
It is a perverse gamble. In order to really work, it requires us to be bored at home for the foreseeable future. Barring extreme cases, it is only when clubs are closed, and concerts are cancelled, and in-person meetings are off-limits that one would go for their Metaverse equivalents. It might be a smart gamble—a new variant, the climate crisis, or a nuclear apocalypse might force us all indoors again—but it is, to put it dramatically, a bet against humankind. It is not necessarily bad for technology companies to take a leaf from sci-fi, but if you really have to, at least try picking the utopian stuff, like Amazon’s Echo, blatantly modeled after Star Trek’s chirpy talking computer, over the unsettling dog-eat-dog hellscape of Snow Crash.
And still, the morality of the Metaverse project is the least of its problems. Unlike Google Glass, the gold standard of tech blunders, it is not an overhyped (and ill-conceived) product: It is pure hype, without a product—except for some hypothetical “building blocks.” Benedict Evans, a venture partner at London-based firm Entrepreneur First, has drawn an apt parallel between the Metaverse and the “information superhighway”—a very fashionable early-1990s term announcing the advent of some kind of US-wide digital communication network encompassing everything from video-games to interactive TV, to fiber optics.
The prediction was not completely misplaced—after all, we got the internet—but a lot of the staples of the coming information superhighway vision, such as the role of interactive TV, never came to pass. Once again, tech companies are looking at the tea leaves and divinating a technological future. Typically, and unsurprisingly, it is a future that is profitable for them.
But one feels that Meta, Microsoft and the others should have read the room better. Last month, gamers, the one demographic you would expect to hop on the Metaverse bandwagon with glee, reacted with quasi-universal scorn to French game studio Ubisoft’s launch of its NFTs—as special objects in shooter game Ghost Recon Breakpoint. Many gamers saw the introduction of in-game economies and cryptocurrencies as a way to fleece them, by making splurging on NFTs compulsory to play, or do so on equal footing with other players. A letter by the CEO of Japanese game developer Square Enix, in which the executive expounded on his interest in NFTs and drew an odd distinction between people who “play for fun” and those who “play to contribute” was also badly received. The idea that everyone wants to make money—and spend money—while playing a video-game surely sounds attractive to the people making those games and selling digital tchotkes; some gamers beg to differ.