Where will Facebook be in the future?
03 Oct 2011With all the recent news about Facebook and the many privacy issues, a question hangs over my head: Where will Facebook be in the future?
They’re a giant corporation, they have hundreds of millions of users and basically have a monopoly on their market.
Every time I think about Facebook and/or Mark Zuckerberg, I’m reminded of the book, Daemon. In this series, a very wealthy man called Matthew Sobol made his money in the computer game industry, and when he dies, he releases a computer daemon which wrecks havoc on the known world. How does this relate to Facebook? Well, Mark Zuckerberg is wealthy, he’s in IT industry, but the difference is, Zuckerberg wouldn’t have to release a virus/bot upon the world to take it over.
Following other key points from this novel, all the users of the Daemon wear AR devices. They’re able to see other peoples personal information, such as if they’re in debt, or where they live. Wait. Facebook already knows these things (okay, maybe not the financial data, but didn’t some wealthy bankers recently invest?).
If Zuckerberg wanted to, he could get his R&D team to come up with some awesome sunglasses that dub as ‘hip’ AR devices. This in turn, suddenly creates something much bigger and much more evil than Facebook currently is — it bypasses everything and everyone. Suddenly, everywhere you walk, every-one you talk to, Facebook is watching. The device is powered by WiFi, and ad-hoc. It’s never down. Everyone has one, they end up being the network.
Normally, when you walk outside, you see people with their heads down, minding their own business, walking from point A to B. This is normal behaviour, and it’s been that way for a decent amount of time. However, we all know that Zuckerberg absolutely hates privacy, and he’ll be wanting this to change. With Facebook glasses, you’ll be having a glance across the street, you’ll see the name of the middle-aged man, you’ll see how lonely he is and where he’s been. All in a glance.
You’ll turn back to your coffee, and your glasses won’t inform you that the waitress spat in it, because Facebook doesn’t care about that.
Once everybody has these Facebook glasses, all they need to do is push their virtual currency towards the users. Really push it. Suddenly, everywhere you’re looking, instead of showing your local currency, it’s been replaced to show Facebook credits. Overnight, Governments are destroyed. This new Facebook network is indestructible, it cannot be shut down. The Governments try shutting down the Internet as a desperate last measure, they try killing all wireless communications — only to discover, so many people are on the network, that the ad-hoc network created by these glasses is in the billions, that it really is, a network all by itself.
The best thing about all this? The technology exists today. To be extra awesome, Facebook could make it so when you’re wearing their glasses, certain things are obstructed from your view or changed in real-time. They’re being paid by McDonalds for some advertising at location X,Y,Z? Replace that Burger-King advertisement with a McDonalds one! Suddenly, Facebook gets hundreds of billions of dollars from other big corporations. They could even have advertisements appear on blank surfaces.
Remember the Cybermen in the Doctor Who universe? It all started from a simple ear phone…
Tags: conspiracy-theory, cybermen, evil, facebook, taking over the world, zuckerberg
