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Jack Dorsey mocks Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse plan, saying it's dystopian
- perryizgr8 5y agoHe said while hosting accounts of genocidal Taliban members.
- bedhead 5y agoI'm hard pressed to think of a person more responsible for our current world having already swung into uncomfortably dystopian tendencies than Dorsey.
- finite_jest 5y agoWhy do you think Dorsey is personally responsible for swinging the world towards dystopia?
- aardvarkr 5y agoNo kidding. Is Twitter perfect? Goodness no, but is it the root of all evil? That’s absurd
- rektide 5y agoIMO the the algorithmic basis of twitter is much less troubling than Facebook. Part of that is because Twitter is a far more alive means for discourse, for democratic processes to emerge & steer what gets raised. There's way less of the echo chamber. There's significantly more back & forth in the comments, way more cross-engagement, that highlights other views, that checks what's happening. On Facebook, the post & the link are primary & the comments are a mess, often a sea of amplification. Twitter- as a for the most part open discussion- is able to tap a "wisdom of the crowds" sensibility whereas Facebook is perpetually falling into dark rabbit holes. But all of this... blaming the tools... it doesn't click with me, really. As unknowable & scary as algorithmic selection is, it seems like a distant second compared to what the real story is. Isn't it obvious? It's us. It's humanity that is the problem. These are inherent problems with attention & broadcast, & how easy it is to feed on other people, to excite them & drive them to ends. Antagonism and zeal are a high-grade memetic weapons payload, and the easy democratic access to thought & conversation is easily subverted. We haven't much in the way of building up immunities- to this day, blocking people seems to be the one and only defense most people have online, and that is a shield which does nothing to contribute to general welfare, to helping align & raise up the infosphere. We live in a dystopian world with dystopian fallen people. It's a much closer together world, much better stitched together. This was of course going to cause problems. But I cannot imagine the horror of going back, of trying to establish authoritarian & limited channels for communication that the info-scarce world of the past was limited to. I do have great hope for progress, but humanity must innovate openly together, must build our own overlays to ourselves better comprehend the world.
- MCRocco 5y agoWell put But given that we are all flawed and easily manipulated (on the macro) I think you might minimizing the roles these tools play when they are designed to exploit our flaws.
- _blz2 5y agoIf he isn't, Mark isn't too.
- rabuse 5y agoDefinitely. Twitter is the cause of so much of the reactionary and socially virtuous witch-hunting that plagues us.
- orange_joe 5y agoThere’s a lot of study being done on facebooks psychological harm to people and society, but not nearly enough on Twitter. I’m quite sure that Twitter is deeply responsible for the deaths of quite a few people by allowing/encouraging cyber bullying and witch hunts.
- bodge5000 5y agoMy personal, flawed, biased, etc... theory on this is that whilst facebook still lives in recent memory, its no longer the "in" social media. Telling people to ditch Facebook because its harmful and all that is easy if you don't use it (either at all or anymore).
- throwawayswede 5y agoPeople who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. The joke here is that Jack, Mark (and others) already live in an unreal metaverse. These people are so far out of touch with reality that they're thinking about creating an even deeper virtual world than the fakeness they live in, just to escape it.
- aero-glide2 5y agoTwitter isn't exactly a net positive for society either. It has become cool to hate Facebook these days.
- trutannus 5y agoPolitically expedient as well.
- atarian 5y agoA few days ago I randomly read about how Zuckerberg tried to serve Dorsey a goat he killed. Seeing their names in the headline just made me think about it again: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/24/mark-zuckerberg-once-killed-a-goat--and-served-it-to-jack-dorsey-.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/24/mark-zuckerberg-once-killed-...
- zarmin 5y agowhat an absolute weirdo this guy is
- ericmcer 5y agoYeah can you imagine actually killing your food instead of letting someone else do it and just buying it wrapped in plastic at the store. What a bizarre idea.
- r00fus 5y agoIt's an anachronistic fantasy that a rich person can fulfill that would be infeasible for 90% of the population.
