It’s been three years since one of the most blatant PR rush-jobs in Big Tech history: when the Mark Zuckerberg splashily debuted his “metaverse”, changing his company’s name from Facebook to Meta, following the Facebook Papers scandal. The metaverse was launched with a slick visualisation of what this virtual reality world – which Zuckerberg said was the future of work, relationships and design, and all to be accessed via expensive headsets – would look like. It was only briefly mentioned that this was merely an idea of what the metaverse could ultimately become. The project was nowhere close to this stage.
The announcement drew more ire than admiration and was critically panned not only for its grim vision of the world – best experienced in isolation, through a computer – but also for its obvious use as a distraction from bad press. This was compounded with every update on the metaverse’s progress, each more laughably pathetic than the last (such as launches in France and Spain celebrated with Minecraft-quality graphics of the Eiffel Tower and the Sagrada Familia or the ground-breaking news that metaverse avatars would soon have legs). It was a tech billionaire’s dream that could only appeal to someone quite as detached from reality as a tech billionaire.
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