Communities make for poor consumers.
They share place and space, time and things, you see?
Pathologised individuality turns to retail therapy.
Me-first Corporate cultures condition individuals to compete,
Indulge self-interest hierarchies and control.
Alienated from bodies in non-places, fingers set to scroll.
Metaverses are meta malls.
The promise of touch, be touched with uncanny gloves,
Simulated haptic space illusions of unconditional love
Artificial scarcity, constant consumption, instant gratification.
You use and discard me, say you’re indifferent to my existence
You get off to power and capital, trading love for resistance.
Trust is a contract, information asymmetry just luck.
Org charts of friends chained to blocks of power & convenience
You move targets then blame victims, private capital has your allegiance
The Effect of Mere Touch on Perceived Ownership**.
New dimensions of untouched senses to monetise
Web3 creeps advertising up your skin, do you realise?
//For a company like Meta, whose business model remains grounded in attention monetization, it’s key that this digitized relationship between contact, sensation, and consumption can be captured, aggregated, and analyzed, with touch data folded into surveillance capitalism’s expanding feedback loops. … Understanding the microphysical relationships between touch and consumption has proved exceptionally challenging, limiting the ability of marketers to drive purchasing through touch. Using VR gloves to capture that interface between hands and brands as data has the potential to enable an unprecedented form of haptic coercion. — David Parisi, 2022//
Use cases standardise look and feel.
But whose bodies and minds prioritised, normalised?
Ends designing means, which sensations anesthetised?
Profiteers steal content as data pours out of willing fingers.
Alienated bodies meta-metaphors feeding surplus value,
Surveillance states and Big Data corporates will be watching you
Synthesised mirages of places hover over the desert of the real.
Shall we refuse to participate, shall we prioritise the weather?
Shall we float down together on a sunbeam on a feather?
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**Peck, J., & Shu, S. B. (2009). The effect of mere touch on perceived ownership. Journal of Consumer Research, 36(3), 434–447
//“Existence in a society that has become a system finds the senses useless precisely because of the very instruments designed for their extension. One is prevented from touching and embracing reality. Further, one is programmed for interactive communication, one’s whole being is sucked into the system. It is this radical subversion of sensation that humiliates and then replaces perception.” — Ivan Illich, “To Honor Jaques Ellul”, 1993//
