I’ve already visited Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse and I don’t want to do it again

When Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg explained his metaverse vision in a keynote video presentation he showed viewers a clean, well-lit virtual world, where people could play virtual games, experience virtual concerts, hang out with each other’s virtual avatars and attend virtual work meetings.

I don’t know if anyone else is thinking what I’m thinking but – apart from the “well-lit” and avatars part – the metaverse sounds a lot like 2021 lockdown to me.

Zoom cocktails, Teams meetings, virtual singalongs from everybody’s lounge rooms? No thank you! We’ve already experienced a tasting plate version of the metaverse and if anecdotal evidence is anything to go by, nobody enjoyed it. It was a virtual hell where the sound was on delay and if you laughed too loudly at someone’s joke you rendered everyone else at the party mute.

But wait, says Zuckerberg, the metaverse is “not about spending more time on screens, it’s about making the time we spend on the internet better”.

Still, sensing my troglodyte reticence, Zuckerberg seeks to beguile me further. “The best way to understand the metaverse,” he says in his robotic keynote pitch, “is to experience it yourself.” He then shows me how he can choose clothes for his avatar (so fun!) before “hanging out” in what looks like the Star Trek flight deck with all of his mawkishly “fun” virtual friends. They play cards, check out some 3D street art and have awkward virtual banter that is very triggering because it reminds me of the last Zoom social event I attended before lockdown ended.

Zuckerberg is nothing, if not a classic narcissist. In creating his metaverse, he seeks to create the world he would like to inhabit: a place where someone who is socially challenged and seeks to avoid natural sunlight can divorce themselves from their physical self and exist bodily within the internet as a “best me” digital avatar.

Call me paranoid, but I’m starting to think that Zuckerberg’s end game is to stop all of us from existing physically in the real world. I think he wants to “make the time spent on the internet better” so that he can turn us all into 24/7 flubby, docile sources of advertising revenue. In truth, his ideal for the metaverse is a world where the internet is so satisfying, you won’t want or need to leave it for the real world.

So, before you get on board the metaverse, remember what we all learned in lockdown, the internet is like a great holiday destination; it’s a nice place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.

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