#facebook’s plans to augment reality are as dystopian as they are smart

Tech

Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story feels more prescient every year. The 2010 dystopian fiction novel imagined a world where holographic, smartphone-like devices called äppäräts project everyone’s personal information all of the time, while a mammoth world-spanning social network called GlobalTeens stratifies society by their looks and net worth.

In Shteyngart’s not-too-distant future, everyone is ranked with ludicrous metrics like Hotness and Fuckability, on credit score-esque scales out of 800. Society is forever on the brink of economic collapse, and yet the tech-obsessed populace worries only about its corporate status and the availability of life extension and cosmetic surgery. The novel, which ended up inadvertently p…

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