Cristian Carlos.
Talcott Parsons is an American sociologist of the structuralist school of thought. He says that “differentiation” is the most common process of change in societies like ours: late capitalism. He proposed that our society is held together by systems that work together to make our existence possible according to our needs.
Recently, Facebook announced the change of the company's name to Meta, which, according to its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, is in response to the creation of a metaverse or an alternate reality. Now, the company Meta is in charge of Facebook's operations – the name of the main social network that was born in the second half of the 2000s is maintained –; later, Facebook acquired Instagram, the visual social network for instant photos and short videos.
WhatsApp began as an alternative means of communication to SMS – short messages sent via cell phone – and competed with and even overtook Blackberry’s messaging service. Initially, WhatsApp was available for all devices that had an Internet connection, whether mobile data or connected to a local network; later, WhatsApp restricted its access only to devices capable of sending SMS messages and opened up to different operating systems, including Android and the defunct Symbian and webOS.
Suddenly, the Facebook app was installed by default on smartphones with any operating system – except iOS – with no possibility of uninstalling it, a practice that is still common on Android.
In fact, Mark Zuckerberg launched a smartphone with Facebook as the core operating system application with HTC in 2013 called HTC First; however, the enthusiasm was short-lived when it was discovered that having Facebook as a communication base, collecting and sending complete user data, did not seem like a good idea among consumers.
I still remember when Instagram opened its market and stopped being an exclusive application in the Apple App Store that could only be accessed by iPhone users. Suddenly, a social network joined the list of social networks that showed graphic content en masse, like YouTube and the late Vine –from Twitter–. Facebook sacrificed the quality of the content provided by iPhone cameras and soon opened its application for Android, so that millions of people, from one day to the next, could join and share photos from less privileged cameras, which diminished the quality of the content.
Later, we experienced the rise of augmented reality and virtual reality when it became possible to transmit large amounts of data through the widespread use of optical fiber. Now, anyone with sufficient computing power could experience virtual worlds from the comfort of virtually anywhere. The Oculus project, now owned by Facebook, was created in 2014 and acquired by Mark Zuckerberg two years later.
And suddenly, without realizing it, Facebook is almost synonymous with the existence of people on the Internet. Let those who are free of Facebook cast the first stone.
Not even Talcott Parsons could foresee that his theory of action would need to be applied to different universes. However, Parsons also proposed – and unintentionally – the way to end Mark Zuckerberg's perverse plan, which Apple, with its recent privacy measures, perhaps discovered before the owner of the social network even had the opportunity to consolidate himself as the Buy-N-Large type hyper-company that Pixar painted in 2008 and that ended the existence of life on Earth. Zuckerberg, fortunately for us, was only able to consolidate the name.
Facebook is the virtual city where people, as sociologists would say, resolve their daily lives, communicate, become social beings and interact with people from different ultra-modern societies with essential post-truth needs. For many, Facebook replaced newspapers, books, photo albums, meetings, conversations –via Messenger–, wallets, shopping malls and personal appointments.
Instagram replaced traditional television, and people preferred to get their information via photos and short videos. People no longer have time to stop and watch a four-hour live Sunday show if a content creator is able to explain reality in 12 seconds.
Nobody remembers the landline phone anymore, much less the yellow pages. If more direct communication is required, Facebook solved it the day it integrated high-fidelity voice calls into WhatsApp. The social distancing caused by the COVID-19 pandemic was supported thanks to high-definition video calls that could be made via Messenger and WhatsApp. Celebrities gave their concerts via Instagram or Facebook Live, and suddenly politics, the economy and the government communicated with hashtags or hashtags to regain the human sense they had lost: #MeToo, #StaySafe, #Vacúnate.
People have moved activism to the couch – something that real activism once feared – we have moved away from in-person social activities for the sake of survival and have moved our entire life to the digital, to the binary, to the encrypted, to the cloud. We have moved to decoding our words, our thoughts and our image to computational and graphic processing… and that is what Mark Zuckerberg wants to achieve with Meta. A metaverse where all our needs are covered by a single company that profits from people’s privacy because, as long as Facebook is used, the person not only gives up his or her will – as is done in a democracy – but also his or her privacy and, with it, the last bit of personality and originality that remains to our individuality.
While the unification of our daily lives comes down to a single name, Parsons would say that we are on the right track. Ultimately, the metaverse is just one more way in which our modern society is evolving – the aforementioned differentiation – but differentiation, being the same weapon that Mark Zuckerberg's Meta has against us, is the weapon with which the computer utopia will be destroyed.
For Parsons, a system – in this case, Meta – is made up of subsystems – meaning the division between Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Oculus – which are sustained by the existence of each other. Meta, in this case, relies on the fact that, in order to keep Facebook operating, it has to have WhatsApp, Instagram and, to a lesser extent – but no less important – Oculus… all operating at the same time, or the lack of one of these would ruin the metaverse, not counting, of course, the next company that wants to join the group that will surely find another way to satisfy a digital need that modern societies demand.
However, let us remember that this happened recently and that is what the concept of the metaverse is afraid of – and Mark Zuckerberg, by the way –: Facebook collapsed and ceased to exist and, with it, it was triggered by the lack of the rest on the day we experienced a very short version of the digital apocalypse: the day the metaverse fell and Facebook ceased to exist.
At this point, it would be very easy to suggest that people should stop using the services offered by Meta, but this scenario is becoming less and less unlikely given that the only thing that is advancing by leaps and bounds is communication technologies. Zuckerberg's most recent weapon to seduce the Internet user and consolidate –without turning back– the metaverse is virtual reality, Oculus, specifically.
Once the goal of making augmented reality glasses accessible to everyone is achieved, there would be no need to return to the real world if all needs – except for physiological ones – can be satisfied for free and as instantly as receiving a text message.
Is there still time to undo the metaverse that Mark Zuckerberg proposes? Definitely. Individuals can live healthily in the real world and healthily virtually. Facebook is as harmful in the digital world as Coca-Cola is in our reality. We know that there are alternatives to Coca-Cola, cigarettes, tobacco, alcohol –and a long etcetera–.
There may be people who take rigorous physical care of themselves, but that doesn’t exclude them from digital junk: people addicted to generating content – speaking about self-care, ironically – making it available to, as Reddit users would say, “earn internet points” and consuming it by the petabyte per month. Empty content, easy, quick and ready to consume just like junk food.
What Parsons failed to do was explore the possibility that systems with the same hierarchy as the metaverse can coexist; society is undoubtedly heading in that direction, but fortunately, we can choose – with the little free will we have left – which metaverse we want to live in: one controlled by a single name without privacy or personality, or one in which we can still maintain our privacy – like Apple services – and can use more decentralized, democratic and, above all, healthy digital tools.
That is, if a government doesn't consider creating its own metaverse first.
