Facebook Purchases Oculus Rift for $2B, and why that's awful news for you
Oculus Rift represented a unique future for the gaming world; free and open virtual reality gaming for the masses. That vision is now dead. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of the Facebook corporation purchased Oculus Rift for $2 Billion dollars, in a combined cash/stock payment. Hundreds of backers are furious, and many are cancelling their pre-orders.
Why? What's so bad about Facebook?
Everything. How do you think Facebook gets the money for this? You don't have to pay for Facebook services, do you? No proprietary hardware or software that must be bought first. No, it's free!
Or so it seems. You actually pay for Facebook by simply using it. They're using you for profit, by selling your information to advertising companies and the NSA, not to mention the ads they themselves use.
So what does that mean for the Rift?
It means the end of privacy. PornHub, while not exactly an upstanding organization, was very excited about Oculus Rift, because it meant they could create incredibly immersive 3D pornography. Not anymore! The Rift is now entirely a social device! Instead of using it to create your own world and escape from the horrors around you, it's now used to get people together in a vast sea of easily attainable personal information.
Does this look familiar? It's going to. This is the vision Mark Zuckerberg has for the Rift. Futurama predicted our grim fate quite well. The entire episode essentially sums up what's going to happen. No personal privacy; constant, forced interaction with others, while constantly being bombarded with advertisements.
You might be thinking; "Ha! Modders will fix this like they always have!"
But they won't. A strong possibility exists that a chip is going to be placed into the Rift's hardware to create a constant, uncloseable gateway for ads to go through. And with the head tracking and advanced sensor technology being implemented, you won't be able to take the headset off to escape the ad; it will likely detect you left and restart the ad the next time you put it on.
20 years ago, maybe even 10, the prospect of this would have driven people into a blind rage.
Now, no one cares. And we're stuck with the grim, dystopian future we always joked about.
Hell is real, and you're in it, bud.
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