Cory Doctorow

All the value is withdrawn except for the minimum needed.

But it's kind of a brittle equilibrium because the difference between I hate Facebook, but I can't seem to stop coming here, and I hate Facebook, and I'm not coming back.

Facebook panics.

Being technical people, they have a technical term for panicking.

They call it pivoting.

And so Mark Zuckerberg, one morning, he arises from his sarcophagus.

And he says, hearken to me, brothers and sisters, for I have had a vision.

I know I told you that your future would be arguing with your most racist uncle using this primitive text interface I invented so that I could non-consensually rate the of Harvard undergraduates.

However, the true future is that I will convert you and everyone you love into a legless, sexless, low polygon, heavily surveilled cartoon character so that I can imprison you in this virtual world I stole from a 25-year-old satirical dystopian cyberpunk novel that I call the metaverse.

And that is the final stage of the giant pile of shit.

Yeah, I mean, people found friends.

They made communities.

We got Me Too out of it.

We got Black Lives Matter out of it.

We got all kinds of social movements because people were able to find each other.

I mean, the problem with Facebook isn't that you had a place to talk to your friends.

The problem with Facebook is that once you were locked in because you loved your friends, Mark Zuckerberg could ruin your life and know you weren't going to leave.

Right.

Is there a platform that- Sure.

Yeah, so I don't think it's inevitable.