“And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
Mark Zuckerberg wants to create a fictional world and make it real. Just like all religions do!
He wants to build a metaverse where you and I will live happily ever after in perpetual delusion. It’s a magical place, like Oz or Narnia, where Mark will be the Wizard, but he won’t be a fraud hiding behind a curtain. You’ll get to meet a digital version of him. Won’t that be fun?
Can you then punch him out? Can you order hookers and moonshine from some Dark Web merchant of all things illegal and immoral and wonderful? When a computer geek with too much money decides he wants to play god, but no one will invite him to their parties, so he has to make his own party, the only real question to ask is: how long until it gets hacked?
I bet Russian and Chinese hackers salivated when they heard ole Zuck talk about another world to layer on top of the already-fake (kinda) world of the internet. I think Jack Dorsey is also thinking about creating some kind of Internet 4.0 or 5.0 or whatever sounds hip for the kids to drool over. Young people with tons of money and power can only want one thing: (peace and love among their fellow people?) MORE money and power.
Mark Zuckerberg will be like the carnival barker saying: “Step right up and enter the world of forbidden dreams – buy all the crap that my advertisers have listed there, shown perpetually on flashing billboards to excite your epileptic seizures – test drive new games and software, open your crypto wallets for me, me, ME! But beware, you may get suckered by the Zucker so well that once you go into his metaverse, you may never come out again.
(I once, many moons ago, played Grand Theft Auto, San Andreas. When inside that game, I went to an arcade and played Pac-Man and Donkey Kong! A digital game inside a digital game! Did I stay in the arcade? Hell no, it was boring – I went back out to kill hookers and cops and steal cocaine, bitches! Got me a helicopter one time and just rattled out the bullets at everything that moved! Made shit blow up real good!)
The Metaverse will be an abyss. Can Zuck be blamed for thinking people will embrace his digital Eden? Well, how often to you look at your phone? See? You are already being sucked into your phone and the fictional meta-world it offers. So Zuck thinks you’ll want more and more of that. Why play in nature when you can play a game called “Play in Nature”?
Those who gaze into the abyss ...
