Figure 1: Three dopamine pathways and their related cognitive processes. Most of your dopamine is generated deep in the midbrain, and it is released in many different areas across the brain. These areas are largely responsible for behaviors associated with learning, habit formation, and addiction.

While the reward pathways (Figure 1) are distinct in their anatomical organization, all three become active when anticipating or experiencing rewarding events. In particular, they reinforce the association between a particular stimulus or sequence of behaviors and the feel-good reward that follows. Every time a response to a stimulus results in a reward, these associations become stronger through a process called long-term potentiation. This process strengthens frequently used connections between brain cells called neurons by increasing the intensity at which they respond to particular stimuli.

Although not as intense as hit of cocaine, positive social stimuli will similarly result in a release of dopamine, reinforcing whatever behavior preceded it. Cognitive neuroscientists have shown that rewarding social stimuli—laughing faces, positive recognition by our peers, messages from loved ones—activate the same dopaminergic reward pathways. Smartphones have provided us with a virtually unlimited supply of social stimuli, both positive and negative. Every notification, whether it’s a text message, a “like” on Instagram, or a Facebook notification, has the potential to be a positive social stimulus and dopamine influx.

The Hands that Pull – Reward prediction errors and variable reward schedules

Because most social media platforms are free, they rely on revenue from advertisers to make a profit. This system works for everyone involved at first glance, but it has created an arms race for your attention and time. Ultimately, the winners of this arms race will be those who best use their product to exploit the features of the brain’s reward systems.

Reward prediction errors

Research in reward learning and addiction have recently focused on a feature of our dopamine neurons called reward prediction error (RPE) encoding. These prediction errors serve as dopamine-mediated feedback signals in our brains (Figure 2). This neurological feature is something casino owners have used to their advantage for years. If you’ve ever played slots, you’ll have experienced the intense anticipation while those wheels are turning—the moments between the lever pull and the outcome provide time for our dopamine neurons to increase their activity, creating a rewarding feeling just by playing the game. It would be no fun otherwise. But as negative outcomes accumulate, the loss of dopamine activity encourages us to disengage. Thus, a balance between positive and negative outcomes must be maintained in order to keep our brains engaged.

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Figure 2: Reward prediction and subsequent dopamine activity. Unexpected rewards increase the activity of dopamine neurons, acting as positive feedback signals for the brain regions associated with the preceding behavior. As learning takes place, the timing of activity will shift until it occurs upon the cue alone, with the expected reward having no additional effect. And should the expected reward not be received, dopamine activity drops, sending a negative feedback signal to the relevant parts of the brain, weakening the positive association.

Variable reward schedules

How do social media apps take advantage of this dopamine-driven learning strategy? Similar to slot machines, many apps implement a reward pattern optimized to keep you engaged as much as possible. Variable reward schedules were introduced by psychologist B.F. Skinner in the 1930’s. In his experiments, he found that mice respond most frequently to reward-associated stimuli when the reward was administered after a varying number of responses, precluding the animal’s ability to predict when they would be rewarded. Humans are no different; if we perceive a reward to be delivered at random, and if checking for the reward comes at little cost, we end up checking habitually (e.g. gambling addiction). If you pay attention, you might find yourself checking your phone at the slightest feeling of boredom, purely out of habit. Programmers work very hard behind the screens to keep you doing exactly that.

The Battle for Your Time

If you’ve been a Facebook user for more than a few years, you’ve probably noticed that the site has been expanding its criteria for notifications. When you first join Facebook, your notification center revolves around the initial set of connections you make, creating that crucial link between notification and social reward. But as you use Facebook more and begin interacting with various groups, events, and artists, that notification center will also become more active. After a while, you’ll be able to open the app at any time and reasonably expect to be rewarded. When paired with the low cost of checking your phone, you have a pretty strong incentive to check in whenever you can.

Other examples highlight a more deliberate effort to monopolize your time. Consider Instagram’s implementation of a variable-ratio reward schedule. As explained in this 60 Minutes interview, Instagram’s notification algorithms will sometimes withhold “likes” on your photos to deliver them in larger bursts. So when you make your post, you may be disappointed to find less responses than you expected, only to receive them in a larger bunch later on. Your dopamine centers have been primed by those initial negative outcomes to respond robustly to the sudden influx of social appraisal. This use of a variable reward schedule takes advantage of our dopamine-driven desire for social validation, and it optimizes the balance of negative and positive feedback signals until we’ve become habitual users.

Question Your Habits

Smartphones and social media apps aren’t going anywhere anytime soon, so it is up to us as the users to decide how much of our time we want to dedicate to them. Unless the advertisement-based profit model changes, companies like Facebook will continue to do everything they can to keep your eyes glued to the screen as often as possible. And by using algorithms to leverage our dopamine-driven reward circuitry, they stack the cards—and our brains—against us. But if you want to spend less time on your phone, there are a variety strategies to achieve success. Doing things like disabling your notifications for social media apps and keeping your display in black and white will reduce your phone’s ability to grab and hold your attention. Above all, mindful use of the technology is the best tool you have. So the next time you pick up your phone to check Facebook, you might ask yourself, “Is this really worth my time?”

