Careless Society (2026)

Book Review from the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Careless People: Power, Greed, Madness. A story of where I used to work. By Sarah Wynn-Williams (2025, 4th Estate)

Remember the Metaverse? Funny that you don’t hear much about it these days. This was going to be the Next Big Thing, the fully immersive virtual reality (VR) heaven where we all spent every waking moment, in our aspirational avatar forms, shopping, meeting people, swanning around in flying cars, and never going outside to see the real sky, or indeed talk to a real person. Unappealing as all this might sound to jaded old cynics and doubters, Mark Zuckerberg was so excited by his own visionary virtual universe that he changed his company name from Facebook to Meta, hired thousands of engineers and invested $36bn in development. As might be expected, tech firms chucked in plenty of money too, just in case it ever took off, and even manufacturers and high-street businesses like HSBC, Skechers, Bosch, Next and Heineken. Seoul City Council even went so far as to build a VR community space where people could ‘take advantage of public services 24/7 all year round and even visit the virtual mayor’s office and library’, as well as availing themselves of ‘various administrative services such as economy, education, and tax affairs’.

It’s hard to imagine a duller advertisement for the Metaverse than, ‘Hey, you can use it to pay your taxes!’ For once, the doubters were on the money. It turned out people didn’t want to spend their lives indoors wearing silly Oculus headsets. Sales flopped, followed by investments, until Zuckerberg quietly dropped the whole project.

One indication of how preposterous the whole thing was, and also why apparently nobody told Zuck this at the time, is the fact that in her tell-all exposé of her five years as a top Facebook executive, Sarah Wynn-Williams doesn’t bother to mention the Metaverse once. But she does have plenty to say about Facebook’s dirty off-book activities. One of these, which Facebook publicly denied to the consternation of their own marketing teams who were using it as a selling point, was to target vulnerable teenagers who had just deleted a selfie by thrusting beauty ads at them, on the assumption that they must hate the way they look. Though often funny, the darkest part of the book is where Zuck finally realises how the Trump campaign has used Facebook’s comprehensive data tools in an ingenious and targeted misinformation offensive in order to win the 2016 election. What’s dark about this is that Zuck and the other FB execs are not horrified, they are impressed. Zuck allegedly even begins to form his own plans to use the same techniques to run for president himself. After all, he’s so rich he wouldn’t even need to fund-raise.

The take-home gist is that, whereas FB starts off as a maladroit mix of idealists and nerdy technicians with no concept of the political reverberations they are about to unleash on the world, the more wealth and power they acquire, the less they give a damn about anyone or anything, a point rammed home by their casual indifference to the FB-driven massacres in Myanmar. Nobody comes out of this book looking good, including in some ways the author. The corruption, hypocrisy, sexual harassment and megalomania are laid bare for all to see. Some of these people would probably have been jailed, except that capitalism doesn’t jail people this stupendously rich. Zuckerberg, increasingly isolated in a protective shell of fawning sycophants, comes across as having had any trace of humanity surgically removed. He is never told that any of his ideas (like the Metaverse?) are just dumb and won’t work, because FB ‘ices out’ and then fires anyone who dares. He’s actually tried to have this book banned in the USA, a truly stupid move because of the ‘Streisand effect’, where attempts to suppress tend to backfire in spectacular fashion. To no one’s surprise, the free-speech champion’s attempt at censorship has sent the book to the top of the bestseller list.

But in truth, apart from showing how dysfunctional the business is, there are no real revelations that weren’t already out there. Yes, Zuck lied to Congress. Yes, FB are manipulative bastards out to make money out of your data. No, they have no scruples whatsoever. We knew or could guess all that. It’s a fun read, but socialists won’t be surprised by any of it. It’s just the reality of capitalist business with the veneer removed.

Paddy Shannon

Pathfinders: Game On (2006)

The Pathfinders Column from the June 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Game On

A man from Sydney, Australia, buys an island populated by wild animals for $26,500, and charges tax for hunting rights, as well as renting beach front property. This is perfectly normal behaviour in capitalism. The money he earns from it is real enough. The island, however, does not exist. It is a virtual island, with virtual animals. (New Scientist, May 20)

Elsewhere, in Shanghai, a man lends his prized sword to a friend, who then secretly sells it for 7200 yuan (£500), back-pocketing the proceeds. Furious, the man complains to the police, who do nothing. Enraged, he breaks into his friend’s house, and stabs him to death. The knife he uses is real enough, and the man gets life imprisonment for murder. No action is ever taken over the original theft, because the sword does not exist according to any known law. Real blood spilled by a virtual sword.

From Carolina, one man has made a fortune selling rare virtual furniture and other items, which, he discovered through a bug in the program, he could duplicate, and sell over and over again. Nobody knows if he has broken a law. The game company closed the bug hurriedly, but not before the man had cleared $100,000.

