"Gradually, a certain sense has been percolating in Silicon Valley that might be described as a “strange shrinking of the Utopian consciousness,” to quote the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno. Just a few years ago, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt could still profess a belief that the right approach to technology could “fix all the world’s problems.” Mark Zuckerberg could still argue somewhat credibly for the potential of “connectedness” to fight climate change, pandemics, and terrorism, and the media could still enthuse about “Facebook Revolutions.” By now, confidence in those dreams has eroded. After all the disappointed hopes, deluges of fake news and hate speech, whistleblower revelations (including those from Christopher Wylie and Frances Haugen), and various antitrust lawsuits, it’s clearer than ever that tech firms have not found the answers to society’s problems, if they were ever looking for them in the first place. In fact, their surveillance-capitalist practices have frequently meant that they themselves are a problem. In this sense, the metaverse might be seen as a logical progression: if you can’t solve problems in the real world, why not create a new one without any? Perhaps it’s not actually the users who are fleeing to the metaverse, but the tech companies themselves.”

I don't think that's the take I would make. Zuckerberg is trying to repeat his early success in introducing Facebook, and he just can't do it. Genius doesn't run on an assembly line and sometimes one great idea is all someone has regardless of the resources at their disposal.

I think using that to conclude that tech firms can't innovate and are stuck in a rut that is feeding a burgeoning dystopia is an over generalization. Someone will always come along with a brand new idea or innovation that will help push civilization forward. History is replete with examples.

The following submission statement was provided by /u/Maxwellsdemon17:

"Gradually, a certain sense has been percolating in Silicon Valley that might be described as a “strange shrinking of the Utopian consciousness,” to quote the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno. Just a few years ago, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt could still profess a belief that the right approach to technology could “fix all the world’s problems.” Mark Zuckerberg could still argue somewhat credibly for the potential of “connectedness” to fight climate change, pandemics, and terrorism, and the media could still enthuse about “Facebook Revolutions.” By now, confidence in those dreams has eroded. After all the disappointed hopes, deluges of fake news and hate speech, whistleblower revelations (including those from Christopher Wylie and Frances Haugen), and various antitrust lawsuits, it’s clearer than ever that tech firms have not found the answers to society’s problems, if they were ever looking for them in the first place. In fact, their surveillance-capitalist practices have frequently meant that they themselves are a problem. In this sense, the metaverse might be seen as a logical progression: if you can’t solve problems in the real world, why not create a new one without any? Perhaps it’s not actually the users who are fleeing to the metaverse, but the tech companies themselves.”

Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/11d9l0k/the_desert_of_the_virtual_the_metaverse_heralds/ja7bwdg/

Those ideas and the best and most innovating techs usually comes from universities or government agencies like DARPA or NASA.

Every couple articles is about how AI is going to change the world but Tech firms can't change the world?

I don't think you can have it both ways!

The social media boom has largely failed to acknowledge that at the end of the day, everything happens in the real world.

The social media tech sector is almost its own foreign nation, and it's luring the best and brightest minds away with the (fickle) promise of work-from-home and the (relative) safety of job-hopping from one wild venture to another. It's been this way consistently since the dotcom boom.

The result is severe understaffing in the jobs - college-educated, far from brute labor - most needed to fix physical problems. Welding and weld inspection, CNC machining, engineering, architecture, data science - these fields need smart people, and they're already being poached by oil companies and the military-industrial complex before the promise of a work-from-home job lining Zuck or Bezos' pockets. This leaves precious few new members in the trades needed to fix our cities, bridges and railroads.

In the promise of the Metaverse and the social media sphere writ large, it's safer to avoid the ugliness and weight and cost of the physical world and opt instead for a code-monkey 9 to 5 and Minecraft on your time off.

I think you’re right about the repeatable nature of innovation, but this isn’t just about individuals. It’s about the overall impact of innovation on society.

Look at medicine, which I think has clearly shown how innovation can benefit humankind. We lock it up behind capitalist roadblocks, and it’s become a carrot, driving us to exhaustion on low-wage treadmills.

The only innovation accessible, and unencumbered to the masses are useless distractions, driving alienation, and selling u healthy lifestyles.

Meanwhile, money flows upwards to innovators while the majority flounder.

Technology was supposed to democratize success. It seems more like it Feudalzed it.

As a correction money does not mostly flow to innovators but to their investors and the rest of the capital class. They rarely see more than a few percent of the value of what they produce

That’s a good point. I should put innovators in quotes throughout. Innovation is like the idea of progress. Progress towards what? What end? At what cost?

Certainly. Beyond the clearly undemocratic nature of the aim being decided more interestingly I wonder if it could be decided democratically, or at least at an individual level

I think I get what you mean. But I’m not sure “the wisdom of the crowd” serves us well in situations like these. Popularity contests only reward the currently popular.

Have you read Kim Stanley Robinson? He (among others) sometimes writes about Ecological Economics. Tying capitalistic rewards to systems that benefit the planet (and us as one of its animals), could put our long term goals in alignment with our short-term baser instincts.

