Dark Forest

Imagine that you live in a house next to a dark, scary forest. Each day and each night you hear howling, growling and outcries of sheer terror and panic coming from the forest. But... The forest is the only place for you to get food and water. You HAVE to visit that place of unknown threats regularly, or you'll die.

This approximates many people's relationship to the online world. Much of our life's spent online, be it through work, social media or video-calls. However, the huge amount of time spent online leaves many of us worried about the predators out there; hackers, viruses and predatory tech companies that are out for our data. And we're always alone in this dark forest of the world wide web, because the same search algorithms and online media we need to use, accelerate the process of atomization that's already inherent in the global paradigm of capitalism with its drive towards profit-seeking and hyper-individualism.

I've written many times about this trend towards atomization and nihilism. How the integration of online media into our daily lifes has taken us to a place where it's already difficult to discern what's real and what's not. The internet has woken us up to the fact that mainstream media lies to us in order to make us subscribe to the wishes and needs of the world's mightiest profit-seeking entities, but at the same time those same entities have fashioned an online world in which they reap the same results through click-bait driven polarization and manipulation. We are products to be sold, analyzed and influenced.

When we were scared of the government taking away our rights to free speech and assembly, now we're in the clutches of the providers of online platforms who threaten to do the very same. Either way, we're fucked. And our children are now growing up in this world of fake news, fake opinions, alternative facts and seductive predators; we've made the house next to the dark forest their permanent home. Of all the threats to the continuation of the human experiment, this one may trump all the others, but like all the others it has the same cause: the shameless and never-ending quest for profits and power by the very few.

Some among the very few stand out though, and Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook stands on top of this vile pile. His plans to launch the Metaverse are nothing less than diabolical. NordVPN, a Virtual Private Network service, has commissioned a poll to see answer the question: HOW MUCH TIME DO BRITONS SPEND ONLINE?:

Britons will spend the equivalent of 22 years, one month and four days of their life online. A poll of 2,000 adults found the typical week will see 59 hours – the equivalent of more than two full days - spent using the internet.

This amounts to 128 days a year, or 22 years over an adult lifetime.
_{source: The Independent}

That's one third of the time, with another third reserved for sleep; we're already spending two thirds of our time in virtual, not real worlds. But Zuckerberg is not satisfied yet; he wants us to spend what little time we have left in the real world, with real friends and real products, in the fake world as well. In the Metaverse people can meet, buy virtual land , virtual clothes and virtual houses, people can get married through their avatars and so on. This Metaverse has been in the making for many years now, and I can't help but think that the timing of its introduction isn't coincidental; it coincides with the pandemic which has us all stuck at home and with the plans of a "Great Reset" by the World Economic Forum in which they announce a future where "You'll own nothing, and you'll be happy." We're heading into the dark forest... Please watch the below linked video for a truly dystopian view to the not so distant future.

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