“I Always Feel Like Somebody’s Watching Me” (Rockwell)

“Love in a Time of Surveillance” (Incubus)

“Surveillance Capitalism” (Evan Greer)

“Facebook Renames Itself Meta”

“Mr. Zuckerberg on Thursday talked up the idea as “the successor to the mobile internet” and said mobile devices would no longer be the focal points. The building blocks for the metaverse were also already available, he said. In a demonstration, he showed a digital avatar of himself that transported to different digital worlds while talking to friends and family, no matter where they were on the planet.”

Below is one of the images form the article, most likely included because of the new “logo” for Facebook’s new brand name, “Meta.” Note, however, what else is shows in the photo: a worker, hypervisibly a person of color, picking up trash around the new sign, shown just as he walks below the new logo . . .

The company’s new logo was unveiled on Thursday at its headquarters.

And, another, more in-depth and critical perspective from The Jacobin.

“Facebook is Now Meta. And It Wants to Monetize Your Whole Existence” by James Muldoon, senior lecturer in political science at the University of Exeter and author of the forthcoming Platform Socialism: How to Reclaim Our Digital Future From Big Tech.

“You log on, and you’re herded into a virtual bar to listen to your boss telling jokes. Meanwhile, a metaverse-first real estate company is selling off overpriced property in a virtual London, and gamers are competing for non-fungible tokens. Welcome to the Zuckerverse — a place nobody asked for but in which we may soon all be spending a lot of time.

On Thursday, Facebook changed its name to Meta, as part of a broader shift toward the so-called metaverse — a network of interconnected experiences partly accessed through virtual reality (VR) headsets and augmented reality (AR) devices. In Zuckerberg’s own words, “you can think about the metaverse as an embodied internet, where instead of just viewing content—you are in it.” The most recognizable examples of this in action are virtual office meetings with VR goggles, playing games in an expansive online universe, and accessing a digital layer on top of the real world through AR.” (italics added for emphasis).