Facebook’s rebranding: Welcome to the Matrix!

Many people perceived the information about Facebook's renaming to “Meta” as a kind of curiosity, ironising both over Zuckerberg's promise to build a "metaverse" and over the new campaign logo in the form of a Möbius strip.

However, Zuckerberg's plans are not a laughing matter. The capabilities and resources of the corporation headed by him, and, most importantly, the circumstances of the current moment caused by the pandemic, make the implementation of the plan to "relocate to the virtual world" a significant part of humanity absolutely real.

We will recall that the "metaverse" promised by Zuckerberg is a kind of virtual world where people do not just appear from time to time, leaving messages and records. This is a special social and psychological reality in which they will spend most of their lives.

This alternative reality is both a product of illusions of personal presence in real spaces created with the help of VR technologies, and the result of identifying a person with so-called avatars, or characters capable of moving in virtual space, as it happens in a computer game.

According to the developers, the main task of this project is to "help people communicate”. In reality, a grandiose plan is unfolding before us to create a system that has the potential of total control over the psyche of people and completely subordinates not only human thoughts, but also feelings and emotions.

Starting with quite harmless collective meetings in VR space, this system leads a person into an illusory world where the line between objective reality and fictional reality is blurred.

If in Russia Facebook is rather a platform for exchanging opinions that has replaced LiveJournal, then, for example, in the USA the role of the social network is much more serious. Today, hundreds of millions of people registered online are experiencing the limitations caused by the pandemic. In this situation, there is a very high chance that Zuckerberg's proposal to "emigrate" to the virtual world will be warmly supported by users.

It would be more honest if Zuckerberg called his new project not "Meta", but "Matrix", by analogy with a Hollywood film of the late 1990s. This parallelism becomes even more obvious if we take into account Zuckerberg's recent desire to interfere in political processes.

In the old days, Zuckerberg was considered a relatively apolitical businessman against the background of others, much more ideologised owners of BigTech - Gates, Bezos, Brin. However, in recent years, he apparently made his choice, moreover, he began to catch up in the political field at a rapid pace.

Just the other day, Donald Trump accused Zuckerberg of interfering in the US presidential election by pouring $400 million into local electoral commissions through charitable structures - "pads". At the same time, the main amount which was spent, including on equipment for processing postal ballots, were sent to the districts where the Democrats won.

Trump called it a "crime," but he probably won't be able to prove anything. At the same time, if we look at the case without legal casuistry, everything becomes clear anyway. The "stimulation" of electoral commissions took place, and it certainly influenced the outcome of the elections.

So it's not for nothing that Zuckerberg claims that he reinterpreted his project in order to "move on to the next chapter of history”. This is, of course, not about business history and not about the history of technology, but about the history of politics.

What this can be, one can imagine from the eschatological dystopias of the writer Yuliya Voznesenskaya, whose characters are deprived of access to culture, books and live communication (they keep a social distance to avoid infection with unknown diseases) and spend most of their time connected to a device - a "persona" that gives access to the virtual world. All of this is fully consistent with Zuckerberg's "metaverse".

And in real life, on the physical level, people are placed in cubicles resembling prison cells, eat synthetic food mixtures, wear disposable clothes and are under the vigilant control of the totalitarian regime.

So, welcome to the Matrix!

Director of the RUSSTRAT Institute Elena Panina