Meet Me in the Metaverse
I am greeting the future with a serene smile
For a brief period a few years ago, I wrote for a certain famous satirical newspaper named after a bulb vegetable. Something they tell you to avoid writing is a “Headline That Does Nothing More Than Combine Two Items In The News.”
That’s just what Sony and TIME did the other day on the Playstation Blog (Support local journalism!) with their big announcement: “Celebrating MLK: TIME Studios presents March Through Time in Fortnite.” Apparently, you will now be able to watch Dr. Martin Luther King give the I Have A Dream speech in Fortnite.
Um. Uhhhhhhh Wait what? ???? I didn’t have that on my 2021 bingo board. He’s gonna be flossing? Dabbing?? Little kids will think he’s a “Fortnite guy”! 😭😭😂 Man, I’m turning into that evil supervillain guy who dresses like Katt Williams! (Ed. Note: He means The Joker.)
No, this is not something I particularly care about. Fortnite, like all video games, is kid stuff for babies. I am a grown-up big boy with more important things to worry about, like getting out of my potty pants and learning subtraction.
In related news, Facebook unveiled its virtual reality office on CBS This Morning, the next step in Mark Zuckerberg’s lifelong dream of cybering with Gayle King. Facebook believes that the future of work takes place in a VR conference room. The product was rightfully panned. It combines the clunky, dehumanizing loneliness of remote work with the awkward faux-congeniality of the office, without any of the snacks or sexual tension that make it worthwhile.
I was able to test a beta version of Horizon Workrooms, and I’m happy to report that traditional time-wasting methods can still be employed at the virtual office:
Both the Fortnite Civil Rights experience and Facebook’s digi-office are attempts at creating the “metaverse.” The term comes from a 1992 novel by Neal Stephenson called Snow Crash. It basically means the type of existence you see in The Matrix, Ready Player One, or Tron, where digital and physical reality converge. Right now, we use the Internet. Eventually, we’ll be in the Internet. The metaverse is just about the biggest buzzword in tech. It’s one of my favorite concepts to scream into a woman’s ear in a crowded bar.
Facebook’s metaverse attempt, like pretty much everything they make, is clunky and lame. It’s not a good demonstration of what it will actually be like. The best examples come from the two places new technology always takes off: children and the military. (Pornography is the third example. There’s porn in the metaverse for sure, but people can’t last 30 seconds playing those games!)
The most prominent examples of an existing metaverse are video games like Roblox or Fortnite. (Use of the term surged following Roblox’s IPO. Their filing included the word “metaverse” more than a dozen times.) And it makes sense. Kids are the best early adopters. If you’ve ever seen a slack-jawed toddler at a restaurant, staring blankly into the iPad while his family talks around them, you know what living in the Internet looks like.
There are scarier, serious examples of metaverse development. Microsoft has a $22 billion contract to build “mixed reality” goggles for the Army. The military already uses video games to recruit drone pilots, since talented gamers make for the best operators, and they already play Call of Duty. Video games are war and war is video games. Physical reality and digital reality converge. That’s the metaverse.
Mark Zuckerberg is wrong about the metaverse. It’s not a crappy version of real life with anodyne avatars. It doesn’t mean putting on a scuba mask to use the computer. The metaverse is because someone figured out exactly who you are and who you think and made you afraid of everything. It’s shitting out your intestinal walls because someone posted that it cures Covid. It’s making plans with someone on your phone, looking it up on your phone, following directions on your phone, paying for the subway with your phone, paying for your meal with your phone, taking pictures of the food with your phone, and sharing them with your phone. It’s waking up, looking at your phone, working on your computer, relaxing in front of your TV, and falling asleep on your phone. We already live in the metaverse. Make yourself at home. 😁