Tuesday, February 14, 2023

Who Wants the Metaverse?

 From JSTOR Daily:

Let’s start at the beginning. In her 2010 article “Capsules and Nodes and Ruptures and Flows: Circulating Subjectivity in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash,” Lisa Swanstrom described Stephenson’s metaverse as, “an expansive and seemingly borderless ‘place,’” which “allows for sensory expansion in spite of any bodily or financial limitations.” This is Stephenson’s conception in its most hopeful iteration. Zuckerberg and other advocates including Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speak of the metaverse in similarly rosy terms. Last summer, Zuckerberg called the metaverse an “embodied internet” that would ideally be interoperable.
“It’ll actually feel like we’re in the same place, even if we’re in different states or hundreds of miles apart,” he explained, adding that “when you’re building social systems primarily, you want everyone to be able to be a part of the same systems. So we want to make them as affordable as possible, we want to make them as unified as possible.” And way back in 2016, Sweeney opined optimistically that, “this metaverse is going to be far more pervasive and powerful than anything else. If one central company gains control of this, they will become more powerful than any government and be a god on Earth.” (Read more.)
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