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Posted on 12/13/2021 2:28:23 PM PST by nickcarraway
In October, Thea-Mai Baumann, an Australian artist and technologist, found herself sitting on prime internet real estate.
In 2012, she had started an Instagram account with the handle @metaverse, a name she used in her creative work. On the account, she documented her life in Brisbane, where she studied fine art, and her travels to Shanghai, where she built an augmented reality company called Metaverse Makeovers.
She had fewer than 1,000 followers when Facebook, the parent company of Instagram, announced on Oct. 28 that it was changing its name. Henceforth, Facebook would be known as Meta, a reflection of its focus on the metaverse, a virtual world it sees as the future of the internet.
In the days before, as word leaked out, Ms. Baumann began receiving messages from strangers offering to buy her Instagram handle. “You are now a millionaire,” one person wrote on her account. Another warned: “fb isn’t gonna buy it, they’re gonna take it.”
On Nov. 2, exactly that happened.
Early that morning, when she tried to log in to Instagram, she found that the account had been disabled. A message on the screen read: “Your account has been blocked for pretending to be someone else.”
Whom, she wondered, was she now supposedly impersonating after nine years? She tried to verify her identity with Instagram, but weeks passed with no response, she said. She talked to an intellectual property lawyer but could afford only a review of Instagram’s terms of service.
“This account is a decade of my life and work. I didn’t want my contribution to the metaverse to be wiped from the internet,” she said. “That happens to women in tech, to women of color in tech, all the time,” added Ms. Baumann, who has Vietnamese heritage.
She started Metaverse Makeovers in 2012. When a phone running her app was held above one of the intricate real-world fingernail designs created by her team, the image on the screen would show holograms “popping” from the nails. This was before Pokémon Go, before Snapchat and Instagram filters became part of everyday life.
She saw the potential to scale the technology to clothing, accessories and beyond, but her investment money ran out in 2017, and she returned to the art world.
In the meantime, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, was investing heavily in his own futuristic vision of the metaverse — what he called “an embodied internet where you’re in the experience, not just looking at it.”
“The metaverse,” Mr. Zuckerberg said in announcing his company’s new name, “will not be created by one company.” Instead, he said, it will welcome a range of creators and developers making “interoperable” offerings.
Cory Doctorow, a tech blogger and activist, said this professed openness came with big caveats.
“He built Facebook by creating a platform where other businesses meet their customers,” Mr. Doctorow said, “but where Facebook structures the overall market, reserving to itself the right to destroy those businesses through carelessness, malice or incompetence.”
That vast power, governed by opaque policies and algorithms, extends to the company’s control over individual user accounts.
“Facebook has essentially unfettered discretion to appropriate people’s Instagram user names,” said Rebecca Giblin, director of the Intellectual Property Research Institute of Australia at the University of Melbourne. “There can be good reasons for that — for example, if they’re offensive or impersonating someone in a way that causes confusion.”
“But the @metaverse example highlights the breadth of this power,” she said, adding that under Facebook’s policies, users “essentially have no rights.”
On Dec. 2, a month after Ms. Baumann first appealed to Instagram to restore her account, The New York Times contacted Meta to ask why it had been shut down. An Instagram spokesman said that the account had been “incorrectly removed for impersonation” and would be restored. “We’re sorry this error occurred,” he wrote.
Two days later, the account was back online.
The spokesman did not explain why it had been flagged for impersonation, or who it might have been impersonating. The company did not respond to further questions about whether the blocking had been linked to Facebook’s rebranding.
Now that her account has been resurrected, Ms. Baumann plans to fold the saga into an art project she started last year, P∞st_Lyfe, which is about death in the metaverse. She’s also considering what she can do to help ensure that the metaverse becomes the inclusive place she said she had tried to help build.
“Because I have been working in the metaverse space for so long, 10 years, I just feel worried,” she said. She fears, she added, that its culture could be “corrupted by the kind of Silicon Valley tech bros who I feel lack vision and integrity.”
She could still sell the handle. I would. Big money.
The Borg never sleeps.
She might get (another) offer that she can’t refuse.
This time, take the money and just keep on scrolling.
It’s not worth her time to keep mud wrestling with an invisible octopus.
Who actually sets out to become a blogger anyway?
That’s like something you settle for after you have
failed amazingly at everything else.
This story has more to do with the great reset and the notavax than most people realize.
Instagram? Is that still a thing?
Original: “My purpose in life is to be a social media influencer.”
Translation: “I suck at evertything else, so I’ll get a job flattering the gullible.”
You’d be surprised how much money some bloggers and youtube stars make.
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I'd be shocked if they made a dime.
Bunch of thieving homos, the lot.
Vanished, just like your bank account will when ‘they’ go to digital currency. (sign in a business today: due to a nationwide coin shortage we no longer take cash; card use only.)
A) Money makes her fears vanish
B) Fear makes he vanish
After being somewhat involved with the farce of how Zuckerburg got his Kauai property I go with B. The guy is a ruthless snake and will destroy her, her family, her business, her life with lawyers and private investigators.
That is not a particularly enlightened statement. You should look up Mr. Beast on Youtube. Guy makes millions of dollars by giving away millions of dollars. The American dream you and I grew up chasing has no longer exists for 10’s of millions of people and they are simply inventing/reinventing ways of making money. Just because their path is different than your path does not make them thieving homos.
Can you explain what you mean? How do they relate?
Just looks up mr beast. Have no clue what he’s doing and can’t stand watching or listening to him shout long enough to find out. Please elucidate—without the shouting.
Thx,
Veto!
(The girl)
Post 8 :::: pithy summary
Good job!
One of my son’s friends has a gaming blog where he records his video game play and gives out advice and clues to followers. At 25 years old he was making a half million a year with gaming companies paying to advertise on his blog.
The short version the proponents say that sebum blocks the follicle from being able to breathe or emerge. The carbonic acid supposedly removes the sebum plugs in a way that normal shampoo cant.
Im told that cosmetologists are presently being taught that the trick of these products is actually the stimulation the bald spot receives when “rubbing the product in for 15 minutes” or whatever that product directs.
I suppose a person could test it themselves. Its free to stimulate your own scalp by rubbing for 15 minutes a day. If it doesnt seem to work then try the plug removal shampoo. If that doesnt work then Id guess that neither are true.
You shouldnt believe anything I say, I shave my head bald these days. (Work related)
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