The META-SPIEL Meta Spiel (aka The Facebook Rant)

On Thursday, October 27, 2021, Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company we all know as Facebook will henceforth be known as Meta.

It had been speculated in some quarters that a name like this would come about. I’d seen it guessed that the name would be Metaverse. But just… Meta?

As the writer of a blog called META-SPIEL, let me tell you, friends: Meta is about the stupidest damn name they could have come up with. But it says oh so very much about what these people are thinking. Zuckerberg in particular.

Merriam-Webster’s first definition for the word:

showing or suggesting an explicit awareness of itself or oneself as a member of its category : cleverly self-referential

Later down that page, a different definition:

situated behind or beyond

But you knew all this. On META-SPIEL’s about page you find this language:

META, ahh, that can mean a lot of different things. It can mean self-referential, it can mean “beyond”. It comes from Greek, you know. Seriously, do you want me to get meta about META?

Well, here we are. Meta about meta.

When I was a kid there was a local chain called American based in Wisconsin. Their stores were huge. They had furniture, they had electronics. In Rockford, we would see ads for them, featuring a spokesman named Crazy TV Lenny.

Here’s one good example:

And if you want to go crazy, kids, here’s a whole mess of commercials:

American was so big and so unlike any other store that I remember on multiple occasions going with my dad up to Madison primarily to go to American.

At some point, American expanded into Rockford, opening a huge store out on East State Street. One day we were in that place, back in the TV section. And there was a TV with a video camera pointed at it. You know what I mean… it was one of these sorts of things:

It’s a particular type of representation of what I’m going to call the meta loop. The TV is broadcasting itself, which means that it’s broadcasting itself broadcasting itself, etc. The loop ends only because there’s insufficient precision available. When you get into the center of the loop, you just got washed out in an eerie glow.

The reason that day at American stands out in my mind is because it was the first time I specifically remember standing directly in front of that kind of a meta loop. And unlike the image above, I feel like you could see dozens of TVs inside the TV. Instead of washing out in an eerie glow, you just never got to the center. You got trapped somewhere else in the loop.

Another type of meta loop is the child, thinking himself or herself to be oh so clever, who responds to absolutely everything with the question Why? Here the loop does not wash out in an eerie glow, but rather in the intervention of a highly secret part of one’s brain, which simply fucking explodes.

META-SPIEL itself is a very self-conscious attempt to, at times, dive an extra layer or two into the meta loop. It is a strange and fantastical place to be, except that it can also just be utter nonsense.

Now, finally, we are led back to Meta nee Facebook, whose CEO, chief strategist, spokesman, and all around avatar is essentially a 21st century Crazy TV Lenny.

Zuckerberg’s big thing is Augmented Reality, or AR. I’m not going to dive into all this. It’s all ludicrous.

What it gets me to thinking about is Negativland. Specifically, this:

I’m not sure when the video was made, but the song is from the 1997 album Dispepsi, and it all feels like a teardown of Zuckerberg somehow made 24 years in the past.

The spoken word portions of the song are purportedly lifted from an advertising executive’s memo - indeed, the full name of the song is actually “Aluminum or Glass: The Memo” - and dwell upon the concept of “heightened reality vignettes”, prefaced with this explanation:

For this commercial the look, the style, and the music is everything: lighting should be dramatic, but not shadowy; location should be beautiful, but not weird; clothing should be contemporary, but not punk; casting should be characterization, but not the point of hoodlums. In other words, we can get out-of-the-ordinary, but we can't live there.

Well, Zuckerberg’s saying we can live there. More to the point, I think, is that he’s saying that he already lives there, or, at least, he already lives at least three rings deep within the meta loop, and like Joseph Smith, or even Jesus Christ himself, he’s going to lead us all the way to the eerie glow itself.

In other words, Mark Zuckerberg is Sybok, Spock’s half-brother from Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, the absolute shittiest of the Star Trek movies. In the end - and there must be an end - Zuckerberg will literally destroy himself. (With a little help from a metaphorical Klingon machine gun.)

There is a massive distinction between self-referentialness and self-awareness. Meta nee Facebook oozes self-referetialness to the point of absurdity. They could have renamed themselves Company and achieved a similar effect, but that name would have been too limiting. They are not seeking to be an archetype, they are seeking to be something that transcends referentiality altogether. Very meta indeed.

