Behold the Metaverse

Ever since Facebook overlord Mark Zuckerberg rebranded his company as “Meta” and announced his plan to go full speed ahead with the “metaverse,” I’ve been skeptical and a bit worried. The metaverse, a term that originated with Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (at long last, we have created the torment nexus), combines virtual reality (the sort of thing you need a headset to experience) and augmented reality, in which technology places digital elements in the real world (think Pokemon GO). In an interview with the Verge, he described it further:

What virtual and augmented reality can do, and what the metaverse broadly is going to help people experience, is a sense of presence that I think is just much more natural in the way that we’re made to interact. And I think it will be more comfortable. The interactions that we have will be a lot richer, they’ll feel real. In the future, instead of just doing this over a phone call, you’ll be able to sit as a hologram on my couch, or I’ll be able to sit as a hologram on your couch, and it’ll actually feel like we’re in the same place, even if we’re in different states or hundreds of miles apart. So I think that that is really powerful.

In typical Silicon Valley fashion, this conception disregards the human and assumes that ever-greater penetration of technology that draws us away from the physical world is an unqualified good. Hence my primary concern with the metaverse — which other companies, not just Meta, will attempt to dominate — is that it will entice a great many souls into an ever-more-pervasive and thorough digital existence. Reality itself will become an afterthought. As Grayson Quay put it for us last year, virtual reality, the more “dystopian” of the two aspects of the metaverse, “fully disincarnates the user, placing very aspect of his reality in the hands of omnipotent Silicon Valley overlords,” while “the real world goes to pot.” And augmented reality blurs the line between real and fake, threatening a resurgence of Gnosticism, “the favorite heresy of all post- and trans-humanists.”

Indeed. So the metaverse is concerning, especially the attendant innovations that may accompany it, such as, supposedly, a scheme by Zuckerburg to track product users’ eyeballs for advertising purposes. However, earlier indications are that we may be some way off from the metaverse from really taking root — except, perhaps, for people like the weirdos who work for metaverse-adjacent companies and were profiled recently in the New York Times for attending a virtual wedding. Behold, however, this sample of a “rave” in the metaverse:

Wow. Looks like a great time. But I’ll take the real world. And I think most people would do the same.

For now . . .