THE SWORD OF DAMOCLES
META formerly Facebook, famously spent a billion dollars to acquire rights to Palmer Luckey's VR headset. The rest is (corporate) history.
FB/META paid a billion dollars for a VR company Occulus, who had not even developed the VR technology, which goes way back to Ivan Sutherland who famously developed the first VR headset "the Sword of Damocles" for the US military. Why spend so much?
FB /METAs multibillion dollar plan is to create a world 'walled garden' for VR, offering a Great Zuckerborg Convergence of all VR resources and applications. Social applications, gaming applications, work and educational applications, 'dating' applications and VR teledildonics - all ported through the META interface.
We know how powerful 2D media is in Mockingbird hands. 3D media content, Virtual Reality (VR) is far more powerful mind control technology. For example because VR delivers a separate video stream to each eye it is trivial to introduce information below the threshold of user awareness using a cognitive exploit based on the visual perceptual phenomena known as "binocular rivalry."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4968740/
As long as there is a moving image presented to the dominant eye, static text information can be introduced through the non dominant eye which is retained and has been shown to influence future behavior.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3159595/
META/FB becoming the FB hub of virtual reality would guarantee a near immediate future enslavement of their users. They will control what We the People buy, who we have sex with, what remember, what toothpaste we use - everything they do now, but more effectively.
To use VR or MR safely we need 1) who and trust them and 2) that packets (vid streams) are securely routed over a network specifically build to insure the integrity of cognitive traffic.
VR and MR are able to mingle digital and real world objects so that is impossible to distinguish digital and material realities. Ultra light headsets with the form factor of sunglasses now exist which can project an image onto the foveal surface of the eye at wavelengths beyond our eye's capacity to resolve.
This is valuable technology. It can be extremely useful in education and in distributing work and resources - it is also extremely dangerous. Should it ever be controlled by a handful of companies owned by a pedovore death cult, we'd be finished.
We the People need a network that is secure for everybody because it's secure from everybody, including the engineers who build operate and maintain it.
A network is a utility. It must be owned by the users and the users must set policy. We have no free speech on the internet; we have a protected back eddy here thanks to patriots in US Military.
If we want rights in virtual space then hard code them into the protocols of a new kind of secure network so they don't get forgotten, or fake 911 emergencied away, like the US Constitution did. If We the People do not own and control the new network, then the people who do will own and control it will own and control us. That is axiomatic too
DIG MEME PRAY
In 1965 Ivan Sutherland, a computer scientist, authored an essay entitled The Ultimate Display (PDF) in which he laid out ideas far beyond what was possible with the technology of the time. One might expect The Ultimate Display to be a long document. It is not. It is barely two pages, and most of the first page is musings on burgeoning interactive computer input methods of the 60
https://hackaday.com/tag/sword-of-damocles/
http://worrydream.com/refs/Sutherland - The Ultimate Display.pdf