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…
