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On the 15th of October our book “Real Fake – Playing with Reality in the Age of AI, Deepfakes and the Metaverse” has been released. It is our take on synthetic media, deepfakes, fake news, conspiracy theories, memes, internet culture, Generation Z and Alpha, crypto, narrative economics, virtual humans, CGI influencers, vTubers, NFTs, DAOs, VR, Web3, the Creator Economy and the Metaverse. Real Fake is about how humans continuously manipulate reality and how new digital technology tools enable us to go one step further in this ancient game.
TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants
“In the end, TikTok’s biggest legacy might be less about its current moment of world-conquering success, which will pass, and more about how, by forcing social-media giants like Facebook to chase its model, it will end up liberating the social Internet.”
What Did Facebook Do Now?
“Now TikTok is much more than a viral dance factory. TikTok generates many of the most inescapable memes, trends, and online debates. (If you’ve recently heard about coastal grandmothers or pink sauce, you have TikTok to thank, or maybe blame.) And if a meme doesn’t originate on TikTok, it usually ends up there, graduating from Twitter or Reddit to achieve true ubiquity. TikTok is now the closest thing the internet has to a town square, a place where every major news story, fashion trend, and cultural moment is filtered and repackaged into a short-form video.”
Tinder to kill virtual currency, metaverse plans amid Match Group earnings loss; Tinder loses its CEO
In a shareholder letter, Match Group CEO Bernard Kim, said
“…Given uncertainty about the ultimate contours of the metaverse and what will or won’t work, as well as the more challenging operating environment, I’ve instructed the Hyperconnect team to iterate but not invest heavily in metaverse at this time, […] We’ll continue to evaluate this space carefully, and we will consider moving forward at the appropriate time when we have more clarity on the overall opportunity and feel we have a service that is well-positioned to succeed.”
The End of Social Media As We Know It
“Last week, Meta announced that the Facebook newsfeed would be shifting towards an algorithmic, recommendation-based model of content distribution. This announcement marked the most recent example of a major platform to formally make this shift, while other major platforms, including Meta’s Instagram, have been headed in this direction for a while. Given Facebook’s relevance as the world’s largest social network, this change signals the end of social media as we’ve known it for the past decade and a half. […] And yet, these shifts towards algorithmic feeds over friend feeds make sense. Platforms like the massively popular (and still growing) TikTok and YouTube put far less emphasis on friends and social graphs in favor of carefully curated, magical algorithmic experiences that match the perfect content for the right people at the exact right time. This is recommendation media, and it’s the new standard for content distribution on the internet.”
From social graph to intrest graph. We predicted this trend in 2011.
Algorithmic Fame
“Algorithmic personalization means that we get to enjoy highly appealing content regardless of who created it. We don’t need to follow anybody or browse or search. Content is delivered to us based on an algorithmically created taste profile rather than socially. TikTok effectively wipes out social status as the influencer market’s capital and taste as its currency. It creates the radically new kind of market where we equal our own taste profiles. In this market, we are all potential influencers.”
The Age of Algorithmic Anxiety
“Interacting online today means being besieged by system-generated recommendations. Do we want what the machines tell us we want?”
MUST SEE: Are We There Yet?
Explore the boundless possibilities of the metaverse with Keke Palmer behind the wheel. In the very first episode of “Are We There Yet?”, Meta’s Vishal Shah and Keke Palmer discuss how the metaverse brings people together like never before. From virtual comedy clubs to karaoke bars, there are so many worlds to explore.
Contact
Real Fake is a weekly newsletter in which SogetiLabs’s Research Institute VINT examines the future where synthetic reality becomes part or our objective reality. We investigate the impact of new technology on people, organisations and our society. If you have any questions or comments, do not hesitate to contact us. You can reach us at vint@sogeti.com.