- andrewzah 5y agoI mean, I dislike zuck as much as anyone else, but I don't see what's so bad about this. Zuck invites Dorsey over for dinner, and at the time he was doing a personal challenge to only eat meat that he himself had killed, to be mindful that it did come from a once living animal. Y'know, if more people did that, we would probably have less people eating meat in general. We're so disconnected from how our food is actually made... Meat doesn't grow on trees or just magically appear in stores.
- xboxnolifes 5y agoThe article reads so weird. A person served another person a meal that contains a fairly common meat. So what? The worst part was apparently the zuck is a bad chef and serve a cold meal.
- seneca 5y agoThe lack of self awareness is staggering. I struggle to think of a single website that has done more damage to western civilization than Twitter. Facebook is a disgusting mess, but a bunch of out of touch old people sharing propaganda pales in comparison to journalists, celebrities, and politicians actively coordinating witch hunts. I've said it before, but it's quite telling that the current political drumbeat is set on destroying Facebook, but never mentions Twitter.
- metalliqaz 5y agoJust saying what everyone thought as soon as they heard it.
- freck 5y agoA 200-word article on a three-word tweet.
- CarelessExpert 5y agoAnd 33 comments and counting on HN, most of which can be broadly categorized as "Twitter sucks too, here's why". Flame on!
- danpalmer 5y agoGiven Dorsey's track record on shilling cryptocurrencies as the solution to social problems I'm not sure he should be calling others dystopian.
- aardvarkr 5y agoWhat’s the connection here?? Person does “bad” thing in some niche so he has no legitimacy speaking on any other subject unrelated to that niche?
- danpalmer 5y agoThe connection is billionaires criticising each others' wacky dystopian dreams. I have no problem with the criticism, I just think it lacks self awareness and that most people would put Dorsey and Zuckerberg in the same category.
- ea550ff70a 5y agoNot cryptocurrencies, just BTC. The dystopian thing to do would be not to seek the decentralized route which he is trying to, at least in a part with BTC. Not sure how that qualifies as dystopian.
- danpalmer 5y agoAlso NFTs. Cryptocurrencies claim to empower via decentralisation, but in reality they simply change the power structures from legal-based to capital-based power structures, and removing legal challenges that could be levelled at corporations in favour of "proofs" that have no moral leeway. I believe they are a strongly dystopian concept masquerading as a utopian opportunity.
- ea550ff70a 5y agoSure, I can see that argument too. You should recognize tho, that our current "legal-based" structure (at least in the West) is built on top of a "capital-based" power structure in where money buys power (by donations, special interest, lobbying, etc...) and this structure is highly centralized and only accesible to the wealthy. I dig BTC and not necessarily NFTs or other ones as much but I rather have systems get decentralized (even if with a capital-based structure) while giving everyone an opportunity to truly participate rather than continue on the current corrupt structure that is beyond repair and only benefit a few.
- crisdux 5y agoI don't really understand this critique. Isn't Twitter a metaverse of sorts? And It's a fairly dystopian one at that. I have no doubt these online environments will continue to get more sophisticated as time goes on.
- kinnth 5y agoI think people always think of the metaverse as a 3D space, whereas social networks are always thought of as more of a 2D space. That's how I think of it at least
- dragonwriter 5y agoSocial networks are much more than 2 (or even three) dimensional. Try mapping out connections (unweighted or weighted by any strength metric) and the figure out how many dimensions you’d need to consistently map that as distances in a space. Even for a single person and their direct connections and the connections between those direct connections you’ll usually get, I expect, a very large number of dimensions.
- intunderflow 5y agoI used to work on and with a lot of folks over at Roblox and still don't understand the metaverse hype, when you ask them to explain it they go off into these speeches that make me think they don't even understand it themselves. To me, it feels like a lot of the metaverse hype is just companies (and their founders) looking for some higher purpose, rather than just saying "we're a social network" or "we're a gaming platform".
