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Penny Arcade - Comic - Incognito Mode
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - Incognito Mode
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
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Oh no, I'm Mr. Zuckerberg!
Porn is the backbone of the Internet. There's no reason to think it won't be the backbone of the Metaverse.
On an unrelated note, did you know that meat tastes better when you hunt it yourself?
There are a whole lot of kids in VR. Like, under teenage kids. If you want to confirm this, just go to an online game like Echo VR with your voice chat on. It's exactly what you'd expect. Those kids aren't young enough to either trust or not trust Facebook. It's just a part of the background of life to them. Yes, they'll eventually hate it. But probably not for a bit.
Plus the Quest has really mainstreamed VR to an extent not seen before. There are plenty of people who are in the same group as the ones that will simply click "Log in with facebook" on any given website, rather than creating an account for it that is unconnected (well, as much as it can be with advertising).
I think the main reason to think it won't is because already have all the porn we need. Internet porn filled a pretty big market: people who couldn't anonymously get their hands on free porn. That's not going away. VR porn will be "better" in many ways, but it's not "better" on anywhere near the same level as "you didn't have porn before and now you do."
Plus, you just have to look at game consoles as an example of a technology where porn had (practically) nothing to do with its success.
I think they are each in a different house? Like this is highlighting how differently each of them responds to Zuck at their door. I might be misunderstanding, though.
All of Facebook the company's faults aside, it kinds of make sense to me. It has been quite a few years since Facebook was just Facebook and not Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp/whatever else.
I think the biggest question this raises for me is what new acronym the computer science world will use instead of FAANG? (That's Facebook-Amazon-Apple-Netflix-Google for anyone who might not know. The big companies at which many CS folks apparently wish to be employed.) Maybe we should make it MANGA. That way we could confuse people by saying we got a job at a MANGA company.
-Tycho Brahe
For what value of "we"? There are a great many people in this country and others who in no way follow shit like Company A changing it's name to Company B to try to flee bad connotations. Otherwise, they wouldn't do it. Just ask Xfinity.
(Now, whether it works is a whole different question. But it really is a thing companies think works.)
A conversation between two strangers 40 years ago.
"I think the main reason to think it won't is because we already have all the porn we need. Between these new VHS movies and a plethora of magazines fill a pretty big market...that's not going away. Internet porn will be "better" in many ways, but...
I'm a Business Graduate, believe me, this is the first and least effort level of work they're going to put in before trying anything else. And I assume you haven't heard about "Jedi Blue"
But your conversation is different. Your conversation is about amount. Mine is about both amount and access. Now people (at least, people with the income to be buying VR headsets) already have unlimited access to a practically unlimited amount of porn. Those things simply weren't true of the situation you're talking about.
VR isn't mostly competing with internet. VR is mostly competing with gaming. And to a lesser degree all the other stuff that you can do in VR that you probably wouldn't do on another device.
And now you can practically run an entire business from a device you can hold in the palm of your hand, connecting to everything wireless, with almost all of your data "in the cloud".
It's entirely plausible that my grandkids are going to "go to the office" by putting on a set of VR "somethings". At this point, I wouldn't even speculate on it being what we think of today as a "headset".
"This will be the end of keyboards and screen time". Legit can't tell if they are brain-dead or trolling. If it's emitting/projecting photons into your eyes it's a fucking screen, even if you wear it on your stupid fucking face. Gah! :rotate: :bigfrown:
It wasn't that long ago that all you needed to "do business and check Twitter" was a PO box, a fax machine, and a USA Today subscription.
If you look at a lot of the pop media in the late 80's and early 90's, we were deeply concerned that the pace of our technological advancement would grossly outstrip the pace of our social development. Being a product of those decades, I can't help but see the parallels.
Maybe it'll be like those people who were in charge of guiding ships in and out of Zion in the Matrix trilogy. Plot twist: Humanity actually chose to plug themselves in and the machines just took advantage of the situation.
-Tycho Brahe
Just to be clear, I was talking about what it's competing with currently. I feel like it's inevitable that we'll eventually dedicate a large chunk of our life to an artificial reality (hey, there's plenty of people already living in an artificial reality, amirite??) I'm not even that bothered if we eventually wind up as brains in a jar, experiencing everything in VR with remotes.
I know that's a horror dystopia to many people, but I'm ready to shed this wasted husk.
To quote Futurama:
That would actually be an incredible twist.
The "war" was really an all-out war between human using machine AI on both sides. The destruction got out of control, nearly destroying the entire planet. The AIs stepped in like a parent between squabbling kids, and effectively sent humanity "to their room", while they figured out how to clean up the mess.
Never assume a narrator is reliable.
People thought cars were evil at first, some people stuck to horses, and there are sad tails that came from having them. Eventually we did find out that the co2 part of it was bad, but on a whole, its just a part of our lives and we work to live around it.
