From Sweden to Germany to France, the citizen is evaluated according to his ability to conform to the Silicon Valley model of the future: a dreamscape populated by app designers visiting trendy coffee shops and artisanal-hot-dog vendors in urban centers while spending their days “revolutionizing” the “internet of things.”
But it seems that even that dream is now about to die. Layoffs in the tech industry have recently exploded; even Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg is warning of job losses. Meta’s so-called Metaverse—the bête noire of some on the right—is losing almost $1 billion a month, while being widely panned by gamers and content creators on YouTube. Far from a harbinger of a dystopian, Total Recall-style future, where physical space is replaced by virtual reality under totalizing control by the world’s progressive elites, the Metaverse is now looking like a perfectly ordinary dotcom dud. Even Silicon Valley nightmares, it seems, are slowly coming to an end, unceremoniously drowned in the cool water of a general economic crisis. Read more…
