My Identity for Sale
Not a premonition but a recurring echo: What could go wrong?
Funny enough, this particular collage was made four months before Facebook became Meta. Most of the cut-outs are taken from two WIRED magazines, edition of November 2014 and January 2020, with the following covers “WARNING: The Data Industry is Selling Your Life” and “Would you trust your man [Mark Zuckerberg] with your money?“.
My first though was to frame this collage as a premonition for all the problems that are yet to come with Facebook and its forced entry to the mystical metaverse. But that would be naive…
In my view, Meta was Zuckerberg’s final act of desperation for relevance in a new generation of social media, by forcing his name into the history books as the ‘creator’ of the Meta(verse) – not sure if future historians will be so easily misguided but nice try anyway. However, in a much more alarming tone, the vision Mark lays out for Meta and “how We’ll build it together” is also a shameless – in-your-face – materialisation of all the red flags Facebook has been waving throughout the last few years without showcasing any remorse or willingness to change.
So, no. This collage does not represent a premonition or a glimpse of the future but a recurring echo that has always been at the back of our mind: "What could go wrong?”
My question is, how many more times are we willing to ask that?
