This image of Mark Zuckerberg says so much about our future…
The image above looks like concept art for a new dystopian sci-fi film.
David Rainoshek Opening Note: This article from Rich McCormick at The Verge is highly worth reading… VR Headsets are a certain part of our future. It’s Good news / Bad news. I don’t think the creators of this technology (such as Mark Zuckerberg) give much credence to the Bad News side of VR.
And what’s the Bad News? We are creating a *simulacrum* — a representation that is not the real thing. But with VR, we run a high risk of treating the VR world as real — or more real — than the physical world in which we live, and on which we depend for life.
#VR #VirtualReality #Zuckerberg #Simulacrum
Now, here is the timely, surreal article from Rich McCormick at The Verge:
A billionaire superman with a rictus grin, striding straight past human drones, tethered to machines and blinded to reality by blinking plastic masks. Golden light shines down on the man as he strides past his subjects, cast in gloom, toward a stage where he will accept their adulation. Later that night, he will pore across his vast network and read their praise, heaped upon him in superlatives, as he drives what remains of humanity forward to his singular vision.
Except it’s not from a sci-fi movie — it’s from Mobile World Congress, in Barcelona, and the man is Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg. The picture trips all of our “horrible cyberpunk future” alarms, carefully put in place by everything from The Matrix to Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent.
The former uses evil squid-bodied robots, the latter privileged human elites, but both works see humanity too distracted and preoccupied — by a full-scale replica of late-90s reality, or just sports on TV — to even be aware of the actions of those in charge. Zuckerberg’s picture acts this out: MWC attendees plugged into Samsung’s Gear VR headset literally can’t see the Facebook boss as he breezes past them.
What’s perhaps scarier is that Mark Zuckerberg chose to share that image himself, figuring it to be a good look.
It appeared on his own Facebook page yesterday, quickly giving rise to a number of comedy copies as people spotted its inherent creepiness, and combined it with movies, dinosaurs, and that iconic Apple ad set in a similar-looking dystopian future. Mark Zuckerberg might have stolen the show at Samsung’s MWC conference, but in this unfortunate picture at least, it looks more like he’s planning to steal our brains.
Original Post: http://www.theverge.com/2016/2/22/11087890/mark-zuckerberg-mwc-picture-future-samsung
David Rainoshek Comments:
Soon, a whole lot of people are going to have stuff strapped to their faces. Just trying to get a head start… And get my head wrapped around this upcoming phenomenon before IT gets wrapped around my head.
