In October 2021, Facebook CEO and harbinger of the apocalypse Mark Zuckerberg announced he was renaming his company “Meta” in an attempt to get away from a shitload of bad press about Facebook knowingly tearing away at our democracy and young girls’ self-images. He waxed technological about the creation of a VR metaverse, a sort of shared digital consciousness foretold by science fiction, and a technology that Meta would helm. It seemed like a scummy attempt to redirect criticism. So why the fuck are we buying this?

Since Zuckerberg’s announcement, I’ve hardly been able to go a day without hearing the word “metaverse”, one that, so far, remains meaningless. The Virtual Reality supplement to our present lives does not exist, or at least, it doesn’t exist any more than it did.

Virtual Reality isn’t new. Even if we discount decades-old attempts at the medium like the Virtual Boy, companies like Valve, Sony, HTC, and Oculus have been hard at work on their personal attempts since I was still attending public school. That last company, Oculus, once the favorite to crack the code, has since been purchased by Facebook/Meta, and is the key to Zuckerberg’s VR ambitions.

In the years that have followed Oculus’s first commercial VR headset, the original Rift model, the VR medium, aided by significant internal competition, has exploded. VR gaming has evolved from niche tech demos to niche games to standard-bearing Triple-A gaming experiences like Valve’s Half-Life Alyx. Still, as VR headset adoption rates climb, they remain far from mainstream, and games like Half-Life Alyx are far from the norm.

A recent Meta ad campaign laments the reputation of VR as a tech for “gamer nerds”. The Zuck doesn’t want his metaverse limited. And, indeed, VR clearly has applications in other fields. Its ability to branch social interaction in the digital space was what attracted Zuckerberg originally. That ability, foretold eons ago by online communities like Second Life and brought to fruition by medium-specific services like VR Chat, has potential, but still has yet to explode in popularity.

Zuckerberg’s version of a metaverse is one that we use to supplement our lives, and in no small way. We might play games in the metaverse, but we also exercise there. We socialize there. We use it for work and school. Enthusiasm about VR has grown exponentially. But against Zuckerberg’s big dreams, its applications beyond gaming and specialist use still seem limited, at least for now.

Big tech and big business coalesce in their fascination with the online office of the future — a space where employees don their VR headsets from all over the country and attend old-school in-person meetings in avatar form. Bill Gates thinks we could be close. Zuckerberg’s obviously thrilled. I’m only a guy writing an article, but no one I’ve talked to is interested in the metaverse’s plan to return to office drudgery. No one is psyched to sit in their meta-cube where it’s just like being at work except proprietary software keeps track of what you’re looking at at all times and 9 A.M. meetings are preempted by a Papa John’s ad.

The idea is, of course, also a non-starter for anyone who’s worked in a non-Silicon Valley office with aging coworkers who struggle with opening PDFs, faxing documents, and locating the “control” key.

But even if people were ready to go, foaming at the mouth to get metastasized… are we ready for that? Why the sudden interest? It’s not the pandemic — that started two years ago and we’re past deciding we don’t give a shit. It’s not some compelling leap in technology — VR headsets can still be prohibitively expensive for casual users and there’s nothing about the “metaverse” that makes it any better than a beige, fur-free VR Chat for office fetishists. So why are we paying into renewed interest?

For now, the metaverse is an unproven, potential, hypothetical idea best grouped with flying cars, self-driving vehicles, real AI, and the rest of their sci-fi brethren. Unless getting sweaty from an hour of Beat Saber is an adequate expectation from the second, digital world of the metaverse of fiction, we’re not close.

Sure, there’s no reason to ignore what could be; it’s fun to hypothesize, to imagine. But flying cars exist in that realm of imagination. Cities on Mars, too, and high-speed transportation alternatives. But those aren’t in vogue right now, at least not beyond the scope of the technology. The metaverse is. Because Zuck wanted a rebrand. And that’s it. Y’all cool with letting this democracy-devouring Slenderman define the news cycle too?

Tagged Facebook, Meta, Slenderdouche