Metaverse Mayhem

Home Opinion Metaverse Mayhem
Metaverse Mayhem
Mark Zuckerberg changes Facebook’s name to Metaverse | Flickr

After years of toying with society and all its users, Mark Zuckerberg has revealed his most sophisticated fantasy yet: the Metaverse. What would have been a Black Mirror episode five years ago has become our reality. 

Our social media-saturated society is the teaser for Zuckerberg’s fantasy. But instead of boomerangs and status updates, we’ll soon have faux sunsets and virtual living rooms. The Metaverse will be an almost entirely immersive experience featuring virtual reality and augmented reality. It will allow users to do almost everything they can in real life within the confines of the virtual space. The Metaverse is the perfect representation for how Zuckerberg so keenly focuses on anything and everything except the wellbeing of his user base.

Whether it is whistleblower Frances Haugen or the Wall Street Journal’s “Facebook Files,” every passing week reveals more information about Facebook’s involvement in the private lives of users and global issues. Last year, company documents revealed that Facebook had buried research showing how toxic Instagram is for young people, specifically young women. In December, Rohingya refugees brought a class-action lawsuit against Meta, Facebook’s rebranded company name for its disregarding of misinformation against the Rohingya people. The lawsuit alleges that Facebook’s lack of intervention is what led to the persecution and genocide of a community in Myanmar in 2016-2017.

Zuckerberg’s clutch on modern society damages the fabric of reality and what it means to be human. Virtual reality has crept its way into mainstream culture through various video games for years now, but passively accepting an entirely separate Sims-on-steroids reality is a problem. As celebrities begin to buy into virtual real estate and NFTs enter our vernacular, it is important to recognize the larger forces at play here.

Succumbing to the allure of the Metaverse will represent more than a morbidly depressed society obsessed with escapism. It will be a collective relinquishing of the last shreds of our freedom of conscience. Give a man a metaverse, and he’ll surely play god. 

We’ve discussed the perils of virtual reality for years. Now, the Metaverse is knocking at our door and the time has finally come in which we are faced with the moral dilemma of the 21st century. Is real life all that great? Or will shadows on the cave wall become so sophisticated, we forget that they are not real?