麻豆传媒

SURREAL news from Silicon Valley: Facebook has rebranded itself as Meta. This is because the company鈥檚 boss, Mark Zuckerberg, wants to launch a product called the metaverse, a shared virtual reality world. Let鈥檚 leave aside the fact that the metaverse is, for the moment, still a fictional idea. This is also an insanely bad episode in branding that would be hilarious if it weren鈥檛 so depressing.

Imagine you are Zuckerberg meeting your crack team of brand experts. A few years ago, you bought a company called Oculus that makes virtual reality headsets and now you have figured out what to do with it. You want to leverage it to launch a new virtual world.

After an intense brainstorming session, you have it! Why not rebrand your whole empire using the name of a virtual world from Snow Crash, a 1992 novel in which an insane media mogul ruthlessly controls access to the Metaverse, forcing everyone to buy subscriptions to his cable service?

Wait, it gets better. Once this mogul has suckered the masses inside his Metaverse, he unleashes a 鈥渘euro-linguistic virus鈥� that robs people of their ability to use language, eventually causing their brains to 鈥渃rash鈥� in a terrifying biological equivalent of the blue screen of death. It is perfect: you can celebrate your new corporate vision with a name that evokes media dystopia and mass insanity.

We can鈥檛, of course, know if this is exactly how Zuckerberg鈥檚 thought process went. But Silicon Valley does have a record of borrowing inappropriate names from science fiction. In 2003, billionaire investor Peter Thiel named his software firm Palantir after a magical surveillance device from The Lord of the Rings. The catch? Merely that the fictitious palant铆r lies to its users as often as it reveals the truth. Kind of an awful choice for a company that was doing data analysis for intelligence agencies.

But hey, maybe execs would learn from the gaffe? Nope. A few years ago, entrepreneur Rob Rhinehart named his food-replacement drink Soylent, after the nutrition wafers made from the bodies of dead people in the 1970s movie Soylent Green.

Tech is an industry nobody has ever accused of nuanced self-awareness. But I don鈥檛 think this cluelessness is because techies don鈥檛 read. I think the problem runs far deeper: it is that tech executives have no sense of irony.

鈥淪ilicon Valley has a track record of borrowing inappropriate names from science fiction鈥�

The first step in understanding irony involves holding two contradictory thoughts together and navigating the dangerous, sometimes absurd ambiguity that lurks between. When I was a professor teaching cultural studies at the University of California, Berkeley, this was one of the hardest lessons for my students: a story can have two contradictory meanings, both of which are 鈥渃orrect鈥�. Often, that is the point.

The Metaverse in Snow Crash is cool and useful; it also makes its users vulnerable to corporate manipulation and madness. Sometimes cool things are awful at the same time.

But in the Boolean logic world of Silicon Valley, there is no room for ambiguity. A thing is cool or not, and we measure it in how many users or dollars the thing attracts.

This failure to grasp irony also explains another common problem with many big tech companies: their inability to deal with the many contradictory ways that their products can be used. An app like Facebook can be used to find love or to sow hate; to spread lies or reveal truths. It can amplify the voices of the oppressed and also lead to their oppressors tracking and silencing them. But the company fails miserably when it comes to dealing with this.

Like many other social media companies, Meta plans robustly for one or two very nice uses for its apps. Negative uses are considered marginal edge cases, assigned the lowest priority and the fewest resources. In other words, Meta doesn鈥檛 understand that the awesomeness and horror of its products are equally meaningful and require equal attention.

As we look ahead to what Meta鈥檚 metaverse will bring, we have to assume that the company will build a three-dimensional virtual world with the same foibles it exhibits in the 2D digital one. We already know that Oculus headsets, which will be key to navigating the metaverse, are capable of mapping people鈥檚 homes in 3D and uploading the blueprints to the cloud. When you enter the metaverse, you might be sending Meta a map of your home and data on your body movements. It is easy to imagine companies using the metaverse to track if employees are keeping their eyes glued to their work.

Worst of all, Meta鈥檚 lack of irony means it doesn鈥檛 understand why controlling the metaverse could be good for the company, but bad for people in general. Hopefully humanity won鈥檛 be reduced to the gibbering crash-heads from Snow Crash before we figure it out.