"The Metaverse": Why do we have to worry about him?
What if I told you that you’re going to pay a million dollars and in return, you’ll get a wonderful property in a high-class state of the united states of America? Manhattan or San Francisco for example.
It was expensive indeed. You could also pay less if you buy the plot of land alone. Yet it’s a huge investment that would double your profits afterward.
However, what if I told you that someone is willing to spend the same amount of money and even more to buy another plot of land in a fictional world?
So we have two cases here:
You, who’s buying a real land but it’s only an example and an assumption. And someone else, who’s buying a virtual land, but has actually paid the cost!
This happened in November of 2021 when a plot of digital land was sold for $2.43 million in the Decentraland store. That's more than the average home prices in any of the states. But what’s odder is that this land doesn't even exist in the first place.
It's 2022. Welcome to the new virtual world... “The Metaverse”
Now you can travel without geographic constraints or flights. No precautions, no vaccine, no quarantine. No waiting, no flights canceled due to bad weather. And you won't need to look for an uninterrupted link to watch the World Cup final because you might actually find yourself in the stadium bleachers. It's tempting, no doubt. But have you ever thought about what that could mean?
More than you can imagine...
In 1992...
Science fiction writer (Neal Stephenson) published his predictive novel "Snow Crash," in which he assumed that there was a virtual world parallel to ours, where humans can interact with no differences. But the irony doesn't stop here, because Stephenson decided to entitle this world “the metaverse”...
The fantasy came true three decades later when Facebook President Mark Zuckerberg came out to the world the last October to announce the future of the virtual world “the Metaverse”, or beyond the Internet. The new future that's moving us into the virtual world in a literal sense, through digital characters, or avatars, where we can touch, smell and feel what we used to only see and hear.
After that...
Facebook, which became “Meta”, started hiring thousands to develop this technology and make it possible soon. Although this new virtual reality has not been released yet, Decentraland's sales for this virtual reality have not stopped [since then].
Nonetheless, other companies have entered this huge future market to build virtual worlds and sell them from now already, such as Nvidia, Opensea, Virtualeap, and even China's Baidu, known as China’s Google, have launched a special app called “XiRang” instead of “Facebook”. This frenzied race will shape the future ahead, and put us, as potential users, before a critical question:
Do we really want these for-profit corporations to oversee and manage this new world and control its users?
You are the product
Remember that Facebook installation instructions that you pressed consent without reading them?
You may know that it’s asking permission to open the microphone, track the contacts on your phone, and have free access to photo albums ... to the end of that personal list... Because the website is polite, it’s asking for your permission. And because you're polite, you accept. Even at the expense of your privacy... But what are we going to gain from this politeness in the Metaverse?
Do you know Frances Haugen?
The first definition, She's a data scientist. Second, she's a former employee of Mark Zuckerberg, who testified in the United States Congress that Facebook always gives priority to profits even at the expense of harming the users.
The ex-employee stated that her company was hiding important matters from users and governments around the world and that it misled the users and deliberately harmed adolescents and children. And if you don't believe Haugen, she’s already planned for this by leaking classified documents to the wall street journal metaverse proving her word under a pseudonym before revealing herself.
Despite all of this, the virtual world is still limited to a two-dimensional reality in which we share data and receive it on hand-sized screens. So what's to be expected when we let this reality be involved in all aspects of our life?
Maybe someone has the answer…
That Someon is 'Lawrence Lessig', a law professor at Harvard University, who tells us that Facebook has a business model whose job is to collect as much data as possible about users. That's why he continues: “so long as this business model doesn't change [in the Metaverse technology], Meta is a much more terrifying version of what Facebook is in the real world right now.” It's like the popular saying in the documentary (The Social Dilemma): “If you’re not paying for the product, then you are the product”.
Poisoned cup of honey
If we create a questionnaire for Facebook users to ask them how many times their accounts have been restricted, banned from posting, or maybe entirely deleted.
How many answers do you think there will be “Zero”?!
We might then accuse this blue website of racism and moral blackmail. But it's going to defend itself by claiming that it’s for maintaining the Community Standards… But do those community standards guarantee that users' data is maintained and that their information is protected from theft as well? Or was it just designed to serve the interests of some political and economic entities in exchange for the marginalization and demonization of others?
On past December 7, Facebook was sued in Britain and the United States for its role in facilitating the genocide of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar and allowing hate speech against them to spread. So where are the standards of the wonderful virtual community?! Or is it that these standards are a mixture of utilitarian morality, material interests, and individual desires, and this mixture determines what’s right from wrong? And what are the other standards that involve cyberbullying, family disintegration, and instructing users under the authority of a virtual dictatorial power to pass on certain ideas?!
Some might wonder...
If it's so horrible, how can we be fooled with it so easily? or why should we even fear the expected effects of entering the Metaverse?
Let's just avoid it. It's a deadly poison.
That's why Meta will put it in a cup of honey. Virtual world metaverse will certainly not be pure evil. With all we have said, this technology will be able to improve many industrial and professional sectors and enhance the quality of our daily lives in an unprecedented way. As it removes obstacles that were impossible before its existence, and puts the whole world in your hands, literally, with just one touch!
But for the sake of this all, Frances Haugen spoke out, warning us about the future impact of the virtual world on people's lives, as it will force them to disclose more personal information, increase the addiction to social media, and give the company another form of monopoly in the Internet world.
So let’s ask:
Can the new virtual world be organized and protected from the domination of businesses and global stakeholders? Can our data be protected from theft, trafficking, distortion, and manipulation, or will it be more vulnerable? And are we going to witness an era where the borderline between realism and virtualism is broken until they merge together? Or will the Metaverse help us improve and develop compassion and cooperation and strengthen our family and social bonds?
Can this really happen, when the smaller model in our hands has already devoted individualism and selfishness and contributed to self-aggrandizing and disintegration of the society and increasingly plunging it into the fictional life?
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