That's fair. I think I just trust crowds more than elites in ethical questions (for logical ones it's the reverse). They're more likely to think of themselves in bad and good positions of hypothetical social arrangements.

And no I haven't! I largely agree with that statement about aligning incentives, if not for the tendency towards regulatory capture, not sure how you account for that

Yeah, we certainly haven’t solved for that yet, unfortunately.

[removed]

Maybe publicly financed elections would do it indirectly. But yeah it seems power is where all the good ideas go to die lol

I think that's confusing the arguments.

Who on earth wants to buy $50,000 of digital 'land' to build a $300,000 digital house on? Nevermind that that isn't even remotely a new idea (hi second life) who actually wants that to be a thing besides the people proposing the idea who stand to make $350,000? Even full something as wicked cool as full-dive VR, you're still going to need an actual damn house and who on Earth is going to pay that much for 1s and 0s?

It's like someone looked at how much money fools have thrown Star Citizens way and wondered how they can get in on that action instead of saying 'this is really really stupid.' $42000 for a video game spaceship? Someone has too much money and no sense.

At least that's the sort of thing I think the article is taking a shot at. Solutions in search of a problem and solutions to problems that not only don't solve the problem but bring in whole new ones. Wild ideas about services that don't actually service anyone or anything but the insiders who are designing them and imagining a need for that service from whole cloth.

No, because democracy is dumb. Literally. Over 50% of the US read at a 6th grade level and you want them to decide how to innovate? That's fucking crazy if you ask me. Which you didn't but there it is anyway. YMMV.

For-profit companies don't usually solve problems. They just try to make money using the problem as a lever to pry money from us.

Really? The COVID vaccines were developed in a year and distributed for free to the public. More generally, cancer deaths are plummeting and it’s not because people are living healthier lives, it’s because new cancer treatments are available to the general public.

It's more about the "aim" of innovation, i.e. what social configuration and lifestyle are we trying to enable with technology. If you ask the billionaire class they might be interested in a future where a lot of people (other than them) work a ton to advance their visions of the future. And if you ask everyone else they might think we should automate as much as possible to enable creativity and human freedom

They rightly pan Horizon Worlds as it's presented now as disturbingly reminiscent of the empty-but-not-insignificant hype around Second Life. And of course the utopian attitude of tech bros is a meme ("Making a difference; making the world a better place... through minimal message oriented transport layers.").

But Facebook really did make the world better... at first. And if they wanted to they could go significantly farther and make the world better, by just doing what they do now, but cut back the design in which anything productive that someone wants to do on there is through a clutter of garbage that's worse than the worst targeted ads from faceless corporations -- that which reinforces addictive behavior. Instead, look at Facebook's special-purpose competitors -- take Meetup and Google Groups for irl socializing and networking, something that could be done for free on Facebook, but that many are avoiding because of that ickiness. Company feeds on Twittertagram are duplicated on Facebook, so there's no reason why I should be able to view people's Twitter posts without logging in while Instagram and Facebook are locked. If the original idealism was that more access + more communication + more socialization (irl and virtual) generally grows your userbase while also improving society, then just in terms of how they've shifted the design of their core product, they've been working against that.

Very fair. Maybe if the statement was that people have lost faith in current tech firms to solve these problems? Or maybe only some of them like meta in particular. I don’t think Meta is about to fix anything but AI from new tech firms might.

Maybe the better statement is that any tech firm that has arrived at the Desert of the Virtual is on course to its own demise - though I guess that’s pretty circular reasoning. Any company that isn’t solving real world problems is going to start failing as a company seems like a pretty redundant take on capitalism

Are you sure either of those situations are in conflict with my point?

While the COVID vaccine was free to the public, the pharmaceutical companies were paid by various governments, resulting in record profits. All while much of the work for developing the vaccines was made possible by public funding.

For cancer treatments, look at this release:

https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2022/01/21/2370991/0/en/Oncology-Market-Size-to-Hit-US-581-25-Billion-by-2030.html

Cancer is discussed like it's a natural resource the medical sector can mine for profits. And while ultimately it's a good thing that lives are being saved, the financial pressures to attain that salvation is devastating for many people. I'm sure you know that medical debt is the number two cause of bankruptcy (in the US at least).

>This leaves precious few new members in the trades needed to fix our cities, bridges and railroads.

This sounds like a compensation problem. The reason they don't go into those trades is the compensation packages just aren't as good as the alternative. Everyone will agree with you until you mention raising taxes or ending suburban and rural subsidies, then all of a sudden everyone is unanimous, we can do without those things as long as it keeps our tax bill down.

>This leaves precious few new members in the trades needed to fix our cities, bridges and railroads.

I love how people talk like capitalism is just going to give them the society they want because they asked nicely and it would be mean if capitalism didn't.

Don't forget to vote. That will bring you the society you crave, lmao.

Also, the trades have a lot of grabass associated with them. After getting out, I was not pleased to learn that, for better or for worse, blue collar working culture is interchangeable with enlisted military working culture. And not the fun Stripes/Down Periscope part, I mean the G.I. Jane/Jarhead parts.