Or, hey, forget it, none of this is true, this is all just a desperate attempt at a pivot, couched in self-aggrandizement. Ed Zitron calls it an “Act of Meta-Desperation”, and his take is well worth reading:

While I suspect Ed is largely correct, and there is a point to be made that Occam’s Razor would suggest that ultimately it’s all about the money, the layers of hubris in this escapade are so thick that I frankly don’t think this is about what it is about.

Judd Legum, earlier this week, in breaking down the document dump from whistleblower Frances Haugen, compiled a list of 5 high level things to know about Facebook:

None of what he writes about was remotely conceivable when TheFacebook sprung into being from a Harvard dorm room. And I don’t think it would be the correct leap to say that Meta nee Facebook absolutely doesn’t care about all of the various mistakes and problems they have caused. Rather, I think what we have is a complicated interplay between the obvious pure profit motivation, and the attendant surreality that Zuckerberg et al genuinely believe that they are operating in the best interests of humankind. They are extreme technocrats, yes; but they are also Plato’s philosopher-kings, asserting an augmented vision of philosophy. This is all Zuckerberg’s retelling of the allegory of the cave, whereby not only are the shadows an inaccurate representation of reality, but reality itself is just another wall of the cave.

Zuckerberg is so thoroughly ensconced in his own augmented life that what he perceives cannot remotely credibly be regarded as anyone else’s notion of reality, but this is not an argument he rejects, it is one he turns around in the service of his vision. His self-awareness and self-referentiality are so extreme at this point that he has apparently transcended both consciousness and conscience.

He has become the TV broadcasting itself, and Crazy TV Lenny selling it, all in one.

Facebook proper, at this point, is essentially a public utility under private control. As much as we deplore it - and for very good reason - it is difficult for all of us to completely break from it.

The damage Facebook is doing far outweighs the benefits. It’s been this way for a long time. I wouldn’t be so dismissive as to suggest that there have never been benefits, but any fair appraisal has to conclude that at some point, it tipped over into being a truly bad thing overall. And so long as Facebook continues to exist in more or less its current state, no other service providing quite the same function is going to displace it.

I don’t have a solution for all that. I don’t think advising everyone I know to delete their accounts really addresses what all ought to be addressed. It’d be like telling someone living downstream from a coal plant to go off the grid. Sure, it might be a very good idea for you to abandon your account. But the damage that Facebook is doing to you is likely not eminating from what’s happening on your timeline. It’s in the algorithms bringing the fascists together. Your stepping away isn’t going to dent that. A huge bunch of us stepping away isn’t going to dent that.

Facebook is not alone in its provision of an opportunity for a negative feedback loop. What is different about it, though, is that it augments that opportunity. When Mark Zuckerberg uses the word “augment”, what you really should be hearing is “algorithm”, and you should be thinking in terms of what an algorithm in his hand truly means. Whatever he may think the intent is, the reality that his company is actively augmenting is a negative one. Either he’s America’s leading psychopath, or he’s America’s leading fool. What he is not is a philosopher-king, and, yes, it is high time that somebody - i.e. the government - does something about it all.

My hope is that the likes of Lina Khan, new chairperson of the Federal Trade Commission, and Rohit Chopra, new director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, will find ways to break Meta nee Facebook apart. Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram stands as one of the most obvious anti-competition acts in recent memory, something the feds never should have greenlighted. Although I have real hope that these people will pursue positive outcomes, I think outright expecting the federal bureaucracy to solve anything… sigh.

I wish at this point I could lay something more thorough out. If nothing else, though, I do think a fair number of my cache of readers are people who don’t regularly read the likes of Ed Zitron or Judd Legum or Matt Stoller, who may not really have a deep, broad sense for just how awful Facebook has been, and who are among the people who have been in need of real information and real argument about what the problems are. It’s not going to be some new Zuckerberg, some hot-shot tech guru, leading us out of this trap, any more than it’s going to be some bureaucrat. It’s going to take a true collective effort.

We have to rethink the way we interact with one another. We have to avoid being distracted by the eerie glow. Turn the camera outward. There’s actual reality out there. We don’t need to heighten it, we don’t need to augment it, and we sure as hell don’t need Mark Zuckerberg to be the one deciding how all that is going to happen. This pandemic will truly end, we will actually be able to spend real time face to face again. Put the damn Oculus down - the literal one or the metaphorical one. Go be with people. Go be with nature. Go be with the reality that has been bestowed upon us by whatever or whomever the Creator may be.

Yeah, it can be fun to hang out inside the meta loop. But we can’t live there. And we can’t keep allowing this narcissist to drag us all into there.