I try to pay no attention to the Metaverse, or if I can help it, Meta itself. I refused to even try a pair of VR goggles at a friend's house when they were offered.
So of course, this article by Kate Knibbs from Wired, called The Metaverse Doesn't Have a Leg to Stand on, confirms my priors, and I am compelled to record some of its best quotes:
Zuckerberg’s particular metaverse can barely provide the expected number of limbs, let alone the sensation that those limbs are somewhere they’re not, cozying up with long-distance loved ones. Far from feeling “deeply present,” people who currently traverse Horizon Worlds must do so while wearing a clunky headset that requires frequent charging, which means that not only are they not transcending the “little window” of a screen, but they are also physically tethered to a charger.
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Do we really want to plop our bodies down, ignore corporeal existence, and instead spend a good chunk of our wild and precious lives in a corporate-controlled simulacrum? ...Big Tech leaders, Zuckerberg in particular, have made an audacious bet that they can profit off the metaverse. This does not make it something people automatically want.
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The metaverse is ... a “pseudo-place.” It’s an artificially manufactured location, one which might be entertaining enough to visit but which cannot offer the human connection it advertises, nor any underlying reason for its existence beyond profit. This all comes back to Silicon Valley’s twinned obsessions with scale and speculation. The metaverse is understood by the world’s profiteers to be a frontier created specifically to be colonized; its purpose is wealth extraction.
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This metaverse stumble ... is ... notable for how well it explains the overarching problem with our modern-day oligarchy: They have too much money to throw at bad ideas.
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I refuse.
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(Have you read Ready Player One, and more specifically Ready Player Two? I don't need their vision of the world, which fits all too well with the Metaverse.)
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