Tide turns against big tech but it's going to be a long, long haulGet Access Code.

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Dismantling or reassembling the tech giants' hold on the way we live now will be a truly massive undertaking.

The genius of Mark Zuckerberg's recent announcement of Meta, the alleged new Facebook, was that it managed to be both disappointing and sinister at the same time. Backed by a series of lame effects, the Zuck announced a virtual world that sounded as gimmicky and unsatisfying as Second Life had been, but authored by an organisation which had the power to enforce it everywhere.

The utterly uninspiring vision of Meta, like all such tech, draws on the utopian impulses which lurk in culture, in art, and in the very structure of human imagining and projection: that we can project worlds that are radically other to everyday life and yet are still recognisable and meaningful and able to be controlled and commodified.

The disappointment that has been widely expressed at this concept is due to what might be called the accumulated insufficiency of dreams.

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Guy Rundle

Correspondent-at-large

Guy Rundle is correspondent-at-large for Crikey. He's a former editor of Arena Magazine and contributes to a variety of publications in Australia and the United Kingdom.

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Tide turns against big tech but it's going to be a long, long haul - Crikey