Sunday With Sisson | Mark's Daily Apple

Happy Sunday, everyone.

Zuckerberg just released a video describing the “MetaVerse,” an alternative digital reality where things that aren’t possible in waking, physical reality suddenly can be made “real.” Anything you can imagine can be realized. Just strap on your headset and enter a world of your devising. A reality more real than whatever we call reality now. A reality more exciting, stimulating, and personalized to your desires and your predilections.

Is anyone actually buying this?

Look, the techies always run into problems when they try to conquer biology. Look at Soylent, the “food replacement” for people who just can’t be bothered to eat actual food. Full of seed oils and soy proteins and missing all sorts of phytonutrients and essential compounds, not to mention all the food compounds that haven’t been quantified yet.

Look at Beyond Meat, which tries to replace actual beef with some lab-constituted slurry full of novel compounds no organism has ever encountered in the natural world.

Failures, total failures.

And now, look at the MetaVerse, which promises to replace physical reality itself. Sure, you strap on a headset and VR goggles and find yourself inside a three-dimensional virtual space. Step out onto your virtual balcony and gaze at whatever setting you’ve chosen. Maybe it’s the rugged coastline of Kauai. Maybe it’s Big Sur. Maybe it’s a perpetual sunset, or sunrise. The most beautiful you've ever seen.

I’m sure the first time you log in it’ll be quite the experience. People I talk to who have used VR goggles report being blown away by their first time riding a rollercoaster or hang-glider. But is it more than a novelty? Is it actually a world you’d be happy residing in?

Can you smell the salt in the air? Is the full spectrum of UV and infrared light that comes with a real sunrise actually present in the VR world? If you climb down the balcony toward the water, can you feel the scree underfoot? Can you slip and slide down to the water? Will you really trick your nervous system into believing it's real? Will you really buy into it with your entire being?

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I’m doubtful. In fact, I know I won’t.

The saddest thing is that some people will. Some people whose real lives are so unfulfilling, so tied to the tiny screen they keep in their pockets, that graduating to a larger, all-encompassing screen attached to your face will indeed seem better than the real thing. Because the real thing is a sad, depleted husk of what it could be.

Even sadder is that despite that they’ll know deep down that this is all a mirage. That they’re selling themselves short. They may not voice these feelings to their conscious self. They may keep them buttoned up, shoved deep into the recesses of their minds, but they’ll know. Some part of them will know.

But hey, this stuff is coming down the pike. People will buy into it. Interesting times ahead.

What do you think about the MetaVerse? Is it the future?

Let me know in the comment section of New and Noteworthy.

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