Bill McKibben writes:

What Exxon is to our air, Facebook is to our minds: an unparalleled source of pollution. Both are giant companies with deep political power whose products at one point offered a certain kind of liberation and now threaten whatever well-being we still enjoy. Both have lied and covered-up their evil: the Wall Street Journal’s accounts of the Facebook files (artfully reprised in the New Yorker and last night on 60 Minutes) remind me of nothing as much as Inside Climate News’s chronicle of Exxon’s global warming prevarications, which helped cost us three decades in the global warming fight. If you want to say anything in Exxon’s defense, it’s that for most of their corporate history we didn’t know the danger carbon posed. But what does it say about Facebook’s corporate culture that even now high-level employees spend their time trying to figure out how to “leverage play-dates” among small children for profit? There seemed a bit of karmic comeuppance today when Facebook went dark, with even its employees unable to get in their offices because their badges were disabled.

My preoccupation, obviously, is with the physical environment, and so the main reason I’ve loathed Facebook is for their attacks on democracy: how can we hope to slow the chaotic heating of the earth when the most powerful force in our information universe works overtime spreading nonsense, helping elect know-nothings, and selling our attention span to the highest bidder? (It could, of course, be worse: elsewhere in the world Facebook has helped expedite genocide).

But today let’s take a short break from the ever-present climate crisis to talk about what we’re saving the planet for. At least in the western world, Facebook has about maxed out the scale of its present business. So, of course, it’s thinking about how to deploy its vast cash reserves to profitably remake our future. And the answer it has apparently settled on—the “metaverse”—has to be the single most dystopian idea the human brain has yet conceived. [Continue reading…]