- akeck 5y agoI've been wondering about who's going to use it - especially by the time it ships. People can be surprisingly unpredictable so it seems like a big bet in a very specific direction. Meanwhile, a lot of teenagers around me (I'm not living in/around SV) are flipping completely back to Real Life socializing and, too some extent, are even anti-tech. They're acutely aware of privacy issues in using any sort of connected technology and want to limit their use and exposure. There's selection bias in my sample, but it makes me wonder about the longer term future of "social media", especially large scale green-field social media like a new metaverse.
- aantix 5y agoThe term "metaverse" is a strange choice. Feels like there was a room of engineers advocating for this term, based on some obscure sci-fi author they all enjoyed. Not sure what the right phrase is, but this feels like "metaverse" is a going to be an uphill battle for users to embrace.
- calgoo 5y agoReminds me of the term cyberspace which was user quite a lot in the bigining or World Wide Web which has just become the web. Maybe metaverse will become something else as well? META or Verse or maybe MV?
- ceautery 5y agoI had no idea Jack looked like that. He has good Iron Maiden cover band vibes.
- bryanrasmussen 5y agoIt figures they would be opponents, given Zuckerberg's Kraftwerk face.
- rpmisms 5y agoI feel like Jack Dorsey is one of the more "human" billionaire tech bros, but he also has no clue what to do with his platform. He strikes me as someone who's good at his job and enjoys being chill.
- mark_l_watson 5y agoIn general I dislike FB, using it less than one hour a month. I do like Oculus VR, and worked for a few years doing VR (SAIC and a project for Disney), and maybe I have read too many William Gibson SF books (all of them, actually), but I see a future where I spend a couple of hours a day in a metaverse. I live in the mountains with a hiking trailhead 200 feet from my front door, so I don’t personally worry about losing touch with the physical world. I can imagine some people becoming addicted to a good metaverse implementation. When I see some peoples’ sick addictions to constantly using their phone, I sometimes feel compelled to tell them about the https://freedom.to https://freedom.to service (I am a happy customer).
- temp8964 5y agoThe fact that Mark Zuckerberg is targeted by the media and the activists while Jack Dorsey is not, I don't think it is because Facebook is worse than Twitter. Rather, it is because Mark Zuckerberg tries to make Facebook political neutral while Jack Dorsey donated $10million to the "Antiracist" center and openly makes Twitter left leaning. The only way for Mark Zuckerberg to be left loose, is do something similar to Jack Dorsey.
- dTal 5y agoFacebook's reach is far greater than Twitter's. There's no T in FAANG.
- ryanSrich 5y agoYour evidence for Twitter having less reach is that they aren’t included in FAANG? Twitter’s reach aside, they’re more powerful than Facebook given that they aren’t politically neutral. Facebook may not be politically neutral either, but they at least attempt to be. Twitter on the other hand has clearly picked a side and does not hide it. In fact, they often flaunt it by applying rules to only certain types of accounts. It doesn’t take any effort to see this.
- dTal 5y agoThe FAANG thing was just a reference to the fact that Facebook's userbase is vastly larger than Twitter's - and that's before we even get into WhatsApp and Instagram. Facebook is the social network and nothing else comes close. Twitter's a sideshow. A business is wayyyy more likely to have an official Facebook page than an official Twitter account. Regarding "politics", I think publicly displaying some principles is preferable to the faux-neutrality with secret behind-the-scenes tinkering that Facebook does. It gives me the willies.
- rektide 5y agoThis is a weird out there view that, to me, sounds like it's coming from someone who wants to feel injured. Twitter's own research shows they have more broadly amplified the right than the left. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28953427 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28953427 I for one could not be less shocked. You (and temp8964) are engaged in, in my view, conspiratorial minded thinking. You imagine some great vast system working against a view. It's just not so. Governing a platform is hard, keeping things on the rails is hard. Not every decision is easy & clean & obvious. Taking the conspiratorial minded view, saying- this is not a democratic platform, this doesn't allow open conversation, is working against me- seems patently clearly obviously heinously untrue. To try to grind an axe over this is, to me, bogus. There's no evidence, no claim I can possibly imagine that justifies such extreme & radical shade casting.
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