This photo of Mark Zuckerberg with a VR army is disturbingly Orwellian
The image is delightfully and disturbingly apt: Mark Zuckerberg confidently striding alongside a crowd of seated people all wearing virtual reality headsets, his smile indicating how pleased he is to be so close to so many people experiencing VR.
You can't help but look at the photo, which the Facebook CEO posted to his page shortly after his appearance at Mobile World Congress on Sunday, and think this must be what he envisioned when his company bought Oculus VR back in 2014: mmasses of people completely immersed in a virtual world, all running Facebook software.
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For the record, the headsets were versions of the Samsung Gear VR headset, not Oculus hardware. But the image is searing nonetheless.
The Orwellian connection wasn't lost on observers, either, especially the people responding to Zuckerberg's post. Some of the more pointed comments:
Mark -- doesn't it feel strange to be the only one walking with your real eyes, while everyone else are zombies in the Matrix?
I dont want to live in a world like this. ... I dont want to sit in a gray suit, and be told whats cool, under an air conditioned led illuminated hall of electronic devices tracking my every move, be human is to be free.
Creepy as hell! The Matrix is here! This is not exciting this is stupid!
Walking among dead people Mark Zuckerberg if this is the future then hell with it. The picture is self explanatory, you look like you have stolen those people's brains
Not everyone on Facebook thought the photo was that chilling, though.
Why are people so afraid of progress? You are simply given tools, options, what you do with them and how you use them is entirely your fault.
Well creepy or not, the world only moves forward. It doesn't really matter what us [sic] think of it. The technology will always improve, the best is to learn and adapt rather than thinking about the good old days.
Now I see all of these comments like, "I wanna smell, I wanna feel, I don't want to be a slave to technology." [...] You had plenty of time to smell and feel. I wanna slay a dragon. I want to survive a zombie apocalypse. Hook me up.
Of course, Twitter got in on the action, too.
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It remains to be seen whether VR will ever go mainstream, even with Facebook pushing it, but if you've wondered how a tech company like Facebook could pave the way to a Matrix-like future, you now have a visual that epitomizes that dream/nightmare.
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Pete Pachal was Mashable’s Tech Editor and had been at the company from 2011 to 2019. He covered the technology industry, from self-driving cars to self-destructing smartphones.Pete has covered consumer technology in print and online for more than a decade. Originally from Edmonton, Canada, Pete first uploaded himself into technology journalism at Sound & Vision magazine in 1999. Pete also served as Technology Editor at Syfy, creating the channel's technology site, DVICE (now Blastr), out of some rusty HTML code and a decompiled coat hanger. He then moved on to PCMag, where he served as the site's News Director.Pete has been featured on Fox News, the Today Show, Bloomberg, CNN, CNBC and CBC.Pete holds degrees in journalism from the University of King's College in Halifax and engineering from the University of Alberta in Edmonton. His favorite Doctor Who monsters are the Cybermen.
