I promise this is not about Covid-19 or the incredibly bad messaging around public health guidance or the high number of people who refuse to take basic life-saving measures. That’s a post for another day. This post, this question of are we getting dumber is prompted primarily by this:
What the actual fuck is this? Imagine how little imagination it takes to create a fake universe and have it look as terrible or worse than this one? Yes, we’re creating a utopia where you can um shop for stuff and pay fake money, where bottles of wine can be bought next to canned ham. Sign me up!
The whole idea of the metaverse to me has been brain numbing. I think about it and then I cannot think because every other base instinct seems to be rushing to be at the forefront of my brain. Rage? Loathing? A deep sadness for humanity? How about all of them all at once? We can’t be this stupid. And yet.
Are we using fake money to shop for fake wine in the metaverse? Did we really build a fake universe and decide to keep capitalism, the current version as it exists in the US with all of its very obvious flaws, intact in this fake universe? I have so many questions about such a lazy exercise.
I knew the metaverse was going to be stupid once Facebook got in on the act. The company’s leadership has lacked imagination from the start, riding the wave from a crude dating site that turned into a social network that turned into a lucrative propaganda machine, all the while ignoring the broader societal consequences. So it’s not shocking that in the early days of Meta’s metaverse, a lot of the problems that Facebook fostered on their platform have made their way to this virtual universe.
Creating a virtual universe where capitalism is the dominant economic system, where harassment is prevalent, where people shop at Walmart of all places and people walk around and are bound by many of the same physical and economic limitations that the real world presents is just an immense waste of time and resources. Does anyone in their right mind think this is utopia? For the users, especially those few excited by Facebook’s presence in the metaverse, can you really be excited by all this knowing what we know about Mark Zuckerberg and his company in the real world? Lastly, instead of building a bullshit world that somehow looks and feels worse than this one we have, why not put that energy toward just improving the real world?
Most films about virtual reality tend to be dystopian, but some tech CEOs, in their seemingly infinite capacity for stupidity, have decided to just go ahead and build the dystopian thing. Worse than dystopian, the applications touted are just so incredibly boring.
Oh great, a virtual conference call. We’ve taken a real conference call and made it worse. I’d much rather see people as they are or even just pictures of people than avatars. Imagine the logistics here too. So in order to do the conference call, I first have to create my avatar, which look almost exactly the same in graphic quality as Miis from Nintendo 15 years ago. Then I have to strap on a ridiculous looking headset so I can then call into my conference call and “experience it” in the metaverse. Or, and follow me here because I know this can be complicated, I can open my laptop and hit a button and join a call in 2 seconds that has me seeing and talking to real people in this world. But somehow the clunky thing is innovation.
We have a world. It’s great at times and when it’s not, it’s almost always our fault. We can make it better if we give a shit enough to try. But having the richest people put their resources into building a fake world worse than this one, all so they can get even more rich, is just such a colossal societal failure. If they can’t help fix and improve this world that people actually live in, they shouldn’t have their wealth. We can fix a lot of global problems through equitable distribution of resources. Taxing extremely wealthy people and using those funds to provide services to others who need it. Or we can keep doing this nonsense of having obscenely rich people build staggeringly banal fake worlds in an effort to goose quarterly earnings, all the while taking more and more resources to power these fake worlds. We have no shortage of global crises (a pandemic, rising fascism, climate change, societal upheaval due to broad dissatisfaction with life as it is now, ever present tension between nations due to the other factors listed, etc.), and we can build all the stupid fake worlds we want, but they won’t mean shit if we don’t take care of this actual world we live in.