Metaverse

So pack it all in then. Away with the wisecracking butterfly that sits on your shoulder during work meetings. Out with the Gamorrean Guards who play Texas Hold’em with you around a floating table. The metaverse, Mark Zuckerberg’s fever dream of a virtual-reality infused world, is dead. That’s assuming it was ever alive and kicking in the first place. To assess just how “real” the metaverse ever was, we need to go back to its inception in the fall of 2021. That was when Zuckerberg released a video of himself in suspiciously Steve Jobs-esque garb — black shirt and pants, sneakers — tooling around what he called a “home space” that brimmed with holographic bric-a-brac.

"Innovation comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don't get on the wrong track or try to do too much,” said the late Steve Jobs. “We're always thinking about new markets we could enter, but it's only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important." These days, Team Apple is all about finding new markets, no matter how removed they are from the company's core focus. Jobs once flirted with an advertising-supported operating system but ultimately gave it a pass. Now, in a strange twist, Apple is doing just that — selling ads in its services that are part of its platform. It wants to become a pooh-bah of digital advertising (it had tried before in 2010 with iAds, an effort that fizzled out).

The way I see it, there are two options for the future: a transplanetary society or a transhuman one. What got me thinking about this was right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel’s recent interview with Mary Harrington, which she wrote up in UnHerd. As Harrington puts it, Thiel’s diagnosis of modern social ills is not that “progress is inevitably self-destructive,” but that we’ve been making the wrong kind of progress. "We’ve had continued progress in the world of computers, bits, internet, mobile internet, but it’s a narrow zone of progress. And it’s been more interior, atomizing and inward-focused,” Thiel said. Meanwhile, “there’s been limited progress in the world of atoms.” So far, so good. But then the interview took a strange turn.

Take my hand, darling, and off we go into the metaverse. It's a whole new world...or at least it's a new world...maybe a brave new world? Enter Mark Zuckerberg, that Titanic captain of industry, who last week released a video introducing his latest plan to leave his Nike shoeprint upon reality. It's called the metaverse, and while even the savviest tech writers are grasping to explain what it is, it appears to be the fusion of our world with the virtual. Big Zuck wants what's on our screens to spill over into real life. We lived on farms, then we lived in cities, now we will live in "home spaces" with digitally rendered pterodactyls flying just outside the windows.