“As June came to an end, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told his employees about an ambitious new initiative. The future of the company would go far beyond its current project of building a set of connected social apps and some hardware to support them. Instead, he said, Facebook would strive to build a maximalist, interconnected set of experiences straight out of sci-fi — a world known as the metaverse,” reports TheVerge.

“In January 2020, an influential essay by the venture capitalist Matthew Ball set out to identify key characteristics of a metaverse. Among them: it has to span the physical and virtual worlds; contain a fully fledged economy; and offer “unprecedented interoperability” — users have to be able to take their avatars and goods from one place in the metaverse to another, no matter who runs that particular part of it. Critically, no one company will run the metaverse — it will be an “embodied internet,” Zuckerberg said, operated by many different players in a decentralized way.”

“At the same time, Zuckerberg said, the metaverse will bring enormous opportunity to individual creators and artists; to individuals who want to work and own homes far from today’s urban centers; and to people who live in places where opportunities for education or recreation are more limited. A realized metaverse could be the next best thing to a working teleportation device, he says. With the company’s Oculus division, which produces the Quest headset, Facebook is trying to develop one.”

Interestingly, Zuckerberg’s comments (the article includes an extensive interview) don’t address the one major flaw with his idea: that it seems to represent people giving up completely on their real lives and choosing to immerse themselves in an alternate reality. It’s a form of social isolation and withdrawal that has the potential to increase political polarization and social discord as people continue to abandon the physical world for an alternate existence. The potential for this to become addictive for some users, and to reinforce symptoms of underlying mental illness is substantial. It’s hard to tell at this point whether Zuckerberg is an evil genius trying to destroy humanity, or if he’s borderline autistic and isn’t capable of comprehending the social consequences of his actions?