The Dangers Of The Metaverse
“They were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should.”
Anyone that has seen Jurassic Park knows this famous line. Jeff Goldblum's character was pointing out the lost art of ethical decision-making in the sciences. He was basically saying that just because we can create dinosaurs from their fossilized DNA that could potentially eat us, doesn't mean we should. And not to spoil the film for you (Who am I kidding? If you haven't seen it yet, than that is on you.), but he was right. The dinosaurs were "chosen" for distinction for a reason, and maybe we should've left it at that.
This line from the film may be the only line most remember because while watching, we couldn’t help but consider its validity, not only in the plot of the film, but also its application to our lives. And more and more these days, a news story crosses our radar that causes us, once again, to wonder if the relevant technological advancement is a good idea.
This is the approach I take when considering the ramifications of Mark Zuckerberg’s latest plague upon civilization: The Metaverse. This idea that there’s a whole new world without limits for us to explore, and the only cost is our socialization with fellow human beings. No need to hang out with friends, you can make friends in the Metaverse. No need to go to the store and smile at the little old lady passing by in the same aisle, you can go to the store in the Metaverse. No need to face your fears and anxieties in the real world, you can avoid them and develop new ones in the fake.
I can think of a million reasons why this is a bad idea, but here are just a few:
I would argue that the most important lesson of this pandemic (outside of the need to question everything we hear) is the detrimental damage the isolation has caused on the human race. This isolation spanned every aspect of the expert’s guidance from social distancing, to lockdowns to the masks themselves. The implications will be felt for many generations and it genuinely makes me sad to ponder. The response by the experts (and us) to this pandemic has unleashed a mental illness crisis on a level that the world has never seen. So why would we deliberately engage in something as isolating as the Metaverse.
The detachment from reality should scare all of us. Some of us might dabble in this new and stupid idea, and still come out of it just fine. But we all know there are many that won’t. Psychologists are already screaming about how video games and even Facebook (Zuckerberg’s other famous plague) have caused people to lose touch with reality. There are documented cases of children, addicted to video games, wondering if they were still “in the game” after setting down the controller and turning off the game. The further removed from reality we become, the more detached we are from our emotions, allowing a numbing indifference to life itself to take place, whether ours or those around us.
Parents are having a hard enough time dealing with the “Wild West” of social media that exists today and the harms they inflict on their children. How on earth are parents supposed to contend with this alternate reality?
So what are we to do? I’d say we’ve all learned a pretty invaluable lesson with this pandemic. It ends when we as the “consumers” say it does. We let it get to far with the overreach of our government officials, but I like to think that we have learned our lesson. The same approach can be taken here. If we just don’t comply with this idiotic idea, hopefully, it will go away. I fear, however, that this new “pandemic” will be an even more difficult one to survive if we don’t.
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