Online gaming is moving beyond the purview of geeky kids. Virtual items and goods, though theoretically worthless, acquire value in the real world as players seek to shortcut the time-consuming process of acquiring them in the game, and serious money is being made in the ‘grey market’ of virtual trading. Now game currencies have been indexed to real currencies, and one game developer, MindArk, has launched an ATM cashcard that players can use to withdraw real cash, calculated according to MindArk’s exchange rate of their ‘game’ wealth. The global trade in virtual goods is currently estimated at $880 million and rising, with 30 million, mostly western and mostly affluent gamers, playing games for up to 18 hours a day. In one popular online game, Second Life, a third of the players spend more time in the game than in the real world.

It’s not hard for socialists to see why people would want to escape the rigid fetters of real-time capitalism. People have been escaping the real conditions of life ever since the Greeks invented the outdoor theatre. What is slightly depressing but perhaps not very surprising is that people work so hard at their escapist fantasies only to create societies of lawlessness, savagery and insane self-destructive cruelty that make capitalism look like a pussycat by comparison. In one game, players are dedicated to the task of setting off virtual semtex bombs and blowing themselves and their online world up. In others, there are virtual assassinations, or random slayings, where players find their character has been murdered for no particular reason, apart from somebody’s idle amusement. A player can take a long time, sometimes years, to build a character up, provide it with its special faculties and powers, as well as its virtual property. To be robbed and murdered after all this work is no small thing and can be deeply upsetting to the player. But this is the virtual wild west, and there is a nihilistic appeal. Law doesn’t appear to work in people’s interest in the real world (true, in many ways), so the idea is to get rid of all law and have an orgy of violence and blood in the games.

The problem is, as with the Shanghai murder, the violence is starting to spill over into the real world, prompting some observers to suggest that law and punishment should be introduced into the games. The game developers are opposed. What is the point of playing a game that lets you do nothing? That’s just like real life, the very thing people want to run away from.

The other problem, from a socialist view, is the constant reinforcement these bloodthirsty games give to the perceived need for law and policing. For these are, in a way, highly moral games, in that they strongly emphasize what dread chaos results from ‘amoral’ or lawless behaviour. Socialism proposes to abolish all coercive law which serves class interests (which is to say, all property law, at the very least). What laws or rules socialism would retain is a moot but interesting question. What is evident however is that no rational debate on the socialist need for laws, or rules, or their nature or means of enforcement, is possible among workers while they are bamboozled into believing that a society without repressive legal structures is always going to look like a scene from Conan the Barbarian. Play one of these online games for a week and you will either become a nightmare axe-murderer from the Dark Ages or you will be screaming for the return of capital punishment and school floggings.

Why normal bank clerks and home heating engineers should want to lead double-lives as marauding rapists and genocidal maniacs is a topic too large to enter into here. But it would be interesting to speculate what a socialist society would make of it. Would they look back at capitalism and trace a pattern from the Boy’s Own stories of Empire days with their strongly moral content, through the poignant emptiness of punk culture and on into the cybernight of shoot-em-ups and global conquest games and say: there, that was a society in decline? By giving reality to the horrors of the repressed mind is capitalism liberating or enslaving us even more deeply? Will there come a point, perhaps with the total abolition of hard cash, when capitalism will itself become a virtual game, with a human population of players who try to amass arbitrary ‘units’ of currency in order to buy arbitrary artifacts? The difference between real life and a game is that you always have to return to real life eventually, but it is just possible that this difference may one day disappear, and our grip on reality may disappear with it.

Game Off

On a more positive note, a friend who is a computer repairman reports a recent case where a young man came in to have his computer repaired. The graphics card, an expensive one, had blown, and the cost would be over £300. The man appeared, and was given the bad news. He went away to think about it. A week later he returned.

“£300 is a lot of money when you don’t have a job. I can’t get a job because I’m too busy playing online for 16 hours every day. I haven’t been to a pub in two years, all my friends have disowned me, and I never see anybody. On top of that, I’m bored with the games because I am Grandmaster in all of them and can’t be beaten. In the past week I’ve gone to the pub, gone to a party, found all my friends and even met some new ones. In fact, I’ve had the time of my life. Tell you what. You can keep the bloody thing.”

And with that, he walked out into the real world.

Paddy Shannon

Virtual reality (1993)

From the April 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Virtual reality won’t merely replace television. It will eat it alive”. That is the aggressive prediction of Arthur C. Clarke, the science fiction writer. But what is virtual reality (VR) and why should we be concerned about it?

