Just an opinion: Why I already hate the ‘metaverse’

Thanks to Stella Jacob and Ye Jinghan on Unsplash

I already hate the ‘metaverse’. Just one glance at people sat in isolation wearing those weird electronic blindfolds puts me off.

Isolated spaces

The images I’m seeing show people clad in white goggles that seem way too big for their heads. Wearers are utterly disconnected from their local physical environment.

Voluntarily locked in these virtual cells, connection becomes curated, experience monetized and reality edited and resold as illusions created by the world’s biggest corporations. We sacrifice our actual lived experience for all encompassing realities across sight and sound that are packaged, marketed and sold to us.

We shall be left to sit in isolated spaces, spaces in which even our experiential experience of nearby reality is limited and sanitized.

Think how Facebook has both enabled and disabled real relationships.

I’m full of concern that these machines will build new electronic walls around our consciousness. That as our experiences become more virtual the vast corporations creating these digital realities will indulge themselves in a mass colonization of the mind, taking possession of our most visceral experience with their own made for profit ‘experiences’.

I really hate it.

There’s a real difference between playing a computer game for a few hours in the den, and locking yourself away from all external reality to indulge in a virtual world.

It’s gonna make lots of money, of course…

Meta and Oculus Quest game developers right now pic.twitter.com/VnUBIvnHg7

— Ben Geskin (@BenGeskin) December 27, 2021

Some innovative new developers will create huge new fortunes.

Those developers will be lionized.

You’ll see them on the covers of magazines.

They’ll say ‘Anyone can do it’.

But anyone cannot do it.

Because it will be business as usual. Their success will disguise that in the new digital enclosures within which humanity is defined and constrained, most money will inexorably travel into the hands of corporations. The occasional independent success is little more than a ‘rags to riches’ narrative to help disguise an utterly non-virtual reality in which riches gather riches far more often than rags ever do.

Money isn’t meritocracy.

And this will be just as true in these virtual spaces as it already is in physical reality.

These new frontier towns will also create opportunity for bad actors. This already seems to be happening, according to claims from the Center for Countering Digital Hate.

Facebook/ Oculus/ Metaverse is not safe for our kids.

I wrote to Facebook this morning, sending them 100 examples of *horrifying* behavior we found every 7 minutes in the #Metaverse.

Child grooming, racism, even mockery of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

We need action, now. https://t.co/4GncMsRrtA pic.twitter.com/I9zry4PyrR

— Imran Ahmed (@Imi_Ahmed) December 30, 2021

I do hope Apple’s approach delivers a better compromise between our inherent humanity and the ghastly digital dungeons I sense each time I see people wearing these things.

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