Metaverse : The Zuckerberg Way to Turn Humans Into Zombies
Metaverse and how it may shape your reality
We are already kind of zombies, aren’t we?
A few months ago, while I went to meet one of my friends at a coffee shop, I saw a bunch of young boys packed together sitting in a round shape, looking at something in their smartphones. No one is seeing the other one in the eyes or exchanging conversations.
First, I didn’t understand what was going on. But soon, I realized that they were immersed in a multiplayer video game. Probably, Fortnite or PubG — I am not sure which one.
You can call me old-fashioned, but I always emphasize the person-to-person connection — I mean real connection, not through some stupid screens. But in this social-media-driven world, we’ve already lost that feeling of connectivity to an alarming extent. And with the introduction of Zuckerberg’s “metaverse,” the real man-to-man connection will soon be a thing of the past.
Maybe your child (or her child) will learn from an online museum that once upon a time, people would sit next to one another and talk, laugh, and fall in love.
With the ever-expanding and changing technology, we are going light-years away from our true self — and Zuckerberg is just fueling the process in disguise of creating social connections.
The Metaverse You Are Going to Witness
Just a couple of days ago, on 28 October 2021, Facebook Inc. officially changed its name to Meta as a part of a major rebrand. And with this, they are also expanding themselves into Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR).
In a presentation, Zuckerberg says that “Back when I started Facebook, that mostly meant text that typed on computers. Then we all got phones with cameras, and the internet became much more visual. And recently, as connections got faster, video has become the main way that we experience content. We’ve gone from 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, and embodied internet where you’re in the experience, not just looking at it. And we call this the metaverse.”
“You’ll be able to do almost anything you can imagine, get together with your friends and family, work, learn, play, shop, create, as well as entirely new categories that don’t really fit how we think about computers or phones today,” Zuckerberg goes on.
Zuckerberg believes that the metaverse will be the successor of the mobile internet. And it will give you the real feeling of getting connected to other people. No matter how far they are, you will be able to experience them as they are right in front of you.
There will also be an avatar of you that will represent you in the metaverse. It’s a living 3D representation of yourself with your expressions, gestures, etc. So you will be able to do everything you do on the internet today in the metaverse.
You’ll be able to choose your avatar based on what you will do in the metaverse. And there will be different types of attire that will fit into all your circumstances or occasions. Moreover, you can create a Home Space within the metaverse where you can hang out with the people you want and experience literally whatever your mind wishes.
Sound like Ready Player One? Yes, of course, Zuckerberg is going to bring Ready Player One into reality. And there, you will be able to create and sell your 3D digital products as well.
But it’s not fully developed yet as it is in its infancy. But maybe within the next 5–10 years, we will experience a whole new and different internet than we are experiencing today. It’s going to be ‘the next big thing.’
Anyway, you can watch the entire presentation here and learn more about what Zuckerberg is up to.
Will Metaverse Be a Mess Like Facebook?
One minute silence for those who doesn’t believe that Facebook is a mess.
In the name of social connectivity, Facebook sucked out all our information and sold to companies to influence elections, spread hate speech, conspiracy theories, or shape our behavior. Well, it’s a thing initially invented for good purpose but later it went terribly terribly wrong.
And there is no guarantee that metaverse will be completely safe and secure, being free off all the bad things that Facebook has today.
People will definitely spread hatred, and make threats in the metaverse for sure. I mean when bad people will have the thrills and excitements of doing an actual threat or bad thing virtually, do you think they will leave that opportunity?
Certainly, not.
Metaverse Can Make People Lonelier Than Ever Before
People hardly act rationally. If they find anything interesting, they do it and repeat and repeat and become an addict. As the entire generation is addicted to screens, they will undoubtedly be hooked to the metaverse and spend more time wearing some stupid VR gadget or AR glass, forgetting everyone around them.
They will join a party in the other part of the world virtually, have real feelings about it while ignoring the person sitting next to them or living in the next room in the same house. And how about students and young ones? They will certainly spend hours gaming, watching videos, or having fun when all they should do is be more focused on their study.
The rise of TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and other social media platforms have negatively impacted people’s mental health. Despite all these so-called social connectivity apps, 36% of all Americans — including 61% of young adults and 51% of mothers with young children — feel “serious loneliness.”
So, it can easily be assumed that the metaverse will only make this situation worse.
Though Facebook says they will spend $50 million funding research so that the metaverse may not turn into a hellscape, we are not sure whether they will succeed or not in the long run. Because when a new technology comes, no one can accurately predict how people will embrace that technology.
But it’s true that soon we will witness a generation of living zombies. We will live in the ‘metaverse’ virtual space 24/7, ignoring all other things that bond us together and make life truly meaningful.
In a recent Psychology Today article titled Will the Metaverse Impact Mental Health? Phil Reed D.Phil. wrote, “The most striking potential impact of engaging in virtual interactions concerns psychoses — especially those involving delusions and hallucinations. These are not the only possible consequences, or even the most common, so we need to be clear about that. Overuse of digital technology is associated with many mental health issues, such as somatic symptoms (6%), depression (4%), psychoticism (0.5%), paranoid ideation (0.5%), and serious mental illness (2%). However, psychoses are among the most serious, and so they deserve some consideration, especially if a company that has an estimated 1.9 billion daily users is suggesting a move to a digitally-immersive experience.”
Well, the promises of this next big thing named ‘metaverse’ may sound excellent, but you must be cautious a little because you will probably experience both the good and the terrible things it will offer to shape your reality.
And no doubt that Mr. Zuckerberg will do everything to get you hooked into metaverse only to put more money in his pocket in disguise of social connections.
Thank you for reading!
If you are interested to read more of my writings, don’t forget to check out the following ones —
- Why Elon Musk Fired His Long-Term Assistant Who Asked for A Raise
- Five Subtle Signs That You Are Destroying Your Life
- Why I Quit My Job While Others Were Busy Saving Theirs
You can share your outstanding stories and inspire others. Just click the below image and be a writer for The Masterpiece.
