VR Explorers Make Discoveries Outside The Metaverse
Leave the metaverse to metamates working for captain Mark Zuckerberg.
Mark Zuckerberg is head of the metaverse. The domain is his, claimed as captain of a ship called Meta with a crew of metamates he tosses overboard regularly by the thousands to periodically replace with new crew drawn into servitude clasped in golden handcuffs.
The crew’s conscience is of no value as their orders flow from above, their mouths gagged in cash to stop them from warning anyone under risk of professional suicide.
The Meta sails to Africa where subcontractors under camera surveillance label personal information fished from its clouds. Meta Ray-Ban glasses are confiscated in Saudi Arabia while Iran warns its citizens to delete WhatsApp. Zuckerberg seeks name tags to label the thinking of every living soul while his right hand, U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Bosworth, protects the idea of capturing people for the metaverse after death.
Zuckerberg stuns his meals and speaks in his language on his terms with people he can use to spread his definition of reality. He promises new jobs to solve problems that get hidden by hiring instead of solved by focus, while distracting from the studied science of virtual reality and augmented reality.
The idea of the metaverse draws us away from the possibilities of creating in space with personal computers and into mindless consumption. It’s a place not made for the use of space by people but for Zuckerberg’s use of people across space. In Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse, you have no ownership and no rights, only terms of service.
Bosworth wrote a thread stating: “The metaverse is *not* just Horizon or VR. It’s the blending of the digital and physical that will define the next computing platform. We can experience it on VR and AR sure but we also see it on mobile platforms.”
Bosworth and Zuckerberg ripped an idea from fiction to apply to the science of VR and then they wonder why their idea didn’t take, tossing more people overboard when each course correction fails.
Bosworth failed to capitalize on VR by linking Facebook accounts, by forcing advertising into virtual spaces, by bringing in third party headsets, and by flooding the zone with generated slop. He’s moved his efforts on to capturing bodies and living quarters for their cloud while adjusting laws and culture to serve his ends.
What does Horizon Worlds on mobile have to do with “blending of the digital and physical”? What does taking on Fortnite and Roblox have to do with VR? Nothing. Does Bosworth feel the plank receding below him?
The metaverse only truly exists in your mind as an idea placed there by Zuckerberg and Bosworth. Even Neal Stephenson suggests “picking a different name” for an idea so obvious. Evict this word from your lexicon and it goes the way of NFTs, disappearing along with the nearly $1 billion stock grants promised to each of Zuckerberg’s top executives if they can make the idea inescapable. The metaverse is a domain where you own nothing because a king believes “Aut Zuck aut nihil”. If the choice is Zuck or nothing, choose nothing.
You can make infinite space in VR from nothing.
VR Headsets Are For Private Discovery
For decades now, VR headsets put the wind in the sails of explorers discovering new realms. Your presence is delivered there by wide field of view opaque optics and the embodied presence it provides. You can layer on mixed reality passed through cameras and may even spend a majority of your time in this merged space, but pure VR is always there underneath when you want it. Remember why you are here starting and ending in the privacy of your own home. You can start out on Jupiter and end in a place you’ve pulled straight from your imagination.
We go to VR to explore, escape and do impossible things. In VR, we take the weirdness in our minds and make space for one another to look around. This space is vast and ever-growing, and we need each other to call out good VR when we see it. Seek refuge there in open personal computers that don’t need your name, age, or your face to deliver what you seek.
There are free islands in Linux and Github and OpenXR and WebXR and Godot and Blender where you can trade time for resources. You can use these tools to fashion your own private vessel and choose when, or even if, you want to hoist a flag and announce your presence to explorers of a growing multiverse.
There are no kings in VR. There are only explorers making discoveries.
