Microsoft causes learned helplessness

Nice, I made a wokrshop about that earlier this year for RightsCon :

"Can you host the metaverse? How learned helplessness from Big Tech made you believe you can't

BigTech seems expensive, complex, secure, new and basically the only way to use any modern tool. This is a blatant lie, repeated daily and orchestrated to limit emerging technology to very few for-profit corporations. Being a repeated lie is a problem because instead of at least trying to challenge the status quo we, all of us, can assume it is true and give up on trying, making it a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Before digging into the technical aspects it is important to first prove it by running a short experiment then, only after, question how lie made us collectively and individually impotent. Learned helplessness itself will be used to identify extremely difficult situations most of us did encounter and might still encounter in the present.

This session will invite participants to simply try what is the state of the art of BigTech marketing at the moment, namely "the metaverse", and show that behind the abstract concept there is a technical reality that is not that complex and definitely not unachievable, even for a independent person with a very limited budget.

The workshop itself will rely on self-hosted open-source tools in order to both communicate and capture lessons learned, demonstrating by its own execution that synchronization and exploration of such a topic is possible today. "

If people here are interested I can record it again in a presentation format.