This could change everything

Let me tell you about Mark Zuckerberg’s favourite book … and how it could change your world.

It’s a science fiction novel, written in the nineties, called Snow Crash.

And it’s actually become an underground cult hit in Silicon Valley, for reasons you’ll soon understand.

Here’s the premise of the book:

The global economy is in ruins, and governments have lost their power to a handful of giant corporations (sound familiar?). To escape their depressing reality people don augmented reality goggles and slip into an alternate internet-enabled universe, which they call … the Metaverse.

Zuck loves the idea of the Metaverse so much that he’s making it a reality: he’s not only rebranded Facebook as Meta, but he announced he’s spending ten billion bucks this year alone building the Metaverse.

Sadly investors didn’t like the idea of Snow Crash … and instead turned it into a share crash:

Last Thursday Meta’s shares suffered the largest one-day crash in US corporate history. The internet giant’s shares plunged 26%, wiping more than $US240 billion off its market value.

And the great cyborg-CEO personally took a $29 billion haircut.

Interestingly, Bloomberg reported that Zuck held an ‘all hands’ staff meeting the following day where sources said he appeared red eyed, wore glasses, and warned his team that he may tear up because he had “scratched his eye”.

Uh-huh.

(Mate, it’s okay to cry, you just rubbed out two Gina Rineharts in one day!)

Here’s my take:

Zuckerberg – the boy wonder billionaire – is losing for the very first time in his career.

See, today, the most successful site on the web isn’t Facebook, or Google or Instagram, it’s Tik Tok.

The Chinese app is currently adding eight users each and every second, and the overwhelming majority are kids. (Meanwhile your Aunty Karen is ranting about face masks on Facebook.)

So, rather than compete head on with Tik Tok, Zuck seems to be doubling down on what made him a billionaire:

Capturing, and then exploiting, our attention.

“From the very beginning our main objective was how do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?” admitted Sean Parker, Facebook’s founding president.

And it worked shockingly well.

The average Aussie now spends 5.5 hours per day on their phone, which equates to 16.6 years – or around 33% of their waking life staring at a screen – according to a study by Reviews.org.

Yet it’s not enough. It’s never enough.

The next play is to suck you into your phone and engulf you in a virtual reality – the Metaverse – that you rarely come out of. And Mark Zuckerberg’s megalomaniac ideas (and those of his other tech-tobacco farmers) will control and monetise everything.

Okay, so I admit that this is all sounding a little like a weird sci-fi novel, so I caught up with a very successful tech entrepreneur I know, who cashed out of his last tech business for a cool $200 million, to discuss the Metaverse.

He put it this way:

“If you have a teenage kid, you have likely already experienced a version of the Metaverse: online gaming. Kids go into that world and don’t come out for hours … even days”, he said.

“Yet, thankfully, no one really trusts Meta …”, he said reassuringly.

But then he added:

“... however, if Apple releases its rumoured virtual reality glasses … humanity is screwed.”

Tik. Tok.

Tread Your Own Path!