Zuckerberg’s meta reality can’t escape the problems of our real world, only replicate them

The metaverse is not the creation of some beautiful, limitless other world — it is just a colourful clone of our real world and all its dismal material conditions

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at MWC 2016. Not to be outdone, Zuckerberg unsurprisingly plans to extend this logic of surveillance to the nth degree. Photo: Facebook

Last week, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would henceforth be known as meta — and that its main focus would be the creation and integration of a virtual reality called the metaverse.

At first, the technology seemed sinister in the usual ways. It spoke of how a future metaverse will incorporate "sensors that map the world around you", hinting at the deepening architecture of surveillance that he and his employees tirelessly hammer away at. In 2019, Google's Nest home security device was revealed to be harbouring a secret microphone, presumably installed with the aim of harvesting voice data from households around the globe.