Joe Vasicek

Go Go Paul Atreides!

This is why Meta is going to fail

So while Mrs. Vasicek and I were in the theater for the first time since the pandemic, watching the trailers before Dune, we saw this commercial for Facebook’s new Meta rebrand:

Since the theater was almost completely empty, we were already having fun by making snarky commentary. And when this commercial came on, it was a gold mine. So creepy. So disturbing. So “I really don’t want whatever the hell this is trying to sell me.”

But right before the end, Mrs. Vasicek nailed it and said: “it’s probably for Meta!” And then, bam! Meta’s new logo came on, and we both had a good laugh.

Seriously, though, ever since Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would be rebranding as Meta, I’ve been fascinated with it—not because I’m looking forward to it, but because it is so. So. Cringe. It’s like watching a train wreck in real time. History may prove me wrong about this, as plenty of things that were laughable when they started out proved to change the world, but I really do think that Meta is going to fail. Spectacularly.

I have so many thoughts about this. So many thoughts. But if I had to break it all down to one core idea, it would be this:

At some point in our lives, all of us will reach a point where something about ourselves comes into conflict with reality. At that point, we can make one of three choices: we can try to change reality, we can decide to ignore the conflict, or we can work on changing ourselves.

Part of becoming an adult is realizing that there are aspects of reality that you simply cannot change. We can choose our actions, but we cannot choose the consequences of our actions. To paraphrase Jordan Peterson, we realize that we should clean our rooms before we try to change the world.

Right now, the world is ruled by people who reject the notion that their actions have consequences, and believe that reality can be whatever they want. That is the main reason why everything is falling apart. But instead of recognizing this and changing course, our leaders are doubling down and demanding that we all bend the knee and fall into line with their false reality.

It’s not going to work.

Zuckerberg is one of those people. Facebook didn’t succeed because it invented social media, or did it better than anyone else: it succeeded because Zuckerberg realized that his end users were actually his product, and his consumers were the corporations and governments that wanted all their data. So he optimized Facebook to be as addictive as possible and got more than a billion people hooked on it.

At that point, Facebook was so ubiquitous that it was difficult to function in the real world without it. Those of us who tried to quit soon learned that Zuckerberg was holding our social connections hostage, and that we could expect to be cut off from our friends and family if we tried to leave.

But then the Trump years happened. Social media became toxic, and Facebook in particular became embroiled in scandal. Zuckerberg tried to thread the needle between the partisan divide, and all he managed to do was split the baby. Team blue hated Facebook for selling their data to companies like Cambridge Analytica, and team red hated Facebook for “fact checking” and shadowbanning them. Meanwhile, team “don’t talk to me about politics” became exhausted by the whole thing, and started to unplug in increasing numbers.

I think Zuckerberg needs Meta to be a success much, much more than any of us need or want Meta. This is pure speculation on my part as I don’t have any figures to back it up, but I suspect that Facebook peaked sometime in the last five years and has been declining at an ever sharper rate ever since. It’s probably not just Facebook, either, but all social media. They’re all toxic now.

But after all the goodwill that he’s burned, is Zuckerberg really the technological Moses who’s going to lead us all to the new promised land? And is the promised land really just a cheesy-looking version of Second Life with VR headsets?

The three things that Zoomers and Millennials crave more than anything are meaning, authenticity, and redemption. Those are also the three biggest things that Big Tech has been depriving us of. That’s not going to change until we get away from Silicon Valley culture.

Anyone who has started a family will tell you that the best way to find meaning, authenticity, and redemption in your life is to raise children. And yet, when Google designed their campus to have all the amenities necessary for their employees to live, work, and play there indefinitely, they somehow forgot to build any sort of playplace or daycare for children. That’s Silicon Valley culture: sexy and sterile, inclusive and censorious, flashy and vapid.

Second life failed because the people at the top tried to milk it too hard, and the users revolted. Facebook’s users are revolting for similar reasons, because manipulating us to have the right behavior is now Facebook’s product, and they’re milking us for all we’re worth. Is Meta going to be any different? Because it looks an awful lot to me like a farcically transparent attempt to build the Matrix. Can somebody please tell Zuckerberg that the Matrix was supposed to be a dystopia, and not an instruction manual?

Ultimately, though, I don’t think it’s going to matter much, because Meta is going to fail. Spectacularly. The deeper I look into it, the more it seems that the writing is on the wall. Of course, I could be wrong about Meta—spectacularly wrong, even—but I’m not betting on it. Because if I had to choose between plugging into Zuckerberg’s new Matrix and vacationing in Iceland, the choice would not be difficult:

“God Help Us All” by Five Times August

Good protest song.

DUNE!

So Mrs. Vasicek and I saw the new Dune movie in theaters last weekend, and let me just say, it was awesome in every sense of the word!

Speaking as someone who’s read the novel three times and fervently believes it to be the most perfect science fiction book ever written, this movie did not disappoint. Not only is it the best movie adaptation of the book, hands down, but it may be the best adaptation that it’s possible to make of the book. Denis Villeneuve has done for Dune what Peter Jackson did for Lord of the Rings. It’s incredible.

