The Metaverse and Other Digital Delusions
Janet Horowitz Murray · transcript Verlag eBooks · 2024
When in October 2021, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the change of his company's name to Meta and its new emphasis on creating a 'Metaverse' it marked a period of increased investment in augmented and virtual reality technologies and applications and a burst of excited predictions about the new experiences.The explanatory videos that supported Meta's announcement were not, however, very specific, and by Fall 2022, when the final Clash of Realities Symposium was held, they had still not gained specificity, though investments continued to grow and overheated promises continued to proliferate.The emptiness of the descriptions at that time spoke louder than the large sums of money being invested, and they turned out to be a better predictor of the immediate future.By Spring 2023, the Metaverse hype had been replaced by an equal level of greed, excitement, and fear over AI, as a result of the surprising coherence of Chat GPT responses.The Metaverse-related lay-offs came sooner than even I expected when I delivered the original version of this essay as a slide talk in Fall 2022.One of the best clues that there was no actual product in sight was the way in which the corporate rhetoric and visual evocations of the future 'Metaverse' emphasized immediate and total satisfaction.For example, here is the beginning of Zuckerberg's original Metaverse presentation: "Desktop to web to phones, from text to photos to video.But this isn't the end of the line.The next platform and medium will be even more immersive, an embodied internet where you're in the experience, not just looking at it, and we call this the metaverse.And you're going to be able to do almost anything you can imagine, get together with friends and family,