Trevor Haynes is a research technician in the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School.

Thank you, Trevor, for a truly remarkable insight and one that has to have been party to provoking the following action, although my subconscious is telling us not to pay attention to the timing presented as constructed roll-out of medical support, this is simply an orchestrated roadmap for global domination and financial return, which feeds the very loops that Trevor discloses above. Chan Zuckerberg Commits $500 Million to Harvard Neuroscience and AI Institute | Harvard Magazine

Chan Zuckerberg Initiative co-founders and co-CEOs Mark Zuckerberg ’06, L.L.D. ’17 and Priscilla Chan ’07, announced today a gift to establish the Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence at Harvard. The new institute, which will have dedicated space in the recently completed Science and Engineering Complex in Allston (see “A 500-Year Building”), is named after Karen Kempner Zuckerberg, the mother of the Meta CEO and founder (Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp are Meta Platforms Inc.’s best-known apps) and her parents. According to Jeff MacGregor, vice president of science communications for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), the Kempner Institute will receive $500 million in funding during the next 15 years. The gift will support 10 new faculty appointments, new computing infrastructure, and resources for students—from undergraduates to post-doctoral fellows—that will allow them to pursue knowledge in an uninhibited way across labs and disciplines. Zuckerberg and Chan, a paediatrician, will donate an additional $2.9 billion to support biomedical research focused on improving human health, with the aim of ultimately ending all human disease. The couple, who met as Harvard undergraduates, pledged 99 percent of their Facebook equity to the initiative in 2015, when their first daughter was born, and launched their science program to end human disease the following year.

At Harvard, the Kempner Institute will be co-led by McKay professor of computer science Sham Kakade, of the University of Washington, who will join the Harvard faculty in January 2022, according to an October 20 announcement from the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS); and by Harvard Medical School’s Moorhead professor of neurobiology Bernardo Sabatini. He has been a member of the medical school faculty since 2001, and became a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator in 2008. The co-directors’ research thus melds the twin emphases of the institute’s mission, to seek fundamental principles that underlie both human and machine intelligence.

Kakade’s work explores the mathematical foundations of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). He is best known for helping create the foundational statistical framework for reinforcement learning, one of three basic machine-learning paradigms (the other two are supervised learning, which requires human intervention to create labelled datasets, and unsupervised learning, in which an algorithm uncovers patterns on its own). In reinforcement learning, the system adapts its behaviour responsively to maximize a particular signal from its environment. According to the announcement released by SEAS when Kakade was hired, “His work spans economics, neuroscience, and applied and theoretical machine learning.” Kakade, who received his Ph.D. at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, University College London, and his B.S. in physics at Caltech, is currently a professor of computer science and statistics at the University of Washington and Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research.

Sabatini is a well-known developmental neurobiologist whose laboratory studies the mechanisms underlying synapse and circuit plasticity in living brains, an attribute that permits new behaviours to be learned and refined. His research group also studies how perturbations of normal synaptic function contribute to human neuropsychiatric disorders such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases. 

Zuckerberg and Chan have a long history of philanthropy in education and health, and neurodegenerative disease has been a focus of their giving. They initially made large donations aimed at improving education in Newark, New Jersey, and in the San Francisco region, and to a local hospital and community foundation where they live in California. In 2015, they founded the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), a limited liability company that allows them to make grants, invest, and engage in political advocacy in a way that a traditional charitable foundation could not. With this latest announcement they extend through 2031 their financial support of the CZ Biohub, a biomedical research collaboration involving Stanford, UCSF, and U.C. Berkeley, founded in 2016 with an initial gift of $600 million. They also announced plans to replicate this Biohub model elsewhere, by funding collaborative research into grand scientific challenges on 15-year time horizons, and to support creation of an interdisciplinary advanced biomedical imaging institute that will unlock “the ability to directly observe and analyse any biological process across spatial scales, in real time, throughout the human body,” said CZI science imaging program officer Stephani Otte.

Harvard president Lawrence S. Bacow said “Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg have demonstrated a remarkable commitment to promoting discovery, innovation, and service at Harvard and other academic institutions around the United States. Their support for the creation of the Kempner Institute will advance Harvard’s education and research mission and is only the most recent way in which they have sought to do so. From supporting the study of COVID-19 treatments and advancing literacy research, to boosting public service opportunities for undergraduates, they have shown a genuine commitment through their work at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and beyond to curing disease, improving lives, and encouraging others to serve.”

