What to Make of the Metaverse?
Why it’s likely that the metaverse won’t be good for humanity.
In October of 2021, social media giant Facebook announced that it had changed its name to Meta. The ancient Greeks gave us the word Meta, who used it to mean ‘after’, ‘beyond’ or even to transcend. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg clearly chose this name for that very reason since he is looking far ahead into the future of his company, far beyond today’s two-dimensional experience of posting photos and text on Facebook. He wants to evolve Facebook into an entirely new experience, where we interact and socialize in a virtual 3D world.
There is great promise and potentially great value in this next epoch of humanity but will the metaverse usher in a golden age, or is it all what the Roman’s called bread and circuses?