In October 2021, Facebook changed its parent company name to “Meta” to align the company with its ambitions to build the “metaverse.” NASDAQ.com believes that this rebranding will help boost the price of its stock in the same way that its name change to Alphabet boosted Google. By changing its name many believe that Facebook is signaling a change in corporate direction from a simple social media platform to a ‘meta-universe company’ i.e. one that combines virtual experiences with reality.
What Exactly is the Metaverse?
Is “metaverse” just the newest “Buzzword” or is “The Metaverse” like trying to explain the “The Internet” to someone in the 1970s? If you talk to CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg the metaverse is the future of the internet. But is this just hype or is it the fruition of the Sci-Fi dream of virtual reality and everything running via computers and holograms?
The term “metaverse” is said to have been coined back in 1992 by Sci-Fi author Neal Stephenson in his novel, “Snow Crash.” The idea was that virtual people aka. “Avatars” travel through imaginary worlds living out their dreams. In the book, Snow Crash Hiro Protagonist delivers pizza for Uncle Enzo’s CosoNostra Pizza Inc., in real life but in the Metaverse, he’s a warrior prince. By 2009, the idea of “avatars” was firmly embedded in the culture, and the movie Avatar had literal humans traveling to distant planets where they would virtually inhabit alternative bodies.
The current concept of the metaverse includes dreams of a new $175 billion market of meta-universe games along with a new generation of meta-universe advertising that will transform the current $455 billion digital advertising market. We can already control our thermostats by talking to “Alexa” or “Siri” we can “FaceTime” chat or even take that a step further to an online game called “VR Chat” where people create their own avatars and control them with real-life movements to interact with others around the world. In our article on NFTs, we discussed how people are already spending millions to stake their claims to virtual real estate such as digital artwork or the last 30 seconds of Superbowl LIV. Combine this with BlockChain in Ethiopia, and Advances in FinTech and you begin to see how the world is already hurtling toward the metaverse.
Currently, you can use your Facebook login to various other sites effectively allowing you to travel the Internet as yourself. In the Metaverse, you could create an imaginary Avatar that you could use to go from site to site. You could buy virtual clothes and virtual cars for your Avatar (along with virtual armor and swords). Currently, you can do that for certain games like “Fortnite” But in the multiverse things you equip your Avatar with in one location would be transportable to other virtual locations. But that is just the beginning. According to Wired Saying that Fortnite is “the metaverse” would be a bit like saying Google is “the internet” … On the other hand, just as it would be accurate to say that Google builds parts of the internet… it’s similarly accurate to say that Fortnite creator Epic Games is building parts of the metaverse.
Psychological Risks of the Metaverse
With the distinction between real and virtual becoming ever more blurred, the risk of people getting lost in their imaginary dream world becomes ever more frightening. Back in the 1980s at the advent of Dungeons and Dragons, I knew people who got so wrapped up in their imagination that they skipped class (or work) and wasted away. What effects will this even more real metaverse have on today’s youth? Dating has devolved into Tinder where everyone can simply “Swipe” away the unworthy suitors in the search for the perfect mate. But in the Metaverse, you could create the perfect Avatar for yourself, equip it with the fastest car and the latest clothes and then find the perfect Avatar mate and live in virtual bliss without ever having to take a shower, worry about pimples, or leave your room. In Isaac Asimov’s The Naked Sun, social distancing – as we would now call it was the norm. “On the planet of Solaria, people don’t ‘see’ each other: ‘seeing’ is viewed as abnormal, even dirty, because it means coming into contact with other people’s breath, germs, and sweaty bodies.” Is that where the Metaverse is leading?
Note: This video contains some bad language.
Metaverse vs. Multiverse
The multiverse on the other hand is purely a figment of Marvel’s imagination. Although LiveScience calls it a “theory” saying “It could be that our universe is just one member of a much grander, much larger multitude of universes: a multiverse”. The idea is that since there are “hundreds of billions of galaxies and almost countless stars” the chances are that there could be alternatives to what we consider reality.
Marvel on the other hand has found it a useful plot tool to explain apparent inconsistencies. The obvious answer when these plot inconsistencies occur is to simply say that they happened in a “parallel universe” i.e. most things are the same including people but sometimes their actions diverge causing slight differences in that universe compared to the original. In the Loki TV Series, the character Loki becomes imprisoned for affecting the approved “timeline” and ends up meeting several different versions of himself from other timelines, who apparently messed up their timelines as well.
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