VR is in its infancy so there isn't any general agreement about what it consists of or how fast and in what ways it will grow. Historians of the technology trace its origins back a century or so, to the first explorations of the principle of stereoscopy, or three-dimensional vision. Some decades ago cinema audiences were introduced to 3-D viewing of films, but the novelty didn’t catch on and wasn't developed. In the last decade or so VR has come on the scene in the USA. It has done so in the form of a computer-generated apparent, or virtual, world.

Like many inventions developed in capitalist society, VR benefitted from its military applications. This is how a writer in Business Week (5 October 1992) described a simulation at the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency:

 Instantly, you're transported inside a tank rolling across the Iraqi desert. You are performing the same maneuvers as a unit ... in the Persian Gulf war. The graphics on the screens are only video-game quality. Yet the illusion works. You duck as shells scream toward you and explode in ear-splitting fury.

That simulation was achieved by three five-foot screens. A more advanced form of VR is projections on stereoscopic lenses moulded inside helmets that participants wear. Multiple sensory information is conveyed. In some systems, a viewer wearing a sensor-laden glove manipulates objects in the computer. In others, images on the screen or a viewer’s perspective are manipulated with a mouse or joystick. Howard Rheingold, in his book Virtual Reality sums it up:

  A virtual world is a computer that you operate with natural gestures, not by composing computer programmes, but by walking around, looking around, and using your hands to manipulate objects.

VR is a technology, that is, an applied science or way of achieving certain physical ends. Socialists are interested in technology from three different perspectives: as part of a critique of capitalism, as part of the case for socialism, and (controversially) as a feature of socialist society. These three perspectives will be considered one by one. although over time they may be seen as making up a single socialist perspective on the world.

Distorted technology

Technology is used by capitalism mainly to make more profits for the few rather than to improve conditions of life for the many. The extraction of surplus value from workers has been possible since they were first compelled to sell their labour to owners of capital (employers). In the early days of capitalism, productivity was low because there were few machines, or only primitive machines, to make labour more productive. As capitalism developed, the process of exploitation remained essentially the same, but the means of wealth production and distribution became vastly more efficient. The wealth produced is grossly unequally distributed, both between nations and between rich and poor in each nation. And more goods and technological developments sometime have calamitous effects: cars and planes that crash, thalidomide children, nuclear power station disasters, oil tanker spillages, among many others.

VR is a typical example of the way capitalism distorts the development of a technology that has great potential for enhancing the quality of life. So far, most of the development has been for military purposes. Rheingold confidently predicts that “the two largest blocs of users of new information and communication technology in the 1990s will be the global finance and global entertainment industries”. VR might become as addictive, energy-sapping and intelligence-dulling as television, the “plug-in drug” which now requires the average abuser to consume seven hours a day.

Part of the case for socialism is that technology can be used directly for need—meeting and not profit—making purposes. Even with capitalism, technology can and is being used for life-enhancing as well as life-harming purposes—medical technology that saves lives (often after other technologies have imperilled them), environmental measures that increase crops rather than poison them, machines that reduce drudgery rather than killing or maiming workers. Socialism would mean using technology only for human purposes, not balancing those purposes against the pursuit of profit.

The electronic media—of which VR is the latest development—have been used thus far by a few to manipulate the desires of the many, resulting in huge profits for the successful entrepreneurs. With socialism, the really life-enhancing potentialities of VR can be developed, and the capitalist uses put in the history box alongside Cinerama.

Democratic control

With the establishment of socialism, democratic decisions can be made about the appropriate levels and types of technology to meet different needs in different environments. It is utopian in the bad sense to try to predict the future in any detail, except perhaps for fun. But we do need some general principles, today, to help us move towards more detailed principles and their application tomorrow. Marx quite sensibly refused to “write recipes for future cookshops”, but Morris envisaged a basically simple, low technology socialist society in News From Nowhere. Socialists this century have from time to time shown interest in the subject. In the 1950s some Socialist Party members expressed views generally sympathetic to a Morris-type socialist future, though with a critical reaction from most other members who felt there were advantages in retaining at least some hi-tech methods of production and distribution.

At this stage we can only speculate on how and to what extent socialist society will use VR or whatever future refinements of it may be invented. We can say with certainty that, since there will be no buying and selling and no rival nation states to prepare for and engage in war, VR will not be used for business or military purposes.

Three probable areas of VR application may be summarized as medical, industrial and political. The minimal physical activity required to participate in VR may enable the minds of severely physically disabled people to be liberated from the prisons of their bodies. Much work that is now tedious could be made more interesting by simulated realities that enable technical problems to be solved more easily.

The political applications are perhaps the most challenging. Electronic media have so far been controlled by capitalist government and business, whose electors and customers have been mere listeners or viewers. VR experts like to talk of “participants”, and there is scope for interaction between the providers of the virtual worlds and those who experience them. The technology will be there for people in socialist society to use for democratically-decided purposes.

Stan Parker