So it seems like the tech giants may be in a race towards creating the "metaverse", or "metaverses". As a kid this would have been an incredibly exciting idea,

So it seems like the tech giants may be in a race towards creating the "metaverse", or "metaverses". As a kid this would have been an incredibly exciting idea, but instead this kind of news creates a weird feeling in the bottom of my stomach. That's mostly for two reasons: 1. It seems like efforts so far towards creating the metaverse are heavily focused on reproducing the inequalities and status heirarchies we have in this reality. What's the point of escaping into a virtual world if it's just another place to get on a status treadmill? 2. Is there any chance that this is going to be an open, standards-based system like the current internet? It seems like this will almost certainly be a walled garden, or a set of walled gardens tightly controlled by a few powerful corporations. Will the open web be "legacy" which is gradually fazed out? Even Niel Stephenson's metaverse in Snow Crash was not this dystopian.