The articles, the opinions, the stories, the poems and the cartoons Ovi magazine covers for Friday November 12th, 2021
Metaverse? And a Zuckerbergian elegy? by Dr. Azly Rahman
I wrote the word “METAVERSE” on my whiteboard today for my academic contemplation the next few days and my lecture notes for my course Sociology of the Future. I then created a concept/mind map out of it. This topic — the fundamental character of technology and its human and social consequences is not new to me. Since I started graduate school ages ago, my research papers in political-economy have mainly centered around the issue of technological fantasy and reality and the so-called “Computer Revolution”.
My dissertation, submitted to Columbia University explored the concepts of cybernetics, hegemony, and utopianism as digital communication technologies are pushed to become the foundation of new cities, impacting spaces of knowledge and power. In 1987, I wrote a Masters essay on the political-economy and philosophy of the “Information Age” when the term was first coined. I explored the linkages between the idea of American reform in education during the Reagan Administration and the role of corporate-industrial complex in defining the terms and trends of the “Information society.” Now we have a new idea: “metaverse.”. It will be a word as common as “bitcoin,” “augmented reality,” and “AI” or “artificial intelligence” our children and grandchildren will breathe in daily. Like air. But what is it?
When Facebook decided on a name change a few weeks ago, I thought of it philologically and epistemologically. I started thinking about paradigms, the evolution of technology, evolutionary markers, political-economy, anatomy of autonomous technology, the reality of virtual reality, the locus of control of this post-post-informational-post capitalist world of digital materialism. I started thinking of the notion of a “new matrix”. Of course, the movie too. So, here I am, again back to another room in my own “metaverse” of academic musing. to contemplate on the next steps for these technological titans — Facebook/META, Google, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, etc., and how we are to consume the ideology that has become more “frankensteinish” in nature.
I wrote these too as an endnote on that whiteboard in my classroom: “Is the metaverse anti-Renaissance, anti-Enlightenment, anti-Humanism”? In other words, how virtual and augmented must our lives be?
Continue reading HERE!
Electric Horses #poem & #painting by Nikos Laios
“I dreamt of
Electric horses
Burning across the sky
Over melting clocks
On midnight beats,
With sleeping angels
And broken demons
In ancient cafes and
Whiskey bars.”
Continue reading HERE!
Screws & Chips 21#17 #cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas
For more Screws & Chips, HERE!
For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!
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