The premise of the Kempner Institute, according to a CZI statement, is that natural and artificial intelligence are “intimately interconnected:

the next generation of artificial intelligence requires using principles that our brains use for fast, flexible natural reasoning, and understanding how our brains compute and reason requires theories developed for AI. The Kempner Institute will study AI systems, including artificial neural networks, to develop both principled theories and a practical understanding of how they operate and learn, and it will also focus on research topics that include learning and memory, perception and sensation, brain function, and meta plasticity.

The Institute will recruit and train future generations of researchers from undergraduates and graduate students to post-docs and faculty—actively recruiting from underrepresented groups at every stage of the pipeline—to study intelligence from biological, cognitive, engineering, and computational perspectives.”

Institute co-director Sabatini said in a statement that understanding of the complex neuronal networks of human brains is expanding rapidly, given new technologies and methodologies. “This new program will bring the fields together by, for example, borrowing features from biological brains to make smarter AI and using computational theories from AI to explain how our brains work.”

In an interview, Sabatini and Kakade said that their first priority will be to assemble an ecosystem of scientists and scholars, and then to define 10 grand challenges in the field of intelligence. Among the kinds of questions that might be pursued, explained Sabatini, is what happens when an artificial neural network is endowed with features from the human brain such as a diversity of cell types, or with the type of neurons that researchers believe perform computation? Working the other direction, do theories about computation in artificial neural networks apply to biological intelligence?

Human intelligence already encompasses the three principal machine learning paradigms—supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning—Kakade and Sabatini pointed out. “Clearly, learning which foods you like and dislike is a process akin to reinforcement learning,” Sabatini elaborated, “but learning to walk is largely an unsupervised project. A baby will try to get up on its feet and stumble…but ultimately learn how to do that on its own.” Learning a language—language is a particular interest of Kakade’s—has components of both supervised and unsupervised learning, as when a baby practices on its own.

There is a modularity to human natural intelligence, said Kakade. Each approach has evolved to become optimal for certain types of problems. But as Sabatini pointed out, “We don’t yet really understand why—and how to use that information.”

Bacow said that the Kempner Institute represents “a remarkable opportunity to bring together approaches and expertise in biological and cognitive science with machine learning, statistics, and computer science to make real progress in understanding how the human brain works to improve how we address disease, create new therapies, and advance our understanding of the human body and the world more broadly.”

To put the Kempner Institute into some perspective, the prorated funding—$33 million annually for 15 years—represents more than 10 percent of the total non-federal sponsored research support (about $300 million in fiscal year 2021, including both direct research spending and coverage of indirect expenses) the University now receives each year.

Wow, there you go, $500m dollars to find a reason to blame that shifts the responsibility from Meta (Facebook) and “I feel tremendous guilt,” admitted Chamath Palihapitiya, former Vice President of User Growth at Facebook, to an audience of Stanford students. He was responding to a question about his involvement in exploiting consumer behaviour. “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works,” and onto some other unsuspecting victim, which we have to collectively digest is YOU.

What this investment is truly seeking to find is a way of projecting the evidence and blame shifting the resulting actions of these loops into the mass audience, with this $500m distraction being the cleaning wipe that Meta hopes will take the heroin smear from the screen, while covertly flooding the digital universe by every means of possible to make each and everyone of you complicit to your own internal “dispute” in a way that the narcissist seeks to separate and isolate its individual source thus diluting its power and support network of the collective (family and friends). However, as we’ve highlighted this particular lie might well appear to be thousands of miles away, but this naked truth is in the minds of all involved and rippling throughout the paradigm we all currently exist in.

While we are here let’s take a look at the Metaverse, let’s start with the Hebrew meaning of Meta – DEATH and Verse means, well here goes and buckle up because it’s going to test us. The word “universe” was created out of the Latin word “universus” which is a combination of the word “uni” (one) and “vertere” to turn – which essentially means “turned into one”…………… So, very swiftly we have a platform that has renamed itself DEATH and has admitted creating dopamine loops that are destroying society and in doing so have constructed a co-dependent environment where the unassuming partner, for we can continue to describe the relationship between the user and the owner of this particular platform (CEO) as bonded connection, now proven already to be one of covert coercion and chemical stimulation, underline Narcissist and the same for the co-dependent.

So, to clarify the above, we have the Vice President of User Growth riddled with guilt due to the internal drug addiction they have created, we have a Harvard Technician quite beautifully presenting the technical and moral perspectives of the COCAINE and GAMBLING based circuitry in very meticulous detail and we have the CEO Mark Zuckerburg and his wife Chan donating $500m to said university to deploy technology and encourage students to become complicit in the continuation of refining the addiction in the name of medical enhancement and during this time of guilt and generosity named his company DEATH – Turned in one, which the leading university in America (My humble opinion) might have recognised if they hadn’t been so quick to grab the cash in the name of Humanities digital evolution.

