Seems a bit naive to me. OP seems intent that Facebook (or “Meta”) will play nice and remain decentralized and absolutely not “own the metaverse,” and uses Goog

Seems a bit naive to me. OP seems intent that Facebook (or “Meta”) will play nice and remain decentralized and absolutely not “own the metaverse,” and uses Google as an example. Unfortunately, that very comment painting Google as an underdog says that it has become a company which “controls the web.” And saying that Facebook has developed some open source frameworks therefore it will continue to do so is just not holistic. FB developed React closed-source and for its own benefit. They didn’t sit down and look at the state of web development and say “hey, let’s create a framework for everybody.” They say down and said “we need a way to easily build UI components and systems that scale.” It just so happened that other people’s interests and needs aligned with FB in this particular instance. To say that this means FB is somehow inherently interested in being “compatible” is fallacious. I do agree that comparisons with any old technology, positive or negative, are inherently slippery. So while I don’t much agree with the original article, I don’t agree with this either because how can you? This is simply pointing to a past event (the commercialization of the internet) and saying “this will happen again.” Maybe, maybe not, to quote a Chinese aesop. But on a deeper level, it seems that the foolish Luddites OP is quoting against the internet were not opposed to the very nature of the web - a decentralized information system - but rather the technical development of it. This is different from the arguments against the metaverse, which are almost entirely inherent to its nature. I think everyone would accept some lacking VR technology or uncomfortable AR glasses, if they agreed on the final destination. Unfortunately, most of the criticism of the metaverse are against its very nature. There is not a market for the metaverse. Nobody seems happy or excited by the idea. And come on, really? Saying that VR is anything like really interacting with another person? This is like those million and one social media apps that are gonna “solve loneliness.” Maybe this comment will be quoted and flashed up on the Meta Headset 8 in a decade or two and everyone will have a good laugh at me and my foolish blindness, but I don’t see a genuine market demand for the metaverse and that’s my criticism for it.