The Metaverse and… the Matrix?

It’s a powerful analogy, and an appropriate one: in “What is the Facebook metaverse? Think of The Matrix movie”, Jeff Kagan compares Mark Zuckerberg’s latest scheme to the Keanu Reeves film, where humans were kept in sticky pods to generate electricity while images of a simulated life were projected via a cable directly into their brains.

In most cases, the comparison would be a bit of a stretch, but let’s remember who we’re talking about: a man with no moral principles, whose business model is based on maximizing the time and level of interaction of users on his platforms to the point of generating, in many cases, documented psychological problems — see “The Social Dilemma” — and is even willing to change his company’s name in the hope that people will forget about the myriad issues related to Facebook and its negative associations. When it came to choosing between the growth of the company and the safety of its users, Mark Zuckerberg always had it crystal clear.

Facebook’s metaverse would be about getting people hooked on the electronic simulation projected a few centimeters from their eyes, which is completely immersive, and which would offer, in many cases, a parallel reality more attractive than their real lives. There are already too many cases of people obsessively consuming Facebook and Instagram, so what might we expect from a metaverse built by the same company and, presumably, based on the same principles underpinning its global empire? And what to make of an advertising model like Facebook’s applied to an environment like the metaverse, which people would only disconnect from in order to shovel some food down their throats as quickly as possible.

Remember those horror stories years ago about people hooked on online games who died after marathon sessions without food or sleep? I can already see Facebook’s umpteenth apology and its promise to introduce periodic reminders on its pages to encourage people to use it more wisely…

In some recent interviews I have given to the media on the subject of the metaverse, the point I always raise about these types of environments is the need for them to be created responsibly, given their tendency to isolate their users. And if we are talking about control, caution and concern for the possible side effects or potentially harmful effects of an activity, then we’re not talking about Facebook, a company riven by contradictions, even if it is willing to invest a lot of money, a process it started years ago when it bought Oculus VR and began hiring people.

The simple fact is that Mark Zuckerberg cannot be trusted with something as powerful as a metaverse. It’s an attractive, interesting and tempting development for many: an alternate universe capable of fooling our senses into believing we’re immersed in it. Add a new logo, a huge company with unlimited marketing capacity and zero sense of responsibility, and I guarantee we will see a fair number of vulnerable people retreating into the a virtual reality for hours on end, and buying home parenteral nutrition kits so they don’t have to bother with eating. In other words, just like the Matrix.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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