It's time for social networks to take a close look in the mirror We learn to downgrade our experience of being together with another human being to seeing their projection overlaid into the room like an augmented reality Pokemon figure.įacebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies before a joint hearing of the Commerce and Judiciary Committees on Capitol Hill in Washington on April 10, 2018. Instead of sharing air and space together, we can collaborate on a digital document. Instead of making human facial expressions, our avatars can make iconic thumbs-up gestures.

In the virtual and augmented future Facebook has planned for us, it’s not that Zuckerberg’s simulations will rise to the level of reality, it’s that our behaviors and interactions will become so standardized and mechanical that it won’t even matter. Zuckerberg wants the metaverse to ultimately encompass the rest of our reality – connecting bits of real space here to real space there, while totally subsuming what we think of as the real world. This isn’t intended to be some casual digital simulation we enter and leave at will. When I clicked on the link to Zuckerberg’s video announcement, I thought it was a joke at first, maybe a “deep fake.” Someone seemed to have modeled Zuckerberg’s face and gestures pretty well, but the guy in the video was so robotic, surely he must have been an avatar.īut no, this was the real Facebook founder, joining his most trusted employees in pitching the metaverse, Facebook’s proprietary new virtual world of worlds where we are supposed to do our working, playing and socializing forever more. It was the metaverse, he said, and also announced that his company’s name had changed, to Meta, from Facebook. I’m speaking of the project Mark Zuckerberg launched on Thursday.

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