The Metaverse Is Bad
Updated at 2:45 p.m. ET on October 28, 2021
In science fiction, the end of the world is a tidy affair. Climate collapse or an alien invasion drives humanity to flee on cosmic arks, or live inside a simulation. Real-life apocalypse is more ambiguous. It happens slowly, and there’s no way of knowing when the Earth is really doomed. To depart our world, under these conditions, is the same as giving up on it.
And yet, some of your wealthiest fellow earthlings would like to do exactly that. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and other purveyors of private space travel imagine a celestial paradise where we can thrive as a “.” That’s the dream of films such as and . Now comes news that Mark Zuckerberg has embraced, that we can plug ourselves into a big computer and while reality decays around us. According to a this week from , the Facebook chief may soon rebrand his company to mark its change in focus from social media to “the metaverse.” [Update: He’s gone ahead and done it! One week after this piece was first published, Zuckerberg that the company will now be known as “Meta.”]