With circa 2.934Bn users and sporting a characterisation such as the above, one can swiftly understand that this body of work and its title are very much on point and the chances of healing and kicking the habit when the frequency pulses that the neuro orchestra are playing like the quartet who fiddled without reward as the great ship sank. One might construe that the final notes of this journey are upon us and Mr DEATH is throwing his money at a legacy unattainable due to the construction of our journey together as each foot step is taken across the page and each passing pixel observed by a nervous system that operates instinctively and without the distraction of thought.

I shall step to left a little and pay my respects to Simon Rouse, who sadly took his own life in the last 24hours, Simon was a digital soldier and Birdman of the real world, raising Owls and Birds of Prey, a spiritual soul that stood for the many and as of now whilst I don’t know the idiosyncrasies of his departure, we can all take a moment to share the loss and passing of someone who’s internal self was undeniably at breaking point. A user of herbal stimulation one can ascertain that his chemical equilibrium was certainly imbalanced and the disparity of being such a intrinsic part of mother nature and yet at the coal face of the fight to halt the slow walk to suicide we are now seemingly all on thanks to Meta (The DEATH Platform) one can catch an insight into just how far apart his reality was set and how that translated into his conscious and subconscious and the internalised echo chamber of screaming data driven fiction we are all subjected too due to the 5.9m Facebook ad campaigns run by Cambridge Analytics for Donald Trump in the 2016 Presidential Election (against Hilary Clintons 66,000). How Alexander Nix must be proud of the manipulation he has bestowed upon the world and how Damian Collins will be held accountable as we press into the digital abyss.

So, where do we find the parental-ised (Adopted the role of parent in the emotional part of the relationship regardless of age and relationship status) 11year old. New school dressed in grey and wearing shorts when the children around him were wearing their own personal outfits stung a little, as did the ridicule of Natalie Jackson professing to care and yet how they laughed, school seems a haze of disappointing moments as academia can sadly provide. “You’ll add up to nothing Langiano” bellowed the fat fingered and equally expanded waist line of the Technical Drawing Teacher, who must have made a tidy sum a year, albeit not the £1.5m I made in 300 days in 2008, he didn’t drive the 438 Scuderia either if my memory serves me correctly although neither did I for too long given it’s one thing buying one and it’s another affording to run the thing and worse still feel safe leaving it anywhere, given the sense of jealously we see in society as a whole. School was something of a distraction looking back, I spent much of the time with older children and one in particular holds my heart very dearly. Michael Dale was gifted individual with a football at his feet and seemingly embedded in a similar trauma journey as I was to uncover. The day Thatcher declared War was a moment that glides into focus like the “conveyor belt” of “prizes” Bruce Forsyth would present as the prizes for reaching the final of the “Generation Game” and one might riley smile at his weekly retort of “Didn’t he/she do well”  as they recited their individual list, somewhat akin to this prize winner and my generational epigenetically imposed gifts, alongside those my neuropathways sought out to maintain the evolution of my particular bios and neurological algorithm. 

But unlike the game and it’s prize winning final the conscious mind will block what the subconscious is throwing up so as the prove out the inability of the conscious mind to make impartial decisions and by impartial we and that’s the UIA and the EC collectively mean decisions for the wellbeing of the collective unit and not one’s that feather the ego of the conscious mind seeking to erase all of the errors and poor judgement calls of the past and thus continuing down the yellow brick road of delusion that actually teaches us that behind the curtain pulling the leavers of the human operative system is the “intuition / instinct / spirit” that manages the circuitry and performance of our human existence. To be rundown by anything would be a truly traumatic experience, to be eaten in slow motion by an 18tonne bulldozer is one of time travelling horror back to the days when the tanks rolled over the battlefields and across the bloodied bodies so remorselessly strewn across the contested countryside. Running sand demands strong boxes, the process of dig, drag in the cage, shingle base, lay the pipe and back fill to the top with twenty mill stone was a repetitive one, over and over we edged alongside the cutting destined to be the bypass from Wingham to Sandwich 2.4meters at a time, pipe after pipe like each block our children are coerced into laying in Roblox …

Roblox is a platform where our children are encouraged from the age of 6 to code and create “games” that construct a revenue stream and earning capacity. The following figures highlight the numbers of “users” and by users we are describing single digit age addicts, who receptors have been blown way beyond anything acceptable for a child to safely engage with.

Home - Roblox

For over 16 years, our team at Roblox has been innovating to solve some of the hardest and most interesting technical challenges as we usher in the metaverse. To do this kind of ground-breaking work, we’ve hired top talent with creative and innovative thinking and created a culture that seeks to empower engineering and product teams to be responsible, take the long view, and get stuff done – all while respecting our global community of millions of creators. Today we’re thrilled to share that Fast Company has honoured our team with a #3 ranking on their annual list of the 100 Best Workplaces for Innovators. Maintaining an innovation-first culture that seeks to empower engineering and product teams is one of our core priorities. Our teams are innovating across an ever-expanding range of areas, including virtual economy, AI and machine learning, social graph, physics, audio, infrastructure, databases, microservices, rendering, and more.

