The Anything-but-Meta-Verse
Yes, we need Virtual Reality, but no, not from Meta.
Now that VR seems once again poised to go mainstream, Mark Zuckerberg has been trying to PR his way into monopolizing it. This means rebranding Facebook as “Meta”, appropriating the name “Metaverse” from Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash” novel, and pushing uninspired and pedestrian ads like this:
Like anything pertaining to new tech, the reactions are predictably visceral, and many are quite justifiably negative. Many of those could be easily dismissed as uninformed and knee-jerk, but I believe they are symptoms of a deep cognitive dissonance.
Virtual Reality is bankrupt.
Virtual Reality as it has been conceived and implemented so far is seriously lacking in humanity, in warmth, in grit, in nuance, in morality, in sensuality. It’s an engineer’s dystopic approximation of their myopic misperception of life. It’s an asperger’s universe, mostly purged of the human and natural elements, and sorely lacking in culture and style. As an alternative to reality, as an escape from it, it’s ill-conceived, inhuman and dangerous.
