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Everyone’s Wrong About the Metaverse
Also Mark Zuckerberg.
The Connect 2021 keynote took place in the middle of the maelstrom surrounding Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg. Zuck presented Facebook’s future endeavors but not without acknowledging the weirdness to be doing so at the same time the company is being riddled with critics from users and policymakers alike. First, he disclosed the rebrand — and face wash — to Meta, an overarching name to encompass Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram, Messenger, and Oculus. This change would, in Zuck’s words, help them shift from “being a social media company to being a metaverse company.”
Second, some long-awaited news: The metaverse. Zuckerberg revealed his dream of building a world beyond our physical reality, “an embodied internet where you’re in the experience, not just looking at it.” The metaverse would be a place to immerse yourself and share the space with distant friends or family, a place to work from home next to your colleagues, or a place to play, create, and imagine; the internet 2.0.
As it happens each time Silicon Valley lays out hints about what's coming, people have gone crazy. Some think the metaverse is the future and we’ll spend just as much time there as in the real world — if not more —, while others see in it a “dystopian nightmare” that will only add to the mental health and addiction crises.