“We hear from candidates that they are drawn to the breadth of technical challenges we are solving here at Roblox, from scaling our infrastructure to working on a state-of-the-art physics and rendering engine to enabling more civil communication in shared online spaces and developing ground-breaking developer, avatar and identity features,” said Dan Sturman, Chief Technology Officer at Roblox. “We also hire people who are genuinely excited about building this new category of human co-experience where so much innovation is happening and is bound to continue over the next decades given the opportunity.”

So, what do the numbers tell us, for as proven they never lie, well unless you’re a BlackRock managed investment, which we will get into in due course.

52.2Mn Daily Users, 11.3Bn Engagement Hours, 12Mn Creators, 32Mn Experiences

https://hbr.org/2022/03/the-ceo-of-roblox-on-scaling-community-sourced-innovation

The CEO of Roblox on Scaling Community-Sourced Innovation

by David Baszucki

From the Magazine (March–April 2022)

Winni Wintermeyer

Summary.   When Roblox launched, in 2004, its user base was made up of friends, family members, and about 100 tech enthusiasts recruited via Google ads to serve as impartial advisers. The idea was simple but ambitious: create an online space where people from...more Tweet Post Share Save Print

When Erik Cassel and I launched the precursor of our online platform Roblox, our users were friends, family members, and about 100 tech enthusiasts we’d recruited via Google ads. We offered one experience. “Peak times’’ meant maybe 30 or 40 people playing at once. Erik and I were the moderators, keeping our community safe and civil.

We also chatted constantly with those early users about what they wanted to see on the platform. Our vision from the start was to build an entirely new category of human co experience—nothing less than the realization of the next phase of human interaction. We imagined an online space where people from anywhere in the world could share experiences with friends, just as they would in person. Our core idea to get there was a platform supported by a community of creators who built everything on it. Together they—not us—could design clothes, construct buildings, make discoveries, run businesses, spend time with family, play sports, and attend concerts. Erik and I had already seen the power of user-generated content on Interactive Physics, a platform we’d launched and run with others to support physics learning through 2D modelling. Even in that primitive form, users engaged more deeply when they were the ones doing the building.

Sixteen years after the launch of Roblox, our focus on creation by the community (instead of for it) remains. But now we have nearly 50 million active daily users and millions of developers building experiences. What they do amazes and inspires us. Let’s Be Well is an experience about overcoming depression that a 12-year-old Canadian user, coping with his father’s suicide, designed to help destigmatize mental illness. Royale High is a virtual high-school experience where people can dress up any day of the week and socialize with friends. Built by a California developer now in her 20s, it has attracted billions of visits and numerous collaborators. Those are just two examples. Thanks to the creativity of our global Roblox community, users can walk fashion show runways, experience an eagle’s flight, figure out how to build a city, and flee natural disasters with their friends. Other companies offer creator economies and user-generated content (UGC), but at Roblox user innovation is not a nice-to-have alongside other things. It’s fundamental. We’re a community. And for us, community is the path to creating what many now know as the metaverse.

Opening the UGC Floodgates

The seeds of Roblox were planted for me during the creation of Knowledge Revolution, the company behind Interactive Physics, which I started with my brother Greg and the simulation gurus (and future Roblox team members) Erik Cassel, Keith Lucas, and Tim Loduha. Even as we sold that business in 1998 to MSC Software, where I worked for two years before taking a sabbatical, the notion of enabling meaningful cocreation stuck with me and with Erik. Our physics simulator was on the cusp of something interesting, but we wondered what it might be like to add avatars, a social element, and a hyperreal 3D world and run in the cloud. We were also inspired by the work of futurists and science fiction writers such as Arthur C. Clarke and Neal Stephenson. What would the next phase of human interaction be? Could we help create it?

We started coding. Soon we had a prototype, which we called DynaBlocks. A year and a half later we released the beta version and in 2006 had our official launch. Matt Dusek came on as technical director and John Shedletsky as creative director to help tackle the obstacles and put our ideas into action. Our first multiplayer experience was a wonder. About 20 users on the platform congregated in an experience called Crossroads. They suddenly realized they could build on top of their avatars and started carrying one another around on elaborate contraptions on their shoulders. It was inspiring—and fun. At first we had just wanted to prove that this kind of platform could work. But once we released Roblox Studio, our free creation engine, the UGC floodgates opened. Roblox Studio allows users to build basic things, such as drag-and-drop obstacle courses and models, and to create complex behaviour and experiences using our scripting language Luau.

