Tech oligarchs are encouraging the creation of virtual worlds as a cheap way to avoid problems in the real one.
Guys, I don't want to alarm everyone, but the proles are getting restless. Not to worry though, I have a cunning plan- we'll just hand out Google Cardboard VR goggles and Second Life subscriptions. They can't see the environmental degradation if they're too busy cranking their hogs on a virtual nudist furry sex colony!
I sometimes wonder if this is actually how they think.
If it is, I really wonder what their reactions were in revolutionary situations when they were on the literal chopping block
It is not possible, on Earth, to give everyone all that they would want. Not everyone can have Richard Branson’s private island,” Doom co-creator and former CTO of Oculus John Carmack told Joe Rogan during a 2020 interview.
Yes, but we want no one to have private islands
What the fuck would an average mfer even do with their own island? Nice take, Carmack.
Sad to see Carmack have these brainworms. Back in his younger days, he threatened to quit if his boss made him patent a rendering technology he'd developed.
A close friend of mine uses VR regularly. They got it after COVID to help with quarantine. It's fun to use for about 3 hours and does give a sense of having gone somewhere new, which is neat-
But as a permanent distraction? No, absolutely not. VR causes headaches after extended use, and it doesn't even work for some people. It's also a limited sensory experience.
Until VR can fully simulate reality and put food in your belly it's not a threat.
probably also rashes if you try to wear that shit for hours daily.
economic class. they see themselves as part of the petit bourgeoisie even though they must labor for their sustenance. partially this has to do with high wages but it's also because for a while there's been a ton of cheap capital available for people to go start businesses if they do the right dog and pony show for the right people, which they've thoroughly confused with actual claim to the means of production. they're wrong and they'll learn just how wrong they've been over this decade. I think that process has already started for younger devs who don't have quite the easy trip into the industry and to cushy high-paying jobs, lacking all protection from abusive work schedules and the legalized wage theft that entails.
or maybe another way to look at this -- the difference between the labor aristocracy and the petit bourgeoisie amounts to little when the former can become the latter with apparent ease. and those conditions have proliferated for most of the last two decades due to really low interest rates driving extraordinarily-concentrated capital to seek wildly more speculative ventures in search of profits, allowing easy access to capital for a small segment of workers in the industry. the success of some individuals, though far fewer than people realize, in crossing the class divide, from labor to ownership, is universalized by the hegemonic liberal ideology -- you see this both in the form of "learn to code" as a panacea for poverty and in the wildly reactionary bent of this segment of labor. when that capital dries up -- and it will as interest rates rise to combat inflation from the pandemic -- these workers, who have failed to protect themselves through any kind of collective action to date, will find their wages collapsing, as the siphon turns to them in search of a prop for collapsing profits.
As @silent_water said, their position in society (and their impression of that position). But also (and as a result of the former), they're all libertarians. :ancap-good:
This is a cool project for an open source and federated VR network: https://web.immers.space
There's also some open source hardware, like this headset: https://www.relativty.com/
and stuff like haptic gloves: https://hackaday.io/project/178243-lucidvr-budget-haptic-glove
Pretty dogshit bet on their end, honestly.
VR is cool tech toy stuff, but lots of people can't afford them, or they can't use them because they get sick or just have no room in their home. Also, VR can't feed you, and unless they're gonna have some VR-to-rent scheme or something, drowning in VR won't keep people materially secure enough to keep using VR anyway.
Motion sickness from like 20 seconds of VR headset gang checking in. It sucked and I hated it
The price on VR will eventually reach the point where it’s affordable enough for most people. We’re almost there already with stuff like the Oculus Quest. Also remote work through VR (assuming the tech works well enough) would basically mean no need for a physical location for companies/jobs that don’t require physical labor, which would be a lot. That would hypothetically mean no need for renting commercial space, and could dramatically reduce cost of living for employees who would otherwise be working together at some location in a high rent city. Those advantages would be a pretty big deal for those corporations that could take advantage, and this would likely drive widespread adoption.
Assuming it works well, it would have nearly all the same advantages as working in a shared physical office vs working at home. It really depends on the job of course, but for anything that requires any kind of collaboration, working with others in the same shared space for the duration of the work day is quite a bit different than just relying on conference calls and messages. There's a lot of casual interaction that otherwise gets missed if you're relying solely on video software. Also, for managers/employers, they like to be able to monitor and keep tabs on people like they normally would be able to do in a physical office and a shared virtual space would allow them to do that in a way that normal remote communication would not. Also, "company culture" and that sort of bullshit would play into this as well.
All those jokes about using the Matrix as escapism in the real early 2000's coming full circle
Cool
:screm-a:
:this-is-fine: but literally. enjoying my scenic virtual mansion as my actual house literally burns around me and I die because biological organisms have real world biological needs.
Naturally, you'll be paying a monthly subscription for it from the Amazon Credits you earn from your job working at the cockroach farming facility at Regional Amazon Fulfillment Center 17 formerly known as your home town
Now the software is bloated so it needs a more intense processor for the same shitty graphics
Even if properly funded (not happening) and supplies were available (pc part prices never coming down even when available for purchase) this would still not have the effect they want it to.
Eh, we'll see. The reason Facebook is investing so much money into VR in the first place is because of how natural a progression their current behavioral manipulation machinations transfer over to VR. The upcoming headset Facebook has been teasing is slated to included eye tracking, face tracking, and probably even heart rate sensing which will give them a slew of data into their user's behavioral responses. Combine that with all the other data facebook collects folded into their big behavior manipulation platform and we're gonna have quite the boring dystopia.
