conference, Meta was roundly slammed for not being further along, given the amount of money their Reality Labs received to develop it, to the point where Facebook’s ‘desperate’ metaverse push to build features like avatar legs has Wall Street questioning the company’s future, as Business Insider reported. The publication also asked “How many more warning signs does Mark Zuckerberg need to see before he pulls the plug on his metaverse?”
Meta released a new metaverse-friendly headset, and the price tag aside, Meta’s New Headset Will Track Your Eyes for Targeted Ads, Gizmodo reported, coming yet one step closer to reading your mind. “Whether you’re resigned to targeted ads or not, this technology takes data collection to a place we’ve never seen. The Quest Pro isn’t just going to inform Meta about what you say you’re interested in, tracking your eyes and face will give the company unprecedented insight about your emotions.”
Tech is and has been referred to as the wild, wild west since the early days of Web 1. Like those pioneers who ventures out into terra incognita when the west was being settled, those web pioneers didn’t know what they’d find, and even in their travels, they were making it up as they went along.
Head’s up: the same goes for investors. There’s no startup handbook, although there are books that bear that title. There’s no investor handbook, either. Which is why founders may hear one thing from one investor, get totally different feedback/advice from another. And yet different feedback/advice from a third, and so it may go, all the way down the line.
With the downturn in the unicorn market, founders have lost much of their power with investors. “New unicorns are plummeting. Here’s how volatile markets and shrinking valuations are shifting power from founders to investors, CB Insights reported, and venture funding to startups is ebbing.
Even those certain funds and investors who had ridden to rock star status in the last decade plus with those outsized returns are being scrutinized more closely, especially by the tech press. While new funds are still being raised, existing funds raising follow on funds and investors are still writing checks – albeit more cautiously these days, Adam Newmann and A16z’s investment into Flow aside – if it’s not full-on investor winter in many quarters, we’re certainly getting close.
We also like to call them the Boys of Summer – those unicorn tech super founders, that is.
As the New York Times noted, The Boy Bosses of Silicon Valley Are on Their Way Out, dismounting their unicorns and heading for the hills, with their largesse in tow and never mind the layoffs and loss of shareholder value that they’ve left in their wake.