We had a lot of work to do, however. Our 3D engine, animation system, and content curation all needed overhauling and improving. We envisioned how we could improve our financials without outside investments. One idea was a virtual economy based on our virtual currency, Robux, which we started building in 2007. Players would be rewarded for participation and could earn various benefits through Builders Club (now Roblox Premium), a membership program for users interested in rewards for creating virtual items and experiences on the platform.

In the form of their avatars, Gucci’s Alessandro Michele presents an award to Roblox creator cSapphire for metaverse design. We allowed players to outfit their avatars with shirts and body colours and then expanded customization to faces, hair, head shapes, and more. In 2013 we introduced the Developer Exchange, which enables developers and creators to turn their Robux into real money. Our developer community now earns more than half a billion dollars annually, helping our members start their own businesses, expand their teams, pay college tuition, invest, and much more. In the beginning Erik and I took turns moderating; all along it was our top priority to support a safe and diverse community and foster positive relationships and civility. So, we made constant improvements in our safety and civility systems, both for content on the platform and for communication.

Our Bedrock Values

Now that we have gone from four employees in San Mateo, California, to more than 1,500 people around the world, I’m proud that we are constantly innovating and that we always maintain and protect our core values. We are very clear about what those are. First, Respect the community—because we wouldn’t be where we are without our users and developers. From the early days we’ve insisted on a platform that balances freedom with civility. We went from a team of two moderators to large safety, civility, and moderation teams, working along with algorithms and user-flagging systems. We also support experiences at various levels of creation. You can be at a technology camp or in computer science class just learning to build or code, and your Roblox creation can go live. Not only that, but you don’t have to be a professional developer for your experience to catch on. Early users swarmed to some incredibly simple games and new, unexpected genres.

Second, Take the long view. When you’re working through challenges and hoping to grow a business, it’s natural to gravitate toward short-term wins. During that pivotal period when we needed more revenue, we spent months implementing the easy fixes on our list, such as online ads and simple enhancements to existing features. Ultimately, we decided that building fundamental systems—including our very own full virtual economy—was the better route, even though it would take much longer to execute. We continually ask ourselves, “What’s the long view here?” and “How can we build a system for this?” It always pays off.

Third, Take responsibility. This means how we conduct ourselves and also means applying an owner’s mindset to everything. Once a company reaches a certain size, leaders can’t be everywhere. Our employees need to think like founders. So, we encourage outside-the-box thinking, taking risks, and off-the-wall ideas, and we build systems that empower an inventor culture at scale.

Finally, get stuff done. Everyone at Roblox knows we need to keep iterating, improving, and “shipping” new products and updates. Even our interns ship features during their few months with us. As a result, we have gone from a collection of simplistic experiences to truly transforming how people come together. For example, there is an immersive Gucci Garden inspired by a physical exhibition that the fashion house set up in Florence, and an In the Heights experience that allows users to explore a virtual recreation of Washington Heights, the neighbourhood in which the Lin-Manuel Miranda musical and Warner Bros. movie was set, including dancing up the walls of buildings. We can’t do all this without the right staff. So, we recruit and hire smart, talented, creative, and capable individuals who share our vision and values. Our people also include our community members, from hobbyists to professional creators. We invest heavily in both groups.

Roblox Facts and Financials. Founded: 2004. Headquarters: San Mateo, California. Number of employees: 1500+. Area chart measures Roblox’s revenue and net loss attributable to shareholders from 20 18 to 2021. Revenue increased from 325 million dollars to 1.35 billion dollars, while net loss attributable to shareholders increased from 88 million dollars to 348 million dollars as of September 2021. The company notes that in the first nine months of 2021 its non-GAAP bookings rose to about 1.96 billion dollars, and that bookings are the gaming industry’s primary top-line metric, representing sales activity without giving effect to certain noncash adjustments. The company generated positive free cash flow while increasing investments in developer payouts, talent, infrastructure, trust, and safety. Source: Roblox. We’ve cultivated like-minded shareholders, too. In the beginning it was our own money. But as we grew, we connected with Altos Ventures and other long-view VC firms. When we decided to take the company public, we opted for a direct listing on the New York Stock Exchange so that our backers and vested employees could sell at the same price and individuals and institutions, from everyday Roblox users to hedge and mutual funds, could buy in at the same time. Most of our current shareholders understand we’re not managing our P&L to the month or the quarter. Creating the future of human interaction—the metaverse—is not a short-term endeavour. As with any company, the bigger we get, the more organizational structure matters, and we’re deliberate about how we build it. Each of our 14 major groups has, on average, four teams, with the goal of prompting the creativity and collaboration seen in start-ups of 10 to 20 people. Instead of 60 small companies we have 60 small teams that, guided by our mission, vision, and strategic road map, are innovating and executing autonomously.

We’ve started to think about our business this way: The most important product we’re building is the Roblox operating system—our culture, our people, and the way we run the company—and we use that to build the Roblox platform.

