Metaverse as floated by Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook's holding company will henceforth be known as Meta.

I understand metaverse to mean a virtual reality space in which in which users can users can interact with a computer-generated environment and other users appearing in hologramic form.

This, as Zuckerberg unfurled in October of 2021, is Facebook's future and if he has his way, the world's future, or at least the rich world's future.

An enlightened mind has taken the initiative to breakdown the origins of the word Metaverse:

"Originally the word comes from a dystopian novel called Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson) about people who escape a crumbling society, by entering a "metaverse" where they can connect to people and share experiences. The basic idea is that instead of picking up your iPhone to send a message to a friend to meet you at a movie theatre, you'd put on a pair of glasses and attend the movie together, virtually."

Cool, except that metaverse does not aim to capture the weekend, movie-popcorn market (already captured by streaming), but all social, cultural and perhaps political experiences.

Metaverse promises to deliver an "immersive digital world powered by Zuckerberg's own products." According to the New York Times, "In Mark Zuckerberg's imagined realm, humans will teleport across the globe in hologram form. Virtual fish will swim in the sky. You'll have a big virtual telescope in your house, and a floating cast iron chiminea, and David Attenborough will be there. You'll still have to spend your days on video conference calls at your work, but now some of your colleagues will look like cartoons."

Even more. The Zuckerberg Metaverse that will become the citizen-consumer's universe, is designed by Zuckerberg himself, meaning that if the Metaverse were to become ubiquitous enough as a substitute for the real world (which won't happen because the apps and devices needed to transform the real into virtual wholesale would be exorbitant), then we would be living inside a world pervaded by the Zuckerberg "aesthetics." What is the Zuckerberg aesthetics like, asks the Times story. It's a projection of his personal style, which is "expeditious. Like a comic book character his closet seems to be full of unindividuated outfits, all dark jeans and subtly heathered crew neck tees. His hair has been cut into the same shape, close cropped and featuring the tiny bangs of a medieval squire, for more than a decade. At 37, his pale, oddly smooth visage lends him a vampiric quality. There is something unnerving about the static nature of his image, of its imperviousness to the passage of time and his own ballooning wealth. It is as if he is always moving through the world as an avatar."

In other words, if we adopt Zuckerberg's Metaverse as our natural habitat, we will be doomed to live in a homogenous and immutable, somewhat flat environment, bloodless, vampirically evolved by feeding off the vitality of the real world.

But there's more. Metaverse will Facebook-ize all aspects of our lives in a more sinister way:

"In the future we might walk through Facebook, wear clothes on Facebook, host virtual parties on Facebook, or own property in the digital territory of Facebook. Each activity in what we once thought of as the real world will develop a metaverse equivalent, with attendant opportunities to spend money doing that activity online."

Who stands to benefit from the digitization of real space?

Zuckerberg, of course.

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