If you are familiar with Ray Bradberry’s short stories, you probably recognize this title. If not, you may recognize the story plot from the 1969 movie “The Illustrated Man.” The movie is a collection of short stories, and one of them involves a family – parents and their two children. The story is set in a future in which the family lives in a home whose virtual reality nursery can produce any setting the children want. They choose a virtual African Veldt with tall grass and lions – lions dining on a prey carcass.
Of course, I was taken back to this story by Facebook’s recent rebranding to the name Meta (stock symbol MVRS for Metaverse). Now, the cool thing about naming something “Metaverse,” is that nobody actually knows what a metaverse is. But, it sounds cool, and it doesn’t sound like “Facebook.”
Why does that matter? It matters because FB stock has taken a hit in the last month – falling from $385/share to something around $315. With a change of brand name, it seems to have recovered about $15 or so in the last two days. Trying to make sense of the stock market is a bit like reading tea leaves or perhaps chicken entrails. I’m in the entrails camp, in case you wondered. The tea leaf readers think that the market is reacting to the bad press FB has gotten after leaked corporate documents have shown what we already knew – FB is in business to make money. Others think that the fall in FB’s stock price is attributable to Apple’s tweaks to iOS to keep FB from surreptitiously collecting data on you and me in order to “monetize” us.
I received an email today from Common Cause. It asked me to sign a petition (I get a dozen every day, and you probably do too). The petition asked Congress to regulate FB and other social media to keep misinformation and other toxic crap off of those platforms – not to mention sex trafficking, child porn, and other unsavory stuff. The petition to Congress had a place for a petitioner’s comment. I wrote, “FB needs to be banned from the Internet for a week or perhaps for a month for failing to comply with America’s community standards.”
That reminds me; I didn’t tell you how The Veldt ends. The parents decide to turn the virtual reality system off. The children lock their parents in the nursery, and they turn on The Veldt. The Lions do the rest.