The Future of Human Co experience

Where are we going with all this? With enough computer power and bandwidth, parts of Roblox’s human co experience platform will look and feel more realistic than ever before and therefore more immersive and even more useful to even more people. Creators who want photorealism will get that, while those who still want a cartoon world will have that option. You’ll be able to attend a concert with 50,000 people and see and hear almost exactly what you would at a live venue. Avatars will become more sophisticated, letting people be whomever they want to be online.

For an eight-year-old, Roblox will be an engaging alternative to a local playground on a rainy day. A middle or high school student can tour ancient Rome, join a mission to Mars, or learn a foreign language with students halfway around the world. Aspiring young designers were recently able to attend the exclusive Fashion Awards 2021 at London’s iconic Royal Albert Hall virtually on Roblox. A mom of two teenage daughters, housebound during the Covid crisis, used our platform to spend time “snowboarding” with them. Businesses may choose to have fully virtual workplaces, with avatars engaging in the same watercooler conversations and brainstorming sessions they’d have at the office, but from anywhere. We’ve done this ourselves during the pandemic, with weekly employee town halls in our virtual headquarters.

Some may worry that time spent in this virtual world will take away from real life. We see our platform enhancing life for so many. And we know that emerging forms of media always raise concerns at first. In the 1800s philosophers said children were reading too much. In the 1960s and 1970s parents thought TV was a problem. Today it’s social media and online games. We believe we are reimagining how people come together to connect, play, work, and learn in ways that open up opportunities that wouldn’t otherwise be available and are as impressive as the ones that novelists and filmmakers have imagined. Interest in the concept of the metaverse has been spreading rapidly of late. We believed it was the future decades ago. For 16 years we’ve been making immersive shared experiences a reality. This is the next phase of human interaction and a new economy that anyone can be part of. Let’s build it together.

And breath……………. or better still,

 Join me and my conscious,

no join me and my subconscious,

listen fella’s now is not the time, our friends here in the front row are ready to scream and scream out loud yea shall and at the top of your voices.

Are you people really fucking serious, “Avatars will become more sophisticated, letting people be whomever they want to be online” which affords the paedophiles and groomers of the world the shadows to exist and prey upon our children, being enticed in to a digital currency gambling based DEATH verse that Trevor Haynes from the Harvard University so expertly portrayed within the Dopamine, Smartphones & You: A battle for your time - Science in the News (harvard.edu)

presented above and for that 8 year jacking up on the digital crack pipe, those visionary creatives pouring their trauma into digital wraps for so many to get their fix from must feel like a Win Winnie for Wintermeyer and is army of cyborgs all bought into the child slavery driven by co-dependency and digital trauma bonds that are party to walking that young boy to the centre of the road, with sirens all around him whilst watching his mother pixelate into choking smog of anxiety and dysregulation as the fear grows and isolation becomes such an attraction as each dopamine hit compounds a misery only heard and retorted by the conscious narcissist rising from the embers of a loving childhood dancing in the rain and bellowing his choices at the rapidly diminishing intuition and instinct that danced so lovingly as each rain drop hit his skin and each puddle, muddy and otherwise we stamped in challenged only by the unrestricted laughter of those playing freely alongside him.    

And the pipe, what of the pipe and those metal tracks of the “caterpillar”?

Well as one crashed against the other and the nine year old now 23 married with two very young children instinctively stepped forward to restrict the collision the weight of the world was quite literally bestowed upon him, and sat here now in peaceful calm accompanied by Johan Brahms and his Chorale Preludes I can truthfully tell you I asked for this journey and was rightly gifted the tasks undertaken and passed so as to have the honour to a lighten my quill for energy source way above my standing and be the prophet speaking and writing those words poured through me. For it was in the pit of the storm that this young man screamed to the grey and thundering skies “Is that all you’ve fucking got” as the rain poured and the sides of the hole, he stood fell in around him.

Well, a resounding no appears to be the answer as the tracks of the “machine” inch by inch climbed his body like each step he was to climb himself some 30 years later, although we shall arrive at that summit in due course and the pain felt was strangely vacant as the nervous system kicked in and twisted my body a full 180 degrees breaking my own pelvis but keeping the top half of me out of the line of the tracks and keeping me alive. However, it was Gary Diggory and a very reactive driver who screamed “go back” and in doing so shattered my femur and broke a number of other bits of me.

One might ask

“How do you lay in the mud and wet of plough field compressed into mother earth”

You close down the mind and let the nervous system and subconscious handle the situation in a manner that keeps the pain to a bearable level, how did my father walk from the flames with 90% burns and how do so many acts of physical attainment happen so effortlessly …………. we flow, we quieten the screaming, panicking mind going crazy like a narcissist caught out as the imposter it tends to be and the “knowing” subconscious moves into disaster recovery mode and shuts down the interfering elements of the operating system that will impact upon the optimum restore settings and if we then jump into the officially recognised work then we can now apply the above knowing that Fight, Flight, Freeze, or Fawn are the optimum reactions that the subconscious uses in moments of extreme danger.

