The Metaverse Has Always Been a Dystopian Idea

[Nevilledog]

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Brian Merchant
@bcmerchant
I wrote about how the recent explosion of "metaverse" discourse in Silicon Valley misses a crucial fact — the concept originated as a deeply dystopian idea, and it remains one today

The Metaverse Has Always Been a Dystopian Idea
Silicon Valley CEOs keep hailing its imminent arrival as they hawk digital goods, but the metaverse was a dystopian idea from its inception.
vice.com
7:46 AM · Jul 30, 2021

https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7eqbb/the-metaverse-has-always-been-a-dystopia


A big shift is apparently underway in Silicon Valley.

The company that operates the world’s largest and most profitable social media network will not, according to its CEO, be a social media company much longer. In an announcement that inspired a fervid wave of speculation, analysis, and mockery, Mark Zuckerberg proclaimed that Facebook is going to become a “metaverse company” instead.

Facebook will pivot from being a website that is accessed through phones and laptops, Zuckerberg says, to a next generation computing platform where the focus is on a user’s “presence,” and is accessed through VR via Facebook’s Oculus headset, or other Facebook products like Portal. “I think over the next five years or so,” Zuckerberg told the Verge’s Casey Newton, “we will effectively transition from people seeing us as primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company.”

Elsewhere in the big tech landscape, Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft—at the time of writing the second largest company in the world in terms of market capitalization—has been promoting his aim to build an “Enterprise Metaverse.” At a Microsoft Inspire keynote talk back in May, and on a July earnings call, Nadella described this as “a new layer of the infrastructure stack” where “the digital and physical worlds converge.”

It’s not just Microsoft and Facebook. A widening swath of Silicon Valley’s investor class, cheerleading pundits, and influential founders have been hyping the so-called metaverse, too. Tim Sweeney, the CEO of Epic Games, which runs Fortnite, has for years been promoting the metaverse as the fast-arriving future. The venture capitalist Matthew Ball attempted to chart its potential and explain why it is “likely to produce trillions in value.” David Baszucki, the founder of the gaming platform Roblox, sung its praises and underlined its import in a January piece for WIRED.

*snip*

[Cyrano]

1. I'll be a Luddite on this and opt out

[Nevilledog]

2. I also find it unappealing.

[empedocles]

3. From the key dystopian source in the cite:

“This imaginary place is known as the Metaverse,” as Neal Stephenson wrote.

*The hero of Snow Crash is named Hiro, and he is a gig worker delivery driver who moonlights as a hacker, and lives in abject poverty in a 20x30 storage unit he shares with an alcoholic roommate. “Hiro spends a lot of time in the metaverse. It beats the shit out of the U-Stor-It.” . . .


The U.S. as we know it has ceased to exist, and corporate entities and organized crime control whole city-states. Workers like Hiro can be killed for taking too long to deliver a pizza, and they are driven into the metaverse underworld to find extralegal work and enough money to make ends meet. The only reasonably safe places in the physical world are heavily fortressed “burbclaves” where the wealthy reside behind batteries of guns and gated communities.

[Buns_of_Fire]

4. And now you know why Bill Gates microchipped us all with a vaccine.

Soon, whatever you think you might want will be delivered to you automatically and billed to your Metaccount (tm). This will encourage highly structured thinking, since there isn't really much difference between "I'd like a banana split" and "I sure wish a rabid hippopotamus would break in here while I'm asleep and eat me alive".