Zuckerberg’s Meta Disaster
Is Meta dying or going through an identity crisis?
“Who Is Still Inside the Metaverse?” wondered Paul Murray for the New Yorker on March 15, 2023.
Murray went, “Searching for friends in Mark Zuckerberg’s deserted fantasyland,” and found…not much of anything. Besides a disturbing bit of casual satanism and anonymous avatar comedians in a virtual comedy club/digital hellscape, Murray found boredom, which is itself a sort of novelty in today’s frenetic society.
Whether Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg can capitalize on this old/new novelty of boring its users is another matter entirely.
For readers of the New Yorker, Murray vividly described at length empty virtual “worlds”, blocky graphics, and a weird combination of prevalent pornography, lewd user names, and ways to easily tattle on anyone who upsets you.
“On my initial visits, the metaverse seems sort of desolate, like an abandoned mall,” mused Murray initially.
“When you enter Horizon Worlds for the first time, after a brief warning about seizures, you hear a female voice assure you that if anyone upsets you, you can report them,” he wrote. “In a giggly whisper, the voice adds, ‘Don’t worry, we won’t tell them it was you!’”
The long, feature piece was full of glowing accolades like, “I can’t stress how…