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The Reality of the Virtual Metaverse By Jim Hightower
Our future was pronounced dead last week.
I mean that glorious future of "The Metaverse," promised to us by Silicon Valley's tech and financial geniuses. Just a decade ago, they were promising us that by now we'd all be playing, working and relating as digital avatars of ourselves, living out our lives in a phantasmagoric new world of virtual reality.
They boldly proclaimed that the next Big Thing in tech, replacing smartphones and all other personal devices, would be a "Metaverse," digitally connecting everyone everywhere. They exclaimed that by purchasing goofy-looking, reality-augmenting headsets, interactions could be done without any in-person human contact. And who better to sell this future than the super-goofy gabillionaire, Mark Zuckerberg?
The CEO of Facebook, he was so bedazzled by the digital hokum of the metaverse that he even renamed his corporation "Meta." Then he pumped a whopping $80 billion into developing and marketing his wondrous new world, including peddling a Meta brand of those magical headsets.
Not wanting to miss out on a bonanza, other tech billionaire geniuses joined the virtual reality rush. But it was just fool's gold, for the geniuses had failed to consider an essential factor: Customers. Specifically, customers! Far from dazzled, buyers pronounced the meta-mess — Goofy.
Even Zuckerberg has now pulled the plug on his fantasy of a digital, virtual, immersive, avatar world of tech "reality." Don't think, however, that goofy, avaricious, egomaniacal billionaires have gained any modesty from their Metaverse misadventure. They are the same ones now hurling trillions of public and corporate dollars into erecting intrusive, massive, wasteful AI data centers all across America. Why, to power their profiteering fantasy of replacing humans with AI bots.
I mean that glorious future of "The Metaverse," promised to us by Silicon Valley's tech and financial geniuses. Just a decade ago, they were promising us that by now we'd all be playing, working and relating as digital avatars of ourselves, living out our lives in a phantasmagoric new world of virtual reality.
They boldly proclaimed that the next Big Thing in tech, replacing smartphones and all other personal devices, would be a "Metaverse," digitally connecting everyone everywhere. They exclaimed that by purchasing goofy-looking, reality-augmenting headsets, interactions could be done without any in-person human contact. And who better to sell this future than the super-goofy gabillionaire, Mark Zuckerberg?
The CEO of Facebook, he was so bedazzled by the digital hokum of the metaverse that he even renamed his corporation "Meta." Then he pumped a whopping $80 billion into developing and marketing his wondrous new world, including peddling a Meta brand of those magical headsets.
Not wanting to miss out on a bonanza, other tech billionaire geniuses joined the virtual reality rush. But it was just fool's gold, for the geniuses had failed to consider an essential factor: Customers. Specifically, customers! Far from dazzled, buyers pronounced the meta-mess — Goofy.
Even Zuckerberg has now pulled the plug on his fantasy of a digital, virtual, immersive, avatar world of tech "reality." Don't think, however, that goofy, avaricious, egomaniacal billionaires have gained any modesty from their Metaverse misadventure. They are the same ones now hurling trillions of public and corporate dollars into erecting intrusive, massive, wasteful AI data centers all across America. Why, to power their profiteering fantasy of replacing humans with AI bots.
https://www.creators.com/read/jim-hightower
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