Big Tech’s appetite for power is never quenched.
They control more and more of Americans’ lives every day.
And now, one of the biggest tech companies has come up with a scheme to dominate the world.
Facebook announced that they are changing their name to Meta. The reason they are doing this is because they intend to focus their attention on creating a “metaverse.”
What is the “metaverse?” It’s a fake reality. It’s a virtual world where people can “interact” with each other in a digitally-created world that is controlled by Zuckerberg’s company.
Virtual reality has been around for some years now, but this is the first time a major tech corporation has gone all-in on VR and made it the centerpiece of their corporate mission.
On the surface, Facebook says that this “metaverse” will be about allowing people to attend conferences virtually, attend school virtually, and interact with their family and friends.
That all sounds nice, doesn’t it?
But the word “metaverse” itself comes from the dystopian novel Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson.
In the novel, people live in the digital “metaverse” to escape their real lives, which are awful. They ignore the crumbling society around them in order to live in a fake reality and pretend everything is okay.
Some people in the novel become so ensconced in the fake “metaverse” reality that they become permanently disfigured.
Facebook is trying to create a society where people choose to live in Facebook’s reality, not the real world.
And if they succeed at that, they will have ultimate power over everybody. They will be the de facto world government, since they will control the fake world that people choose to live in to escape the real world.
Facebook, or Meta as they are now called, is hard at work trying to make the “metaverse” as enticing and realistic as they possibly can.
They even are creating touch sensors so that people can feel like they are touching objects or people in the virtual world.
Zuckerberg hopes that eventually, the fake world that he creates will come to replace the real world that we all live in now.
Even former Google CEO Eric Schmidt expressed his terror about the prospect of the “metaverse” taking over.
“All of the people who talk about metaverses are talking about worlds that are more satisfying than the current world – you’re richer, more handsome, more beautiful, more powerful, faster. So in some years, people will choose to spend more time with their goggles on in the metaverse. And who gets to set the rules? The world will become more digital than physical. And that’s not necessarily the best thing for human society.”
Americans need to do everything they can to reject this vision of society.
The first step is to refuse to purchase any of the new virtual reality products that Facebook – or Meta – is now hawking.
And the next step is to recommit to making the real world around us the best place it can possibly be, starting with our family, friends, and community.
The more we commit ourselves to the real world, the less power the “metaverse” will have over us.