Of course, there's also the issue of finding the right trade. If you did pneumatic controls or drywall, well, sucks to be you! Should've picked lighting systems, idiot. Oh, wait, Lutron owns everything and underpays its lighting techs. Well, you should've invented a time machine, idiot.

But yeah, trades solve everything. If everyone did a trade, the wage stagnation that happened with liberal arts and STEM totally won't happen with blue collar work. You see, by picking up a wrench or a multimeter, you put up an anti-job competition field that can permanently deflect any number of hungry applicants, no matter how much you get lowballed.

[removed]

>No, because democracy is dumb. Literally. Over 50% of the US read at a 6th grade level and you want them to decide how to innovate?

People say stupid shit like this and yet always whine about elites exploiting them.

As if there was some faction of Herrenvolk Loyalist Elites who, unlike every other elite that ever existed, will not ever betray their underlings to benefit their peers. Oh, if only these fictional Volkheit-promoting elites were in power, instead of the stupid masses or our corrupt leadership!

>if they were ever looking for them in the first place.

They werent. Lets not throw the baby out with the bathwater; this is good old fashioned greed, not technology that failed

Wozniaks are out, vulture capitalists are in

>Wild ideas about services that don't actually service anyone or anything but the insiders who are designing them and imagining a need for that service from whole cloth.

[incurious, xenophobic dipshit voice] Uh, it's called innovation, sweetie. Do you hate progress or something?

No, capitalism is horseshit specifically because it prioritizes easy money over getting shit done. I don't need phone apps, i need applied engineering.

Maybe I misunderstood your point. By “lock it up behind capitalist roadblocks,” I figured you meant ordinary people don’t benefit. Clearly everyone benefited from the free vaccines. And if the manufacturers earned a handsome profit along the way, I don’t really have a problem with that. I want drug companies salivating at the thought of getting rich by developing important new vaccines.

I’m also not troubled that companies “mine cancer for profits.” That’s another way of saying “earn money by saving people’s lives.” Better than drilling for oil or running a casino.

I agree medical bankruptcies are a problem. But I’m honestly not sure quite what to make of them. Bernie Sanders claims 500,000 medical bankruptcies per year. But in a nation of 330 million, that’s less than one-half of one percent of the population. So it’s not really evidence that most people aren’t getting cancer treatments.

Is it so easy to minimize the trauma of medical bankruptcies by reducing them to a percentage? 500,000 people dealing with physical and emotional struggles, also having to start their financial lives over? Every year?

If you think about the human experience of these people, I doubt you can dismiss them as a rounding error.

And again, most medical innovation is done with public money, or at the very least R&D tax rebates. The pharmaceutical companies often spend more on marketing elective drugs than they do developing treatments.

Publicly funded innovation should be provided at cost to patients.

I don’t think Mark was ever a genius. Facebook was a stolen idea created by him and a number of other people, almost all of whom he later fucked over. Like most billionaire “innovators” he really just got lucky.

Someone really doesn’t like WFH. I think you need to get over it.

WFH is great for vital jobs. Social media corporations are at best non-essential and at worst straight up vampiric.

I don’t think I’m minimizing, just putting into context.

I genuinely am puzzled by medical bankruptcies though. I often think people who complain about US health insurance don’t actually understand the system. Assuming you don’t have insurance through work, Americans who earn less than $55k per year are eligible for insurance subsidies. And even on the lowest bronze plan, the total maximum out of pocket payment is $7000 per year.

Granted, it’s possible to go bankrupt over $7000, but my hunch is that most of them are people who never signed up. I’m still sympathetic, but there’s only so much the government can do. That said, I’d be ok with public healthcare too.

I mean, this is definitely kind of the problem of our times. Billionaires and corporations have taken into charging forward into the “technological determinism” paradigm, where technological “progress” takes precedence and society should adapt to it, as opposed to innovating tech and progress BASED on society’s evolving demands, ala a sort of “technological voluntarism”. They’ve pushed this so much over the past few decades that I think most of society just accepts that it’s the status quo. Meanwhile, it’s this rampant, uncontrolled, unmonitored growth that’s leading to the planet’s rampant exploitation/ destruction, and humanity failing to keep up with the rate of technology. It’s not a sustainable model anymore.

Really? Show me the government sponsored social media platform lmao.

Are you really this dumb? I'm talking about real technologies. Like the creation of the internet.

https://www.darpa.mil/about-us/timeline/modern-internet

Rude, no shit DARPA made the internet (ARPAnet). Calm down and take a joke man.

How I'm supposed know it's a joke and not some crazy right wing elon musk fan? It's reddit after all..

True I suppose, my bad. Fuck Musk and Zuckerberg though, fr.

Wasn’t Down Periscope the best? They didn’t offer that major in college so I couldn’t be a submarine captain on an old WW2 diesel sub that’s manned by a rag tag motley crew of misfits and a sexy first mate who’s clothes are too small for her. Because I could have also minored in hosting Village People concerts. Even though that didn’t work out, at least I wasn’t stuck with a communications degree.