Metaverse was such a weird pitch to me. It seemed to think the way we are living our lives in the way we want to live them, and just offered that in a sterile, miserable package of digital ennui.
Like I get it, our lives right now are built around work and material consumption. But we don’t enjoy work and material consumption! It doesn’t make us happy; it’s not what we’re excited about! We just can’t meet basic survival needs without money (work), and the stress kills us so much that we look to any shallow escape to recover juuuuust enough to keep doing it.
Why on earth would a working human - which is >90% of us - want to move into a space that has all the drudgery, tracking, oversight, micromanagement, and shallow pandering of the current world… and lose all the socialisation, birdsong, walking past a busker playing blues, the smell of a nearby cafe, the sound of passers-by laughing; life?
I want to wake up in the morning in a comfortable bed and open my curtains to clear skies without traffic smoke; you think waking up to traffic noise and grey skies and shuffling over to my laptop to do my economy-mandated 8 hours labour with a blue backdrop is somehow appealing? If anything, it highlights just how incredibly dystopic the waking world is becoming in the name of productivity and efficiency.
How little does MZ understand about humanity, to think we want an existence devoid of nothing more than existing in a closed economy and 3D storefronts?