Sorry metaverse, but I‘m pulling the pin on living in a virtual world

Having been shown an array of new technologies, Joe Hildebrand has decided to pull the pin on a virtual world. Here’s why.

THIS week I attended a conference in which a couple of very smart people outlined the exciting array of new technologies on the horizon, and I made a decision there and then.

I’m done. I’m out. I’m pulling the pin.

I do not want to live in a virtual world. I do not want all my wants and needs anticipated by
machines, and I do not want to wear those weird immersive headsets, which we all know everyone is just going to end up using for porn.

And it’s probably just as well, because I wouldn’t know how to do any of that anyway and, even if someone else did it for me, I wouldn’t know how to make it stop.

And the truth is, new technology doesn’t like me much either. When one very nice and very smart lady plonked her virtual reality goggles on my head in an effort to show me the “metaverse”, the metaverse spontaneously imploded. All I could see was a collection of loose squiggly lines, which may well have been an image of my brain.

Virtual reality goggles. Picture: Rodger Bosch/AFP

This is not to say that I disapprove of new technology. In fact, I want others to have it in abundance. I just don’t want anything to do with it – much like Splendour in the Grass or sex after marriage.

Besides, can anyone really look me in the eye and tell me that any good has ever come from TikTok or those weird robot vacuum cleaners?

Nor do I want to say goodbye to technology altogether, I’m just saying that once Uber Eats was invented, we probably didn’t need to take it any further – a bit like how we now know that civilisation peaked in the 1990s but nobody appreciated it at the time.

Were CDs really so bad? Will we ever have lyric sheets again? Did Beyonce really not know what the word “spaz” means?

These are the burning questions of our age.

And if you want to find out the answers, there’s apparently a popular online search engine you can go to. I think it’s called Infoseek.

Originally published as Sorry metaverse, but I‘m pulling the pin on living in a virtual world