With all of that said, I’m not sure if the movie would make much sense to anyone who hasn’t already read the book first. Dune is really a story within a story within a story, and while the movie captures that aspect quite well, it also touches very, very lightly on the outlying stories, which could be confusing for someone who isn’t already familiar with the novel. Even in my first read, I didn’t fully appreciate the complexity: it took two rereads before I began to grasp the full significance of all of the moving parts.

At its heart, Dune is about the struggle of Paul Atreides (the Chosen One) to push back against his destiny, because he knows that his success will be far more devastating, for him and for the galaxy, than his failure. In that, it’s a brilliant subversion (in the truest sense) of the hero cycle. But all of that takes place within the story of the Bene Gesserit and their quest to create the Kwisatz Haderach, a super-human who can see the past, present, and future all at once. But the Bene Gesserit scheming is all happening within the political intrigue of the Great Houses and the Imperium, specifically with the feud between House Atreides (which presents the greatest threat to the emperor) and House Harkonnen—and all three stories converge on the planet Arrakis, amidst the struggle of the Fremen to terraform their desert world into a lush, green paradise when all of the powers of the galaxy want to exploit it for the spice that is so important for interstellar space travel.

For someone who is already familiar with all of that from the book, the movie hits on all of those nested stories perfectly, without getting bogged down or missing the most important story of all: Paul’s internal struggle with his own destiny. But for someone who is new to all of that, the movie might be really confusing. It will be really interesting to hear what my Dad thinks of it, because he’s never read the book and he plans to stream the movie over Thanksgiving break. I’ll report back when I hear his reaction.

Some people are criticizing the movie for ending at the wrong place, but I actually think it ended at the exact right spot: where Paul becomes one of the Fremen by killing his first man in a duel. It’s subtle, but the whole movie builds up perfectly to that moment, making Paul’s character arc the central driving story arc. For me, it didn’t feel at all like I’d only gotten half a movie, or that the director was drawing the story out to make it into a trilogy. It felt very natural to end the story there, and a great set-up for the sequel, which should wrap up Dune itself. The third movie will conclude Paul’s story by giving us Dune Messiah, which should be really interesting, since the first movie actually did a lot to set that up. If the second movie is as good as the first, then the third one may actually be better than the book.

It’s become very fashionable these days to cast a major character as an ethnic minority, which can be really annoying. However, I wasn’t all that bothered by the decision to cast Doctor Kynes as a black woman. It did some interesting things for the character that I thought worked really well for the story, and for Paul’s relationship with Kynes. So even though that was the movie taking license from the book, I felt like it was a really good call.

One criticism that I do tend to agree with is that the characters feel a lot more like archetypes than like real people. That’s fair, not only for the movie, but for the book. My wife says that’s the main reason why she didn’t like the book, because none of the characters felt “real” to her. But that focus on archetypes is something I really enjoyed about the book, so it wasn’t as big of a problem for me with the movie.

Another point of criticism that my wife had was that neither the movie nor the book have a whole lot of joy. That’s also fair: the movie does tend to hit the same emotional notes over and over, without much variation. The most humorous part was where the Reverend Mother tells Paul “farewell, young human. I hope you live,” which wasn’t actually meant as a joke (and Mrs. Vasicek and I are totally going to use that line on our own baby from now on).

But it really did hit the sense of wonder quite spectacularly, not just with the big things like the desert and the sandworms, but the fine details like the control systems of the ornithopters, or the grittiness of the stillsuits and the spice mining equipment. It really does stick with you long after you’ve watched the movie, and makes you want to watch it over and over.

All I can say more is that I’m really, really, really looking forward to the next one!

A quick update and the future of this blog

So as you’ve probably noted by now, I’ve dropped out of doing nanowrimo. I was hitting all the daily milestones more or less until the halfway mark, when 1) I finished the novella In the Wake of Zedekiah Wight, and 2) we left for Nebraska to spend Thanksgiving with my in-laws. Between those two things, and the fact that this was our first time traveling with a baby, writing got put on the back burner for a few days, which means no nanowrimo this year.

But now that we’re here in Nebraska and it looks like we’re going to have a pretty quiet and easygoing vacation, I will probably get a decent amount of writing done before we go back to Utah at the end of the month. Who knows—I may even try to jump back on the nanowrimo train, though I’m not going to push for that. This is a vacation, after all. We all need a vacation from time to time.

But one of the things that I do want to get much better about is posting more regularly to this blog. And towards that end, I’ve come up with a plan.

Back in 2016, I deleted my social media and became something of an online hermit. For personal reasons, it was the right thing to do as it helped me to avoid all of the toxic online insanity during the (first) Trump years, and all of the gaslighting and doom porn that became so prevalent during the pandemic. If I had still been addicted to social media during all of that insanity, I would not be in a healthy place right now. But I do think it impeded my ability to connect with and build my readership, and I feel that I need to change that going forward.

