The article sees the dystopia of the Metaverse in its real world implications (poverty, escapism) and so on, and uses Ready Player One as an example, but I thin

The article sees the dystopia of the Metaverse in its real world implications (poverty, escapism) and so on, and uses Ready Player One as an example, but I think the more fundamental observation about that book and the corporate Metaverse is what Derrida called Hauntology, or what Mark Fisher later described as the inability of being able to imagine new futures. What's noteworthy about RPO isn't the poverty, it's the fact that everything in the Metaverse, and the book itself, is just a repetition of the same nostalgic elements over and over. There is no actual future in the RPO Oasis, just past, in the same way Hollywood (mentioned in another comment) and video game studios increasingly keep re-publishing the same franchises over and over. So the real threat coming from the Metaverse might not be the poverty or degrading infrastructure which is a sort of obvious one, but the erosion of our capacity to produce any sort of genuine novelty or imagine alternative worlds. Ironically enough, the Metaverse which is supposed to be a sort of wellspring of new ideas is more like a haunted house where you end up trapped like some kind of half-abandoned MMO where people, half-dead, run through the same stories over and over. Important to point out that Fisher saw this inability to produce any futures as a feature of our political, cultural and economic system (i.e. 'neoliberalism' overused term nowadays) and not just a particular technology.