Part of the voting line in my part of Astoria, NYC.

So now that Facebook is continuing to tighten their grip on Oculus VR headsets, here are all the circumstances where you might lose access to your Oculus account (and all your purchases).

1. You refuse to create a Facebook account.
2. If you have multiple VR headsets attached to one account.
3. If you decide to delete your Facebook account at any point.
4. If your Facebook account is suspended for any reason, including no reason at all.
   
   

From a Kotaku article published today:

Now combine this knowledge with the words spoken by Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth, Vice President of Augmented and Virtual Reality at Facebook last week, when he said “I think people should continue to make sure their Facebook accounts are in good standing before they buy the headset. They can work through those problems before they do it.”

Are people really still interested in buying these things at this point?

Let’s talk about how Facebook and their quest for “neutrality.” Usually summed up by Mark Zuckerberg’s favorite ridiculous sentence: Facebook will not be arbiters of truth.

Here’s a series of events regarding “left-wing”/“right-wing” politics/news stories as it pertains to Facebook.

1. May 2017 - Facebook is tweaking the News Feed to cut down on terrible ads and spammy posts: Facebook makes changes to the news feed to cut back on bullshit. As you might expect if you’ve kept your eye on the types of stories coming from right-leaning publications, this reduced traffic from publications on the “right” more than the “left”.
2. July 2018 - New study finds Facebook algorithm hurt Republican more than Democrat lawmakers: It’s confirmed that cutting back on spam and other bullshit hurts Republicans more than Democrats.
3. October 2020 - Facebook reportedly choked traffic for left-leaning news sites including Mother Jones: In response to Republican complaints, Facebook (with the approval of Zuckerberg himself) reduced the visibility of left-leaning publications like Mother Jones.

So not being the “arbiters of truth” means you strive for neutrality in all cases even when you aren’t dealing with neutral sides.

Which then of course, means you’re susceptible to groups who aren’t acting in good faith to paint whatever picture they want and manipulate you. So now we have Republicans manipulating Facebook and Facebook manipulating the world.

But if you have any questions about what “side” Mark Zuckerberg is on, things like this (November 2019) might clear it up:

On Thursday, NBC News revealed that the CEO of Facebook had a secret dinner at the White House in October with President Donald Trump. Zuckerberg was accompanied by Facebook board member and long-time mentor Peter Thiel. Thiel is notorious among Silicon Valley billionaires for explicitly endorsing Trump in 2016 and speaking at the Republican National Convention that year. Thiel, a libertarian who runs a company that enhances government surveillance efforts, has also questioned the value of women voting.

That October dinner was the second in two months at which Zuckerberg dined with Trump. It followed a series of dinners at Zuckerberg’s home in California with conservative pundits and activists like white supremacist Tucker Carlson of Fox News.

Facebook is a trash company run by a spineless robot of a CEO.

Coinbase, the cryptocurrency exchange, has been in the news lately for taking the stance that politics is a distraction and telling their employees to stop talking about it.

This comes from the direction of the CEO, Brian Armstrong, who is the exact type of guy who is relatively unaffected by the current political issues that people feel the need to talk/do something about.

When I first heard about this, my first reaction was “well of course the Bay Area crypto company would have a ridiculous position like this.” I mean, were we expecting anything better? But this guy just keeps doubling down on this even after the expected backlash.

Let’s talk about the problems with his terrible position:

1. Many people who aren’t in his position cannot afford to ignore politics like he can.
2. Coinbase is a cryptocurrency exchange. Cryptocurrency is inherently political. The entire point was a statement against government banking systems right?
3. Telling the people who work for you to shut up and do the work, especially during times like this, is tone deaf, short sided, and basically just outright stupid.

Vice published an article today about leaked audio recordings showing outright censorship inside the company at this point:

“There’s fear from employees about monitoring in all channels, including private ones,” the former Coinbase employee told Motherboard. “The biggest fear is that employees will be confronted on what they say or do on their work and personal devices—work systems are often on personal devices. This already happened when writers of old Slack posts were confronted by leadership and asked to delete posts.”

Terrible.

I have a Coinbase account for some random small amounts of crypto I’ve collected over the years. I never thought Coinbase was a great company (again, it’s a Bay Area cryptocurrency company) but I’m definitely moving my holdings somewhere else. At this point probably just to my own wallet, not an actual exchange.

Honestly at this point I don’t even try to understand Google’s messaging app strategy anymore.

From the article:

If you’re having trouble keeping track (understandable considering Google notoriously confusing messaging strategy) Chat is the company’s enterprise chat app originally introduced as part of Google’s business offerings. It has features similar to the original Hangouts experience, but has extra upgrades like reactions and reply suggestions. But starting next year, instead of only being available businesses that use Google Workspace (formerly known as G Suite, formerly known as Google Apps) the upgraded “Chat” app will be available to everyone who uses Gmail.