Of course, I don’t just want to build an audience on a popular social media platform, only to have that audience taken away from me when the platform arbitrarily changes its policies or monetizes in some disadvantageous way. That was the big mistake that everyone made with Facebook back in the 10s. So my plan is to build up this blog first, which is a platform that I own and control, and repost content from this blog to other social media platforms as I expand my presence there. The goal is to bring my audience here and make this the center of my online activity.

But to do that, I need to post new content to my blog on a regular basis—something I haven’t really done since I jumped off of the social media merry-go-round in 2016. So I’m going to start blogging on a schedule again, taking it fairly easy at first with just two posts a week, but working it up from there.

I’ll be posting on Tuesdays and Saturdays at 11am Eastern, or 9am Mountain Time in my own neck of the woods. Tuesdays will mostly be for sharing links to interesting articles, videos, or podcasts, while Saturdays will be for more long-form posts, like book reviews, movie reviews, and state-of-the-genre type stuff. When I add a third day, that will be mostly for writing and family updates, if that’s what people are interested in. I’ll also share book excerpts, WIP excerpts, and posts about sales and book releases.

So that’s the plan. We’ll see how long it lasts. Now I’ve got a baby to watch and a book to write, not to mention Saturday’s blog post.

NaNoWriMo 2021: Day Twelve

Words Written Today: 2,171
Children of the Starry Sea: 0
In the Wake of Zedekiah Wight: 2,171
Science Fiction from A to Z: 0
Total Words Written: 21,736
Total Words Remaining: 28,264
Total Words Ahead: 1,732

Making good progress, even if I don’t always blog about it! Last night, I got to the really good part of the story and was nearly an hour late getting to bed, and it was a similar story the night before that, so that’s why I haven’t blogged until now. But In the Wake of Zedekiah Wight is coming along very, very well—much better than the first iteration of this story.

Also, I’m on a five-day streak of writing 2k words or more! As of this morning, I’m a day ahead in nanowrimo, and if I can hit 2k words today then I’ll still be ahead on Sunday, even if I don’t write anything at all. Woohoo!

NaNoWriMo 2021: Day Ten

Words Written Today: 2,255
Children of the Starry Sea: 0
In the Wake of Zedekiah Wight: 2,255
Science Fiction from A to Z: 0
Total Words Written: 17,374
Total Words Remaining: 32,626
Total Words Ahead: 704

Making good progress on In the Wake of Zedekiah Wight. With luck, I’ll finish it tomorrow or Friday.

NaNoWriMo 2021: Day Nine

Words Written Today: 2,079
Children of the Starry Sea: 0
In the Wake of Zedekiah Wight: 2,079
Science Fiction from A to Z: 0
Total Words Written: 15,119
Total Words Remaining: 34,881
Total Words Ahead: 116

Pretty good writing day, though it could have been better. A lot of outside distractions. Got really sucked into this one scene, though, and managed to finish it by the end of the day. This Zedekiah Wight novella is really coming together.

NaNoWriMo 2021: Day Eight

Words Written Today: 2,047
Children of the Starry Sea: 459
“In the Wake of Zedekiah Wight”: 1,588
Science Fiction from A to Z: 0
Total Words Written: 13,040
Total Words Remaining: 36,960
Total Words Behind: 296

No writing on Sunday. I generally don’t write on Sundays, so I didn’t bother giving a progress update either. That’s another reason why I’m shooting for 2,000 words a day through nanowrimo, instead of the more typically 1,667.

Making really good progress on “In the Wake of Zedekiah Wight,” which will probably turn into a short novella after all. Had to do some plot noodling, but I think I’ve got the rest of it figured out. Since it’s a short story (or at least, since it started as a short story), I didn’t bother writing an outline, which meant that I had to spend more time thinking the story out today than actually writing it.

Making progress on Children of the Starry Sea too. The next scene is going to be a lot of fun: it’s a family dinner with Jeremiah and Noemi from Star Wanderers (and all their kids, of course), except as a guest they have Reva from Sons of the Starfarers. The scene is from Reva’s point of view, and if you’ve read that series through to the end, you’ll understand why that would be fun to write.

It’s getting late and we should have gone to bed an hour ago, so I’ll end this for now. Shooting for 3k words tomorrow.

NaNoWriMo 2021: Day Six

Words Written Today: 1,454
Children of the Starry Sea: 1,454
“In the Wake of Zedekiah Wight”: 0
Science Fiction from A to Z: 0
Total Words Written: 10,992
Total Words Remaining: 39,008
Total Words Ahead: 990

Passed the 10k word mark today! Woo hoo! Unfortunately, though, I did not hit word count—I think missing it by so much yesterday really took the wind out of me. Struggled a lot with motivation today, so chalk up another one to Resistance. But 1.4k words is a heck of a lot better than nothing!

I do wonder what it’s going to be like at the end of the month, though. We’re going to be on the road visiting family from the 19th through most of the 30th, which means I’ll be doing at least 20k words on a Kindle Fire, if not more. That’s not going to be pleasant. So next week, I’m going to shoot for more like 3k or 4k words per day, in order to make things easier later on. And I don’t know how much I’ll be blogging.