From virtual reality to being able to purchase a house in the Metaverse, the rise of digital technology has developed further than we ever thought possible.
Technological advances are being reported everywhere in the media and, for most, the digital world is an abyss of information people truly don’t understand. It’s common knowledge that the human race is petrified of the unknown, so inevitably people will have their doubts when it comes to technology and what the future will look like.
Last week, Palmer Luckey, the founder of the VR company Oculus now owned by Metaverse giant Facebook, revealed a creation that could alter the world. Luckey has claimed to have created a VR headset called NerveGear. The headset looks like any other wearable virtual reality headpiece, but the capability of this gadget is astounding. The Oculus founder has created a VR headset that can kill, instantly. The product aims to tie in your reality with the virtual world in the most terrifying way possible. The technology is stylised around the series ‘Sword Art Online’ in which players are inside an immersive VR game where if they die, they also die in real life. The new Oculus headset has the ability to explode the brain of the user when a ‘game over’ screen appears.
This poses the question of whether technology is becoming too advanced, to a point where it is becoming dangerous. The world’s digital advances are creating fear in society, with a rise in paranoia and confusion. As humans, we’ve become acclimatised to the ease technology has brought us, with it virtually altering every aspect of our livelihoods.
Elon Musk is a multi-billionaire and the richest man in the world. Hitting the headlines recently has been Musk’s Twitter ownership scheme. On 28th October, Twitter confirmed that Elon Musk had officially bought the platform for an extraordinary $44 billion, after a long ordeal of speculation. From announcing new policies to publicly overthrowing them, his acquisition so far has been a whirlwind of unpredictability.
Infamously, the Twitter meltdown began early this month, when the Tesla mogul began firing half of the social site’s employees, with Musk saying he ‘had no choice.’ Around 3,700 jobs were slashed suddenly. In an abrupt turnaround, those fired were asked to return to the platform, with a report by Bloomberg (Musk’s blogging platform) claiming they were ‘laid off by mistake.’
The new boss has even fired employees who have called him out across Twitter. Furthermore, Musk planned for the verified blue tick to have a subscription fee of £7 a month but, of course, that took a U-turn too. He might have an awful lot of money, but someone who navigates a platform so many rely on in such a preposterous way shouldn’t be on this pedestal, where he has so much influence on our news sources and how society is informed.
Ultimately, the ultra-rich have a great deal of power, more than anyone in the world. This could certainly be used for bettering our planet but as these pricey and dangerous decisions show, they can also cause an abundance of harm.
Is capitalism putting our futures in danger by taking control of our digital resources? Our privacy, security and our right to be authentically informed is unjustly in the hands of those with power that’s simply based on wealth.
If functional killing gadgets are being produced and billionaires are firing us with no adequate reasoning, what’s yet to come in this abyss of technology?