Zuck's Metaverse (tm) is very forward looking in some ways, and very backward looking in others. Although his particular vision is very weird and ugly, Zuck is

Zuck's Metaverse (tm) is very forward looking in some ways, and very backward looking in others. Although his particular vision is very weird and ugly, Zuck is on the right track: in the future, people will spend real time (not async time, a-la tiktok/instagram) with each other in virtual spaces. Facebook is already a text-based version of the metaverse, and it minted a pretty penny. The metaverse, as Zuck imagines it, is already here though: video games. People who are hardcore about video games wake up, go to work, get home, and then plug in. Their friends and social circle exists on the internet, in the game. This is the metaverse. Video-game communities; Fortnight [1] , WoW, League, CS-Go, etc; these are the most complete so far existing metaverse(s). One exists for every major flavor of gameplay we can think of. Look on steam for people who have 10,000 hours in a game. These people live as Zuck wants us all to: in the metaverse. Zuck's vision is to expand these virtual communities beyond the hardcore gamer group. You go to work (in a metaverse) then you come home and spend time with your friends (in a different metaverse), then you play a game (in yet another metaverse), then you sleep and do it all again the next day. It's actually a very forward-looking vision, and one that probably will come to pass over the next few decades. A metric for this is "time spent in front of a screen." It inexorably climbs year after year, generation after generation. But the key thing is that the experience has to be good. The metaverse of Fortnight or CS-GO is worth spending time in because those games are fun and engaging in their own right; for some, more fun and engaging than reality itself. These games print money, because a small group of people legitimately spend every leisure moment in them. Zuck's vision is to expand this beyond the market for hardcore gamers and into work, socialization -- life itself. I suspect that the market doesn't quite fully understand this part of Zuck's metaverse dreams. In part because of Meta's spectacular failure at making the metaverse look fun and compelling. Personally, my money's on Epic to actually bring the Metaverse to fruition. They already own a Metaverse, Fortnight, and they also own Unreal, which will probably be the software foundation upon which the normie metaverse gets built. [1] https://medium.com/@ow/the-metaverse-is-already-here-its-called-fortnite-3a7d92e4acfd https://medium.com/@ow/the-metaverse-is-already-here-its-cal...