My mind was quietened and my intuition knew that if I remained as still as possible, I would be able to control the pain to a manageable level and it was only when the “where does it hurt mate” or the “are your okay’s” interrupted that equilibrium that the conscious mind jumped back in screaming out all manner of expressions based upon fear and fragility, when the subconscious was formulating control from a deep sense of knowing.

I can always recall in that moment of serenity when my contract was made with God and it might well take a second book to roll out the idiosyncrasies of that commitment.

“God, don’t let me die without seeing my children” and here we are delivering my end of that bargain, for in that moment I swore to do anything and that has been the driving force behind the journey that sees us all so deeply connected in this moment, moments we can repeat and repeat, those minor miracles, those moments we have become so swift to take for granted and moments that have truly changed our lives.

However, it’s in these moments of stillness and quiet that the snipers of the “300” are seeking to grab the attention of our conscious mind and drown out that silence with bullets of armour piercing quality so as to contextually target us all as I’ve presented thus far. Hundreds of boardrooms full of surface readers in suits, awaiting the next digital straight jacket that will see its audience LOCKED into its products and services they somehow negotiate with themselves is going to be a benefit to those their inner voice is holding them to account over.

“Quants” I believe is the technical term in “Wallstreet” for those who create the soulless algorithms who feast like sharks on the lost Nemo’s of the digital sea, although we might be forgiven for calling them something similar given the same rhythmic execution.

What you don’t see, are the pieces of the jigsaw showing those same CEO’s, VP’s and the like suffering their voice of their conscience, their subconscious and it’s the poetry of Nick Long, of Longy and the gospel Trash that has been the gateway for my own subconscious to “climb out of the abyss” since our own fated meeting at the “Sundeck” when he sang for the universe and all she had to say ….like a mother to us all silenced by the know it all ego of our self-centred, self-serving methodology that has now run out of plausible ways of distracting us.

“With a cigarette in hand you try to understand….. where you wanna go

You’re just running for tomorrow

You can cover up the lies you have to face in time….. where you wanna go

You’re just running for tomorrow

Spotify – Songs from the Seaside

How the global ego “AMERICA” is now viewed as the desperate child lost in a tailspin of panic as the learned gentlemen so full of dreams and aspiration for humanity were one by one picked from the tree of knowledge and feasted upon by the serpents duly following the narrative spewed out by the flying monkeys of the narcissistic society, each so desperately seeking their own moment in the spotlight to justify the screams of every lie they’ve told themselves to maintain their race for life and the trinkets and treasure miraged as booty and reward for a “job well done”

If money is your only driver and the barometer for attainment then how could we have arrived at any other place then here right now, dripping in materialistic opulence that contradicts the “Climate Change” narrative that the pantomime players need to drive forward so as to protect the fabrication of the illusion and push the valuations and thus self-worship via their own dopamine addictions to another all time high.

We are at this stage beyond the point of the Child Snatcher calling out the names of our children and promising them the digital candy of all they ever wanted, and with Dan Buszucki (Roblox CEO) coercing our children into the forest and promising them all that glitters is gold, then we are very deeply and darkly in a place of DEATH that the METAVERSE has been named to be.

The death of the soul, well to coin my brother again

“Be careful what you wish for”

for it is at that point of we are our most alive, and at our most alive we will fight for survival

“Well, its all coming back now memories of what I buried”

WOW … did you feel that too………………...?

Yet another moment of collective resonance, for we were born with every modality needed for the optimum life path, we simply chose restitution in monitory value rather than a vocational journey that in the end and on every pathway, the mirror becomes so intense that we either seek to alter our faces, believing that will alter the mindset or we shatter into a million little pieces and feel the rapture of “returning to Christ” falling to your knees begging for forgiveness of the abuse you have bestowed upon yourself, your inner child and in that moment under the eyes of GOD you do and I can tell you in way that is so pure nothing can pull you from the commitment of conviction, no matter how one might be enticed by the “movements of the classics” and the now rubber bullets of the broken souled snipers, seen as frighten very little boys and girls as we stare backwards down the telescopic sights of their digital weaponry.

You know, I can’t say a word

Tell me I’m gonna wake up soon

It’s not like they said

The sugar-coat we see is really there.

……

Well, I walked in the shadows of the wreck

I came to tell you I am resurrect

I have front but no respect

Cut the chains from the walls

Got myself in shape

This time I come rolling the thunder

With all that I can muster

It’s a changing of the guard

And I’m stepping on the …ogre’s eye

It’s a message from above

I was born an accident but I’ll die with love.

Spotify – Songs from the Seaside