Cristian Carlos.
Talcott Parsons is an American sociologist belonging to the current of structuralism. He says that "differentiation" is the most common process of change in societies like ours: late capitalism. He proposed that our society is bound together by systems that work with each other to make our existence possible according to our needs.
Recently, Facebook announced the change of the company's name to Meta, this responds, according to its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, in 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?; subsequently, Facebook acquired Instagram, the visual social network of instant photos and short videos.
WhatsApp began to operate as an alternative communication channel to SMS -short messages via cell phone- and competed to unseat Blackberry's messaging service. At first, WhatsApp was available for all devices that had an Internet connection, whether mobile data or connecting to a local network; later, WhatsApp restricted its access only to devices capable of sending SMS messages and opened to different operating systems, including Android and the defunct Symbian and webOS.
Suddenly, the Facebook application was installed by default on smartphones of any operating system - except iOS - with no way to uninstall it, a practice that is still common on Android.
In fact, Mark Zuckerberg launched a smartphone with Facebook as the core OS application from the hand of HTC in 2013 called HTC First; however, the taste was short-lived as they found that having Facebook as a communication base, collecting and sending full user data didn't seem like a good idea among consumers.
I still remember when Instagram opened its marketplace and was no longer an exclusive app in Apple's App Store and only accessible to iPhone users. Suddenly, a social network joined the list of social networks that displayed graphic content en masse like YouTube and the late Twitter's Vine. Facebook sacrificed the quality of content provided by iPhone cameras and soon opened its Android app, so that millions of people, from one day to the next, were able to join and share photos from less privileged cameras, which lowered the quality of the content.
Later, we experienced the rise of augmented reality and virtual reality when it was possible to transmit large amounts of data through the massification of fiber optics. Now, anyone with enough computing power could experience virtual worlds from the comfort of practically 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. Whoever is 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 - and unwittingly - Parsons also proposed the way to end Mark Zuckerberg's perverse plan which, perhaps, Apple, with its recent privacy measures, discovered before the owner of the social network even had the chance to consolidate itself as the Buy-N-Large hyper-company that Pixar painted in 2008 and that ended the existence of life on Earth. Zuckerberg, to our good fortune, was only able to consolidate the name.
Facebook is the virtual city where people, Sociology would say, solve their daily lives, communicate, become social beings and interact with people from different ultra-modern societies with essential post-truth needs. For many, Facebook has replaced diaries, books, photo albums, meetings, conversations via Messenger, wallets, shopping malls and personal appointments.
Instagram replaced traditional television, people preferred, then, to be informed 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.
No one remembers the landline phone anymore, let alone the yellow pages. If more direct communication is required, Facebook solved it the day it integrated voice calls with high-fidelity sound into WhatsApp. The social distancing caused by the COVID-19 pandemic was endured 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, economics and government were communicating with hashtags or hashtags to regain the human sense they had lost: #MeToo, #StaySafe, #Vacúnate.
People moved activism to the couch - what real activism feared so much - we moved away from in-person social activities for survival and moved our whole lives to the digital, to the binary, to the encrypted, to the cloud-stored. We moved to decode our words, our thoughts and our image to computational and graphical processing? and that's what Mark Zuckerberg wants to achieve with Meta. A metaverse where all our needs are covered by a single company that profits with the privacy of people because, as long as Facebook is used, the person not only renounces to his will -as it is done in a democracy-, but to his privacy and, with it, the last bit of personality and originality that subtracts from our individual.
If the unification of our daily life is reduced to a single name, Parsons would say that we are on the right path, after all, the metaverse is one more way in which our modern society evolves - the aforementioned differentiation - but in the differentiation, being the same weapon that Mark Zuckerberg's Meta has against us is the weapon with which the informatics utopia will be destroyed.
For Parsons, a system - in this case, Meta - is composed of subsystems - understand 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 be operating WhatsApp, Instagram and, to a lesser extent - but not less important - Oculus - all at the same time. Oculus? all at the same time, or the lack of one of these would ruin the metaverse, not counting, of course, the next company to be added to the group that will surely find another way to satisfy a digital need demanded by modern societies.
However, let's remember that this happened recently and that's what the metaverse concept - and Mark Zuckerberg, for that matter - is afraid of: Facebook collapsed and ceased to exist and, with it, triggered 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 propose that people stop using the services offered by Meta, but this scenario is less and less improbable since the only thing that is advancing by leaps and bounds are communication technologies. The most recent weapon that Zuckerberg has to seduce the Internet user and consolidate -without turning back- the metaverse is virtual reality, specifically Oculus.
Once the goal of all people having access to augmented reality glasses is achieved, there would be no need to return to the real world if all needs - except physiological ones - can be met for free and as instantly as receiving a text message.
Is there still time to undo Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse? Definitely. The individual can live healthily on the real and virtual plane. 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 with rigorous physical self-care; however, that doesn't exclude them from digital junk: people addicted to generating content - ironically, talking about self-care - making it available to, as Reddit users would say, "earn Internet points" and consuming it by the petabyte per month. Empty content, easy to consume, quick and ready to go just like junk food.
What Parsons failed to do was to explore the possibility that systems of the same hierarchy as the metaverse can coexist; society is undoubtedly heading towards it, but, fortunately, we can choose -with the little free will we have left- in which metaverse we want to live: one controlled by the same name without privacy or personality, or one in which we can still maintain our privacy -like Apple's services- and can make use of more decentralized, democratic and, above all, healthy digital tools.
That is, if a government doesn't consider creating its own metaverse first.
