Dirty Meatverse Business

Warum NFT-Kunst so unfassbar hässlich und schlecht ist. Wie sich alle auf das Metaverse freuen. Und was sonst noch im Internet los ist.

Supergute Zeit für alle, die irgendwann mal Bücher von Neal Stephenson oder William Gibson gelesen haben und jetzt über das Metaverse abnerden können, die cyberfuturistische Parallelwelt, die über uns kommt. Mark Facebook Zuckerberg verwettet offenbar gerade ein paar Milliarden darauf, will Tausende Leute einstellen und am Metaverse schrauben lassen. Die Hardware dazu, Oculus-Brillen, hat er sich längt einverleibt. Womöglich ändert er auch gleich noch den Firmennamen, die Domains meta.com und meta.org hat er wohl schon.

Jetzt mal die Pundits beiseite, die völlig zurecht darauf hinweisen, dass die Metaverse-Literatur vor allem als Warnung (Opens in a new window) zu lesen ist und die Idee von durchkommerzialisierten virtuellen Realitäten, in denen alles und jeder Content ist, traurig und abschreckend ist: Der Move vom Betreiber einer umtrittenen Hassmaschine hin zum Architekten und Immobilienhändler einer virtuellen Welt ist verständlich. Infrastruktur betreiben, Transaktionen vermessen und oder mit Gebühren belegen: top.

The Metaverse Is Bad (Opens in a new window): It is not a world in a headset but a fantasy of power.
The Next Facebook Will Be a Tartarus (Opens in a new window), an Endless Prison for Humanity. I Can’t Wait.
Life In The Fantastic World Of The Facebook Meatverse (Opens in a new window)
Facebook is researching AI systems that see, hear, and remember everything you do (Opens in a new window). AI tools that could one day appear in Facebook’s AR glasses.
»Feast your eyes on the metaverse discourse of 2008. Everything new is old, everything is still shitty.« (Opens in a new window)

Social Media

The Four Dirty C-Words of the Internet (Opens in a new window): content, culture, community, and creator.
Raya And The Promise Of Private Social Media (Opens in a new window): The app has created a space free of the problems that plague the rest of the Web, but only by leaving almost everybody out.
Google-Bewertungen (Opens in a new window): Die Netzwerke der Fälscher. Eine exklusive Datenanalyse von BR und SRF zeigt.
What’s the deal with fictional influencers? (Opens in a new window) One tech company has created a slate of scripted influencers, each with their own storylines. But how is anyone supposed to tell the difference between what’s real and what isn’t?

»TheRepublic« ist eine Art Tichys Einblick mit weniger langen Texten, dafür Parteianbindung an die CDU, man träumt von einer Kampagnenmaschine gegen den vermuteten Linksdrift. Eine FDP-nahe Social-Media-Taskforce hat mal nachgeschaut, in welcher Gesellschaft sich TheRepublic im Netz wohlfühlt:

»Dürfen wir Ihnen das 'bürgerliche Deutschland' von #TheRepublic vorstellen?« (Opens in a new window)

Medien

Facebook doubling down on curated News Tab (Opens in a new window): »Facebook says the News Tab now contributes to over 30% of overall Facebook news link referral traffic for U.S., U.K. and German publishers included in the tab.«
Vox Media has built a visual way to experience podcasts (Opens in a new window). It’s accessible to deaf audiences — and gorgeous.
Spotify opens access to video podcast publishing (Opens in a new window): Aus der beliebten Reihe »Große Plattformen kopieren Features anderer großer Plattformen und gleiche sich immer weiter aneinander an«.
Apple’s advertising business has more than tripled (Opens in a new window) its market share: »What has made Search Ads suddenly attractive is not any new feature but the fact that Apple has rendered the rest of the ad industry “blind” in the iOS universe.«
Google Earth is now a 3D time machine (Opens in a new window): Google puts 20 petabytes of historical satellite data into the Google Earth globe.

Crypto

Remember the International Star Registry?

Somebody looked at that, and thought, »That's a pretty great scam, but what if it destroyed that planet too?«

And that's how we got NFTs. (Opens in a new window)

Bitcoin-mining power plant raises ire of environmentalists (Opens in a new window): A bitcoin operation in central New York has taken over a power plant to find cheap energy for currency mining in a move that has alarmed environmentalists.
The NFT's Aura, or, Why Is NFT Art So Ugly? (Opens in a new window) NFT art is bad for the environment, and bad for artists, but critics and supporters of NFT art are both missing a key fact: it's also just bad art.
The battle to take down Ethereum (Opens in a new window): If you want to build a crypto application, from NFTs to decentralized finance, you're probably going to build it on Ethereum. But should you?
Worldcoin emerges from stealth to pursue its UBI infrastructure ambitions (Opens in a new window): Worldcoin says it's designed »to be the first widely adopted cryptocurrency.« It has so far collected 100,000 iris scans and aims to collect 1 billion by 2023.
We need to talk about digital ID (Opens in a new window): why the World Bank must recognize the harm in Afghanistan and beyond.

Hacker

Crack the code (Opens in a new window): Moderna won't share its vaccine recipe. WHO has hired an African startup to crack it.
🎧 CRE222 Terravision (Opens in a new window): Die Geschichte hinter der Netflix-Miniserie »The Billion Dollar Code« über Berliner Hacker, die eigentlich Google Earth erfunden haben.

Longreads

The Creator Economy Needs a Middle Class (Opens in a new window): The creative economy on platforms like YouTube and Instagram looks a lot like the U.S. economy — there are a few big winners and a lot of people hustling to make a living and barely getting by. But it doesn’t have to be like this.
What is internet criticism? (Opens in a new window) Never send to know for whom the meta verses; it verses for thee.
Global Lessons From The Margins (Opens in a new window): The stories and images on this website explore how pastoralists understand, experience and respond to uncertainty.
Everything Not Saved (Opens in a new window): Julian Oliver and Crystelle Vu come together to reflect, taking and sharing the long view on their art and activist practices. Everything Not Saved is co-written from the position of their multi-species reality in Aotearoa New Zealand. It is from this place that they bring forward their work so that it might be adapted and shared, and from the infrastructural resistance they have worked long to build there may come empowerment, and hope in the »fight against that which must be refused«.