Empower yourself, or else

The emergence of a digitally connected world spurred hope for more self-empowerment, self-organization and decentralized political action. Now what we are getting with Metaverse is a streamlined version of more of the same – world-alienation and isolation of everyone who can’t keep up. 

Daria Rubisch

Philosophy Undergraduate at the University of Vienna. Interested in the good life, philosophically and in practice. They’re also invested in local politics, with a focus on art subsidy.

Introduction

In a Facebook post from late 2018, Mark Zuckerberg spoke of how recent innovations spark his faith into technology becoming the decentralizing force it once set out to be. In the same breath he talks about learning Mandarin, running an equivalent of 14 marathons and training a smart home AI. ''Giving power back to the people'' is listed alongside his personal self-improvement projects.

So if you are wondering how technology is going to empower you, you're gonna have to sit and wait until Zuckerberg and his team of experts figure it out for you. Because nothing is more empowering than your future being on some billionaire's To-Do list.

From Facebook to Meta - from scandals to promises

Facebook was infamously created in a dorm room at Harvard and launched in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg. From this moment on, the seed of data misuse and toxic entrepreneurship was already sown. Instead of building the social network in a collaborative effort, he stole ideas from several colleagues, who were convinced they would be teaming up with him on the project. This prompted an investigation against him, resulting in an article published in Harvard's student newspaper.

No matter the truthfulness of the article, Zuckerberg's reaction to it was a poor display of integrity when it comes to data privacy.  Instead of dealing with the criticism in a constructive manner, he used collected login data from Facebook to hack into the email accounts  of students associated with the article, likely in an effort to somehow get back at them.

These kinds of allegations surrounding Zuckerberg and his company have not ceased since, in fact it's almost nauseating to hear about yet another scandal revolving around business practices at Facebook. This blog post gives an overview of scandals that occurred from Facebook's launch up until (almost) today, that I encourage you to scroll through if you missed out on them.

The company has since rebranded as ''Meta'' - functioning as an umbrella term for Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp. This PR move would guarantee a strong public association between the company and the concept of Metaverse - a digital infrastructure that is aided by augmented reality technology, but another motivation was likely to mark a shift away from the substantial criticism Facebook has been getting,  and to improve their image.

The company does not refrain from letting you know about their ambitious humanitarian philosophy. On Meta’s business website you come across a set of core principles. They read as follows:

1. Give People a Voice: People deserve to be heard and to have a voice — even when that means defending the right of people we disagree with.

2. Serve Everyone: We work to make technology accessible to everyone, and our business model is ads so our services can be free.

3. Promote Economic Opportunity: Our tools level the playing field so businesses grow, create jobs and strengthen the economy.

4. Build Connection and Community: Our services help people connect, and when they’re at their best, they bring people closer together.

5. Keep People Safe and Protect Privacy: We have a responsibility to promote the best of what people can do together by keeping people safe and preventing harm.

At first glance, the principles Meta has pledged to follow actually sound kinda good! However, knowing about the company history, you can't help but see them as white lies and pretty blatant counteractions to accusations.

But regarding them only in this cynical way might lead to a premature dismissal of the humanitarian potential of social media platforms altogether. Let's think about if Meta can actually become this enabler of autonomous action, opportunity and connection. And if not - what exactly is in the way of such a platform becoming reality?

Consumerism isn’t community

On its website, Meta does not give a lot of exposition on how exactly the company plans to stay true to their core principles, but I tried to gather an understanding from different pieces of info, mission statements and mood pictures. The one of ''building community'' seems to mostly be represented in the mood picture category, not all that much is said about it. The only story in concern is one about skateboarding culture. They showcase a few skateboarding influencers and title it a ''niche sport'', thereby implying that Instagram is what turned the sport into a global phenomenon. Frankly, this is completely ridiculous. Skateboarding has already been a widely established subculture in the 90s, having since further grown in popularity, even without the need of social media. This is a bleak example of a prime ''success story'' for a website that has around a billion active users.

The way I see it, Meta is only capable of building a community around something that has already been culturally established to begin with. The root of this lies in  an oppositional tension between principle 2 and 3 (Serve Everyone and Promote Economic Opportunity), that jeopardizes the possibility of all the other principles. Let me explain what I mean by going back to the skateboard example.

Say, you want to get into skateboarding, but you live in a small town that doesn't have much of a skating scene. You could probably go on Facebook and easily get connected to people in the closest big city in your area to meet up for boarding. It might be a bit of a hassle to drive all that way, but you hate your rural surroundings anyway, and if it doesn't have the urban vibe, it's not really the same anyway, is it? Congratulations, you have been successfully connected to a community (principle 2).

