Ian Bogost writes:

In science fiction, the end of the world is a tidy affair. Climate collapse or an alien invasion drives humanity to flee on cosmic arks, or live inside a simulation. Real-life apocalypse is more ambiguous. It happens slowly, and there’s no way of knowing when the Earth is really doomed. To depart our world, under these conditions, is the same as giving up on it.

And yet, some of your wealthiest fellow earthlings would like to do exactly that. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and other purveyors of private space travel imagine a celestial paradise where we can thrive as a “multiplanet species.” That’s the dream of films such as Interstellar and Wall-E. Now comes news that Mark Zuckerberg has embraced the premise of The Matrix, that we can plug ourselves into a big computer and persist as flesh husks while reality decays around us. According to a report this week from The Verge, the Facebook chief may soon rebrand his company to mark its change in focus from social media to “the metaverse.” [Update: He’s gone ahead and done it! One week after this piece was first published, Zuckerberg announced that the company will now be known as “Meta.”]

In a narrow sense, this phrase refers to internet-connected glasses. More broadly, though, it’s a fantasy of power and control.

Beyond science fiction, metaverse means almost nothing. Even within sci-fi, it doesn’t mean much. No article on this topic would be complete without a mention of the 1992 novel Snow Crash, in which Neal Stephenson coined the term. But that book offers scarce detail about the actual operation of the alternate-reality dreamworld it posits. A facility of computers in the desert runs the metaverse, and the novel’s characters hang out inside the simulation because their real lives are boring or difficult. No such entity exists today, of course, just as no real product even approximates the rough idea—drawn from Stephenson or William Gibson or Philip K. Dick—of having people jack into a virtual, parallel reality with goggles or brain implants. Ironically, these writers clearly meant to warn us off those dreams, rather than inspire them. [Continue reading…]