The articles, the opinions, the stories, the poems and the cartoons Ovi magazine covers for Saturday November 27th, 2021
Totalitarian Cyber-Creep: Mark Zuckerberg in the Metaverse by Dr. Binoy Kampmark
Never leave matters of maturity to the Peter Panners of Silicon Valley. At their most benign, they are easily dismissed as potty and keyboard mad. At their worst, their fantasies assume the noxious, demonic forms that reduce all users of their technology to units of information and flashes of data. Such boys (they are mostly boys), felt somehow left out by the currents of reality, their own world excruciatingly boring and filled with pangs of childhood disturbance and regret. So they sought vengeance upon us all: imposing a global regime of fairly useless cyber architecture that saps intelligence in the name of experience, destroys imagination even as it celebrates it, and luxuriates in a lowly prurience.
Facebook, in particular, has been trying to push such a model using a tactic all companies in distress have sought to adopt: rebranding. Be it the scandals disclosed by the Facebook papers, the scrutiny over the use of algorithms by the company, the inability to combat galloping misinformation on its platforms, or the stark amorality of the company’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, the chance to seek the metaverse has presented itself.
Enter, then, the world of Meta Platforms, aided by the virtual reality headset company Oculus, which was acquired by Facebook in 2014 for $2 billion. Astute watchers then would have been the strategy afoot at the time; most, however, thought the decision misguided and destined to flop.
Continue reading HERE!
Wipe your Tears #poem by Shola Balogun
“Child, let your eyelids gleam
Like a thousand suns.
Let your smiles radiate
Like the stars
In the sky at night.”
Continue reading HERE!
Book review: The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir by Joseph Gatt
The book mixes descriptive accounts of the social and individual lives of women with literary accounts of the social and individual lives of women. That, along with legal and religious views on all matters pertaining to women.
The common thread of the book: men usually live their life cycles without having to worry about getting pregnant, without having to worry about “forced hangovers” once a month which is what menstruations really are. And men usually don’t have to worry about becoming anyone’s sex slave or domestic slave or domination within the household.
So women are mostly reacting on a daily basis, on an hourly basis to these threats.
ntinue reading HERE!
Mika Toxica 21#12 #cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas
For more Mika Toxica, HERE!
For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!
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