But what if there are actually a few skating enthusiasts around your area? They might even have plans to set up a small shop. You might have missed them online, they might have not set up a side yet or not a very exciting one with little engagement. Bigger more established communities will simply do a better job on grabbing your attention online, which also makes them better at making you look at ads, and they likely will have a lot of content to interact with, which again can be analyzed to show you ads that will more likely result in you making a purchase. This is hardly what ''leveling the playing field'' looks like (principle 3).

Now let's say Facebook actually makes an effort to promote sites of your fellow town folk to you and local businesses flourish left and right. This would only work up until a certain point. If your needs are met by businesses in your area, you wouldn't buy as much stuff online. That's tricky, because this is how Meta manages to keep their services free. This is what I meant by oppositional tension. Both can be met at the same time to some degree, but never enough to satisfy either of them sustainably.

So yes, Meta is free to use for everyone but no, it hardly ''serves everyone''. At least if you expect their services hold true all their principles for every user. As mentioned before the contradiction that arises between principle 2 and 3 also affects the other principles, or rather: the promises of what their service entails.

Apart from that, while most of the mood pictures and captions speak to a sense of connection and community, the actual statements highlight the support of small local businesses - which makes me suspect that Meta is mixing up - or deliberately blurring the lines between - consumerism and community. Social spaces with no consumption-incentive are already rare, and a platform that runs on ads only reinforces this focus on social activities revolving around consumption or owning products (like skateboards). At its best, their platforms are a tool of convenience for already somewhat established subcultures, at its worst, it is deepening a division between social classes.

Technological Agency

Now that I explored what Meta is not able to do, let me tell you what I think it is really about: Making you feel like the future is now. Like you can skip the tiresome present that is rendered by crisis after crisis, and be part of something that makes you feel in control. Especially their Metaverse takes the next step towards escapism. Similar to Zuckerberg being too impatient to build the world's first major social network platform in a collaborative effort, there is no due diligence being paid here to pressing current issues.

This idea that technology should always be striving towards advancement is a widely accepted but fallacious belief and speaks of a fundamentally misconstrued understanding of technology. There is no technological advancement that experts can cook up to create decentralized control. The reason why empowering people towards more autonomous action is so hard to achieve is partly because of system convenience: If a system makes a set of things convenient for you, you will repeat these things over and over.

But how can users be motivated to become involved when technological abilities are seen as something only an "technologically skilled" elite has access to? People need to understand technology as something they can make use of for their goals, in the way they choose. Zuckerberg did not personally lay the network of undersea cables that are the world wide web, or make data processing efficient enough to allow billions of people to write messages to each other through their electronic devices, which he also didn't build. The things necessary to create an infrastructure for large-scale user-interaction was already there, he just made use of it.

Working with technology is something that needs to be much rather practiced than learned about. Distributing control over technology to more people is what enables this practice and what it truly means to decentralize control. What the general population must learn is to not treat technology as if it was the opposite of nature. Technological agency is just as much about using fire to cook, as it is about using computers to optimize processing of information. Both need to be practiced, taught and the means for it be made accessible to us.

In his essay “‘Technology’ as the Critical Social Theory of Human Technicity” Ernst Wolff writes that people never properly grasped their technical agency as intertwined with all the other aspects that make them human. Unless it is your job to design machines, a piece of technology will feel more like a ''colleague'' (that has their own fixed traits and quirks that you have no control over) rather than a tool that you use to help you solve problems.

Conclusion

So if we all just become programmers and found our own Startup it's all good? Short answer: No. Long answer: It would be a mistake to let autonomous action drift back into individualistic realms, where technology is used for personal economic advantage only. While yes, people need to feel enabled to contribute, their contribution needs to follow a common good.

If we want to follow Meta's call for ''strengthening our communities'', there are a few incentives that the site could give to their users: Involve them as stakeholders to design the structure of the content to their needs, not their immediate drives (Friedman, 2002). To be able to do this - in a sort of open source approach - critiquing and taking up tasks to improve the site needs to feel rewarding and like a personal responsibility (Blok, 2013).

Facebook could have become this collaborative project in the first place, if it weren’t for a certain individual’s pride and competitiveness (traits that are unfortunately being rewarded economically). Running a platform in this way takes more time and effort, but in the end it is the only way to realize its full potential as a community endeavor.

References

Wolff, E. (2016). ‘Technology’ as the Critical Social Theory of Human Technicity. Journal of Philosophical Research, 41, 333–369.

Friedman, B. et al. (2002, December). Value Sensitive Design: Theory and Methods. University of Washington Technical Report, 1–8.

Blok, V. (2013). The Power of Speech Acts: Reflections on a Performative Concept of Ethical Oaths in Economics and Business. Review of Social Economy 71(2), 187–208.