Could this be more of a necessary share-holder reference/pointer,
opening new doors and preparing a pathway to shed FB if it becomes too
much of a liability? From an organisational PoV is makes sense, right?
It does, that would be totally logical and it's exactly what seems so desperate. Zuck would be getting ready to ditch one of the most successful media products ever, for a VR helmet? Then the end is near! But that's just what I want to believe (Jon Lebkowsky's point).
Plus there's this:
In many places and for what concerns many topics, struggles and
mobilisations, what is called 'activism' and which used to be organised
in groups meeting in dark cellars with the phone batteries removed, is
now often exclusively done on Facefuck. Not on, you're out of the loop.
A few years ago when it was my liberal friends organizing their art stuff on FB I just groaned. I figured someone would tell me what happened. Then I realized that if I wanted to do *activist* media - particularly with grassroots communities - I had to incorporate their Facebook feeds. Because that is the primary way in which grassroots activism is organized around much of the world. Now I am on FB, Twitter and soon probably Instagram, without ever posting anything, just for the developer access...
To Felix's point, the reason Silicon Valley is obsessed with simulations and Mirror Worlds is because they are constantly administering experiments carried out on populations under glass. More broadly, scientific management, the psychology of labor, mass propaganda and the application-development-metastasis of these things during WWII and the Cold War created an archetypal popular suspicion that everything is part of some arbitrary experiment - maybe more than one at a time (Philip K Dick). The multiple universe theory provides a perfect organizational template for corporations seeking monopoly power over the perception/_expression_ of specifically segmented populations. Plus, as a parlor game, it is a perfect excuse for cynicism and nihilistic blather, we're all motes in the Supercalculator's eye, Kurzweil, etc.
I'd really love to see that shit go down, I gotta say.