Perhaps, but personally I don't see VR ever taking off in its current state outside of a few useful industrial/business uses and the like; I tried a recent headset recently (one with the fingers thingy) and it's fun, sure, but as an alternative - even a very limited one - to the real world ? they suck quickly IMO. Perhaps for video games - and I'm not even sure about that - but watching a concert or having a meeting with them ? fuck no.
Give it time, even at an estimated 5 million Facebook Quest units sold, we're still pretty early in the VR tech adoption cycle; Viable consumer VR wasn't even really a thing until about 10 years ago. As the tech improves, becomes lighter, more sensory captivating, AR tech will as well and between the two we'll end up with a considerable segment of the population spending most of their time in a curated echo chamber under control of some major corporation (probably fb/meta).
The upcoming headset Facebook has been teasing is slated to included eye tracking, face tracking, and probably even heart rate sensing which will give them a slew of data into their user’s behavioral responses. Combine that with all the other data facebook collects folded into their big behavior manipulation platform and we’re gonna have quite the boring dystopia.
:anprim-pat:
sometimes I think Ted was right, what the fuck
lol, yeah. That's my typical disclaimer, which one will get us first? Climate Change or Mixed Reality tech so advanced that the Matrix seems quaint?
Resource exhaustion and ecological collapse due to pollution and modern agricultural practices are also in the running.
I tend to include that all under the heading of climate change, but yeah totally.
Squeeze a tube of soylent paste in your mouth while eating a wisecracking animated steak in VR.
Clippy the steak.
Would you like to simulate the taste of a medium rare steak for 25 ZuckerBucks or use your free economically fucked voucher to taste the MegaGood A1 Steak Sauce Well Done Extravaganza Steak Experience? - 1
- Up to 90% of your brain may be used to mine ZuckerBucks during consumption of your MegaGood A1 Steak Sauce Well Done Extravaganza Steak Experience
simulate the taste of a medium rare steak for 25 ZuckerBucks
As a vegan I would actually have occasion to use this
I dunno, VR seems very 2017-ish, a brief fad that kind of flared up then petered out. I think people like traditional social media on their phone, they're more interested in posting about Biden in their prayer warriors for ivermectin and trump facebook groups than putting on an oculus and watching a concert.
VR seems very 2017-ish, a brief fad that kind of flared up then petered out
VR would have been huge if fans and companies started adding VR support to the best of the last 2 decades of games. For awhile it looked like that was going to happen, then it just didn't.
Instead over the better part of a decade we got like maybe 4 worthwhile apps.
Many of the greatest films and historical moments from the first half of the 20th century were lost because the companies let them rot in warehouses.
more interested in posting about Biden in their prayer warriors for ivermectin and trump facebook groups
Every year or so someone tries to make a VR browser where every website is a physical place where you can see other people who're browsing it, kinda like VRChat but the internet.
Yeah it seems like only now older games are getting VR support, kind of missed their moment.
IMO that iteration of VR was kind of like if Starbucks offered a $50 cup of coffee.
There's very few people who wanted it and could afford it who didn't go out and buy it.
Now we have to get nuanced on "wanted it" and "could afford it".
Wanted It - It was first gen, not that great tbh. Then facebook bought Oculus, Oculus lied and said FB login would not be required, then facebook announced that they lied, now everyone associates VR with shitty things like forced login to facebook. There were several "unmaterialized wants", or "wants in waiting", such as waiting for more games, a killer app, flagship games, please something that's not a tech demo. I never saw evidence they were trying to branch out into business uses, such as VR as an alternative for 4+ 4k monitors. So if they tried that, they failed to market it, because I might have actually bought one for that.
Could Afford It - in the fiscally responsible sense, not the far right version of that term, of course. That shit was expensive.
Basically, the supply and demand chart condemned this product until conditions improved.
“People react negatively to any talk of economics, but it is resource allocation. You have to make decisions about where things go. Economically, you can deliver a lot more value to a lot of people in the virtual sense.”
Well that's an ignorant lie
Is it 2017 again? Are the elite really going to start pumping vr and ai driving again?
Self driving is different IMO it will definitely work in the future because it is not just a couple of US companies but the entire industry is investing and implementing it. European and Chinese car manufacturers are making their own systems. And then there are real profits to be made with self driving. Generaly people are right to hate Tesla but don't mistake Elon for the entire EV and self driving industry.
VR is difficult to predict because it is only a couple of companies and the base use case is already quite niche you know having computer proficiency and money to buy one.
It is like imagine if Apple launched the iPhone 1 15 years ago at 1000 USD and required you to have a Mac in order to even use it, it would obviously be a massive failure.
It is like imagine if Apple launched the iPhone 1 15 years ago at 1000 USD and required you to have a Mac in order to even use it, it would obviously be a massive failure.
That's almost exactly what a 1st generation iPhone cost in 2007 if you didn't lock into a two year contract.
Can't find a price without contract otherwise people say it was 499 to 599 and it was already mocked as too high, the only reason it reached 1k is because of the market share they got at one point they realized people are willing to pay much higher now that premium iPhone became a status symbol specially outside the US, that and a whole generation of fanboys who think smartphones = iPhone and can't/wont use anything else...
It was $600 on launch day with a $300 early termination fee on the contract. Resellers were hawking them for $1k easy.
Can't afford a real home but I got a VR mansion and the deed to the property is on the blockchain 😎
oops, now VR real estate is inflating faster than the bay area, and VR homeowners won't let us build any more
