The Metaverse has Always Been a Dystopia Name ONE work of fiction involving virtual reality in which virtual reality is not viewed as a horrible hellscape. (okay, name two) One of the climactic beats in Neuromancer, which came out 10 years before Snow Crash and without which Snow Crash would not exist, has the hero in a false reality constructed by an AI in which his dead girlfriend is alive again. The AI appeals to him to stay a while because this reality is better than the one he's currently dying in. The protagonist chooses to return to the crappy reality because it's real. It's the RUR problem: the first appearance of robots in fiction is about a robot uprising, and the majority of works since have also. We write these stories to reinforce what we don't want, not what we do. Frickin' Snow Crash is fundamentally about a virtual reality virus that infects your real brain and the tantalizing evidence of a mother tongue destroyed by the tower of Babel but then Stephenson whiffs the ending because he's a hack. ABSOLUTELY NO PART OF IT is inspirational in any way, shape or form. People don't even want augmented reality, let alone virtual. Yeah you can play Pokemon Go that way but it slows you down, is a gimmick that lasts 2 minutes and nukes your battery (as well as isolating you from the friends you're playing with). Second Life has reliably failed to catch on for 18 years now.
But this all makes a ton of sense when you stop to consider that Zuckerberg is the archetypal badguy from bad Marvel-level sci fi. It's as if he saw the Matrix and really sympathized with the robots who were giving all those useless, ungrateful humans food and shelter.
Facebook makes sense if you presume that Mark Zuckerberg is a sociopath that has built a successful industry by hiring sociopaths. EDITED TO ADD: Something pointed out in Yuval Hariri's Sapiens is that Neanderthals were smarter than us. They had bigger brains. They initially had more sophisticated rituals. But they also limited their socialization to small family groups. Cro Magnons, on the other hand, were smaller-brained but more social. The result was that they formed larger social groups, which allowed a greater spread of innovation - if you invent an atlatl but you only show your family, the tribe that shows 150 people how to use an atlatl is going to kick your ass. Hariri didn't make the link that sociopathy and libertarianism are basically neanderthal behavior, but I will. Society exists because we evolved to protect it. There are deviants from the norm but by and large, the structure only works when the participants have a heapin' helpin' of altruism. It is my measured opinion that as soon as we normalize our relationships with algorithmically-mediated content and landscapes, the initial benefit gained from sociopathy will be neutralized.
