This column comes to you from an isolated farmhouse in the southern Cape, to which I’ve decamped for a week to celebrate a birthday and get away from it all. One of the selling points of the place is that there is no internet connectivity, not even on your mobile, so you can really remove yourself from that continuous barrage of Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Trello and e-mail messages, and opt out of the endless round of Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and Twitter updates.
To even further simulate the simpler times of the 19th century, there’s often no electricity, so you get to sit in the dark with a flickering candle and an old Almanack, poring over the latest cures for impala dropsy and designs for hyper-modern, turn-of-the-century (the one before last) long-drop toilets.
I at first thought this was a rather clever part of the farm owners’ "get away from it all" strategy, but I now realise that Eskom had decided to treat us to stage 4 blackouts.
Sounds idyllic, doesn’t it? Well, no. It turns out you can’t really live in a world without the internet any more. For example, it’s really useful to know when Eskom is switching off the lights, and it’s extraordinarily difficult to write a column about the state(s) of the world when you can’t keep a constant eye on the way the world is changing.
On the bookshelves of this farmhouse are works by some of our great writers. I can picture Herman Charles Bosman sitting on the stoep here, sipping on a mug of moerkoffie while he composes fantastic tales about the human condition.
Ha — try that today, Herman, try that today. If you aren’t mired in the turbid waters of social media, you’re not even human.
So I made a shameful journey to the closest town to check for anything urgent on the interwebs, and one of the first alerts that pinged my phone as it slowly came back to life was this one: "Facebook changes its name to Meta as it focuses on virtual reality."
I’m in a country where they can’t keep the lights on, and Mark Zuckerberg wants me to move to one where everything is electricity. I can’t help thinking that if Philip K Dick had set his sci-fi classic Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep in SA, the answer would have been a resounding "no" — because they’d be inert lumps of metal without any way to recharge their batteries.
Which is all to say, living outside the tech bubble of Silicon Valley gives you a slightly more jaundiced perspective on shimmering, sparkling visions of the future.
According to The New York Times, "the move punctuates how Zuckerberg … plans to refocus his Silicon Valley company on what he sees as the next digital frontier, which is the unification of disparate digital worlds into something called the metaverse.
"At the same time, renaming Facebook may help distance the company from the social networking controversies it is facing, including how it is used to spread hate speech and misinformation."
You can’t deny that the hate speech, disinformation and sheer violence that permeate social media are largely facilitated by the big platforms themselves
There’s something both hubristic and, one hopes, heuristic about the names that companies such as Google and Facebook choose when they realise they have effectively colonised most of the known world.
Google rebranded as Alphabet, naming itself after the essential components of all language and meaning. And, thus, basically telling us that everything we say, think or do will now be in googlespeak, a language whose meaning and impact is controlled by Google’s algorithms.
Facebook’s Meta carries a similar meaning. The metaverse, I’m reliably informed by Forbes magazine via Wikipedia, "is a collective virtual shared space, created by the convergence of virtually enhanced physical reality and physically persistent virtual space, including the sum of all virtual worlds, augmented reality, and the internet".
Meta’s beloved leader, Emperor Mark I of Facebook, to give him his new metaverse title, "said … Facebook has committed to building a composite universe melding online, virtual and augmented worlds that people can seamlessly traverse. He has said that this concept, known as the metaverse, can be the next major social platform and that several tech companies will build it over the next 10-plus years."
Metaverse is a portmanteau of the prefix meta, meaning "beyond", and universe, meaning, well, "all existing matter and space considered as a whole".
Yes, Zuckerberg’s colonial ambition really puts Cecil John Rhodes’s piffling Cape-to-Cairo dream in its place.
"I’ve been thinking a lot about our identity," said Emperor Mark I, speaking at a (natch) virtual event. "Over time, I hope we’re seen as a metaverse company."
According to The New York Times, "with the change, Mr Zuckerberg telegraphed that his company was going beyond today’s social networking, which Facebook has been built on since it was founded 17 years ago. Having Facebook as the corporate name when the company now owned many apps and was fundamentally about connecting people was no longer tenable, he said."
There are some cynics — aren’t there always — who are suggesting that the Facebook rebranding is not so much the heralding of a new dawn in world domination (sorry, universe domination), but a way of evading the dark shadow of night cast by the latest Facebook leaks.
The company has faced some intense interrogation lately, especially after the revelations by former employee Frances Haugen, who leaked internal documents that showed how much Facebook knew about the harmful effects it has on people and societies.
Let me state unequivocally that I am constitutionally and intellectually compelled to believe in the technological innovations brought by the internet, as I’ve spent all of my professional life trying to facilitate those changes. So I’m pro the metaverse. It’s inevitable.
But we can’t be blind to the fact that this brings both good and bad things, and let’s rather try to work out what those are before we are irretrievably forced under Meta’s virtual imperial yoke.
So bless you, America, for bringing this sparkly world of wonder and freedom to us, in much the same way merry old Europe brought us the benefits of colonialism (only joking, I’m no Helen).
But I can’t help worrying: what if Facebook decides to pull an Afghanistan on us, and one day we’re left clutching the struts of a virtual helicopter as it takes off from the metaverse US embassy, leaving us to the mercy of that virtual Taliban that social media seems to turn most of us into? Because while you might argue over the extent to which the US contributed to the flowering of the actual Taliban, you can’t deny that the hate speech, disinformation and sheer violence that permeate social media are largely facilitated by the big platforms themselves — sometimes by chance, but often by commercial choice.
Zuckerberg’s apparent goal of universal colonialism makes Rhodes’s Cape-to-Cairo dream seem puny
— What it means:
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