Fear and Loathing of the Metaverse

Summary: The Metaverse. The concept has been there since 1992, but not many people paid a lot of attention to it until Mark Zuckerberg mentioned it like 72 times in the process of announcing that he was changing his company’s name to Meta, which is so, not, meta. Now, all of a sudden, the Internet is buzzing with conversations about the metaverse, which is not to be confused with the <a href="https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Multiverse">multiverse of Marvel comics</a>. There are web articles numbering in the millions, podcasts in the hundreds, and quiet conversations among technophobes who are at the point of needing their anxiety medication increased. Most of that content is little more than noise. Why, then, would I spend my valuable time talking about a topic that is already saturating the interested market? Admittedly, part of my reason is knowing that simply having the name in the title will generate more hits than we might normally get. I’m not against pandering just a little bit every once in a while. I’m more interested, though, in debunking a lot of the nonsense that I’m seeing in all this glut of information and calming some of the ridiculous fears that people seem to have about the topic. I get it, when Mark Zuckerberg, whose trust factor is already about as low as any corporate CEO can get, says that he’s building an online world that will suck us in more than anything else he’s done, the mind tends to shudder at the prospects. It’s difficult to see Zuckerberg ruling over anything other than a dystopian nightmare. But here’s the thing: Mark Zuckerberg isn’t in charge of the metaverse. He never was, he never will be, and by its very nature, the most he can do is offer an alternative. His may be all glitzy and glamorous and contain a lot of things you think you want, but his will definitely not be the only option, and it already is not the first option out there. You read that right. There are pieces of the metaverse available to you now if you’re really interested and have that much expendable cash lying around. The difference is that what exists now is severely limited and not nearly as immersive as some are envisioning. There’s also the fact that the technology isn’t close to providing the deeply consuming alternative reality that some people imagine. This type of development takes time and comes with a lot of glitches along the way, glitches that could doom a metaverse project from the start if they’re not addressed before rollout. So, let’s try and get a better handle on this thing called the metaverse. We’ll try to break it down into easily digestible chunks so that it doesn’t take up all the space you need for thanksgiving dinner. The Metaverse Started As Fiction The metaverse is a child of the 1990s, born in 1992, the same year as my first child. We named our offspring Zachariah. Neal Stephenson named his <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40651883-snow-crash?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=g22LXKTat1&rank=1">Snow Crash</a>. His main character was named Hiro Protagonist (no, really), a pizza delivery person of mixed race who spends all his non-working hours running down bad guys in an online world threatened by hackers. In the real world, he’s pretty much a nobody, but in the metaverse, he’s a warrior prince. Sitting here in 2021, the plot sounds almost trite. In 1992, though, the book was confusing to anyone not actively involved in this burgeoning thing called the world wide web, which, at the time, was more theory than reality. Some considered the book a knockoff of the 1982 video-game-inspired movie, <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084827/?"></a>

Fear and Loathing of the Metaverse

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