People thought telephones were evil, that people were lazy for not seeing each other, that people would feel brazen and insult each other over them. So, yeah, people are a little more lazy, but business runs faster (from an economic standpoint) but we also get to enjoy time with our friends and loved ones.
If you kill facebook, whats left. Another forum that'll provide the same access to each other. Humanity will interact again. And it's again going to be like getting a rash from sitting down too long. Sometimes you get a callous, like when you start wearing sandals/crocs instead of shoes. Sometimes you use an ointment. Sometimes you adapt. The negative outcome of people feeling bad from interacting with each other is going to happen if they intermingle more. And the reports showed that they knew of the negative impacts of people interacting on their platform, not that it was different from the same exposure of high-school or home school.
That's not the premise of the comic at all. The premise of the cartoon is not that contact is bad, but that this particular company is doing all it's can to act in the most manipulative way possible. It's like trying to argue that white supremacist website Stormfront isn't bad and shouldn't be killed because it's increasing contact time of humans. Okay, yeah, it does, but it's not the only way to do that.
Nah, you'd be dating yourself if you mentioned friendster. Myspace only showed up less than a year before (the)facebook. Granted, facebook didn't start out as public to all.
But I don't think that's really relevant. Companies can act like abusive monopolies that were founded 10 years prior or 100 years prior. Also, Standard Oil wasn't the first of its kind, either. Plenty of people were in the oil business. They just managed to claw their way to the top and crush (or buy) everyone else. You'll find the same thing is true of several historical monopolies.
I think the harder question is how does one "break up" a company whose beating heart is "having everyone on the same platform." Some people say to split it up into different companies with one being the social network, one being the ad company, etc. But that's just "split it up into one company that has no way of making money and a bunch of other companies that are the profit centers."
Possibly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_social_network
But then, you have the problem of https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/12/20691957/mastodon-decentralized-social-network-gab-migration-fediverse-app-blocking
My argument involves the increase of human contact, the comic didn't mention it, the comic mentioned how evil facebook is, I was countering with a different point. Now, again, I respectfully disagree with your new point too. People go to facebook to see what their friends and family are doing or saying, to blow off some steam, etc. If someone goes to Stormfront, they go with the purpose of being a racist person in a group of racist people. And facebook isn't doing what it can to act manipulatively. They have public api's for companies that can/will use the data that shows many of these things that people find offensive, the data's just sitting there out in the open ready to be looked at. That doesn't mean the data's bad, it just mean's that you haven't looked at all its potential uses and stopped it from being used that way. There are likely many more potential ways that data can be abused.
We absolutely should stop that abuse of that data in how its used to target certain audiences, sure. Facebook is a media company. There are tons of other media companies out there that don't leave a paper trail and keep hidden all the damage they do. Fox twists, lies, and fights for the right wing. CNN (now) twists, fights, and lies for the left wing. They don't leave a paper trail and they're allowed to lie and create the atmosphere that things like the jan 6th riot were able to be created in, because of, the combative atmosphere they're enjoying creating. If there's conflict, it creates views for them, its just not this new paper trail way, and it is Not creating a healthy environment. And now every one of these media companies are throwing facebook under the bus, when they're all guilty of it.
The real solution is demanding accountability to all media companies, rather than feeding on the chum in the water that all the others are throwing to kill facebook. Lying in mass media is dangerous. Hurting the body image of children is dangerous (count the number of normal body imaged women in commercials/shows tonight on tv). Facebook just has paper trail and threatens to eat their lunch.
By the way this is a continuation of my "least amount of effort" thing. Want to rebrand yourself as a trailblazing tech CEO? Literally steal Steve Jobs' look despite the fact that for the last decade you've been known a the "CEO who dresses like a lazy teenager who can't be bothered to wash his shirt"
What action? Thats the problem. Everyone whose a media company who says facebook is evil is a direct competitor. But what action did facebook take?
Just so I'm certain of the ground rules, are you saying that any response we give to you must in no way include any reporting by any media organization? If it does, you will deem it invalid?
I'd just like to know how crazy the setup here is.
Knowing who is whose enemy when you take their word for it, is important. Nothing here described as evidence against facebook is different from when you increase the population of a people. Comparing a village to a city, there's more murder, more suicide, more corruption, because there's more people. This forum itself is an increase in contact between humans, and another forum will take its place when its gone some day. There are bigger monsters out there rather than the internet representation of a city.
Also, straw manning to undermine an argument is mean, as I never inferred that all evidence comes from a media company.
No one said all evidence comes from a media company. In fact, none of the evidence comes from a media company. However, the function of a media company (more specifically, it's news organization) is to report on that evidence. This is much easier for normal people who have other things to do in their day to actually find the appropriate section of interest.
I would call the tens of thousands of documents in the Facebook Papers leak (which is what this comic is referencing) and the extensive testimony of Francis Haugen backed up by those documents evidence. But to actually point you to specific sections on why facebook in particular has done the things that are out of bounds, I will be referring to news media. So would you accept that, or would you say "nope, you can't trust the media because they are enemies of facebook"?