How to Talk to Your Family About the Metaverse – Futurism

With the news of Mark Zuckerbergs new pet project to create a fully-digital world, the metaverse is a topic thats getting more buzz than ever. Naturally, your mom or dad might have a few questions about it when it comes time for Thanksgiving. Heck, you might have a few of the same questions yourself.

Well, have no fear: Weve created a handy guide with all the essential talking points you need to get through a conversation with your friends and family about the metaverse.

The metaverse is a term used to describe a complete virtual reality (VR) or augmented reality (AR) world where people use digital avatars to interact with each other.

The term metaverse was first coined in Neal Stephensons 1992 sci-fi novel Snow Crash. However, the concept remained niche until it was broadly popularized in Ernest Clines 2011 Ready Player One. Both stories present the metaverse as a dystopian, escapist tool wielded by the powerful in order to control the masses by putting them into a perpetual state of complacency and distraction but, confusingly, both authors seemed to think that living in the metaverse would be kinda cool.

The concept is in the news once again because back in October, Facebook rebranded itself as Meta and announced sweeping plans to develop a fully-realized metaverse for totally non-evil and nondystopian reasons. In his announcement, CEO Mark Zuckerberg described the metaverse as a massive online platform thatll allow users to create digital avatars, meet and interact with friends, and create AR overlays over existing physical spaces.Oh, and for some reason, nobody has legs.

Many experts are rightfully apprehensive about the project, including Facebooks own VR expert John Carmack, who said recently thathes been actively arguing against every single metaverse effort that the company has put forth for years. While there are a few reasons for the backlash, the most substantive stem from privacy concerns as well as perceptions that the metaverse needs to be a larger, community-led effort rather than centralized by an evil mega-corp (hey, kind of like in Ready Player One!)

Explain to your parents that you want Thanksgiving and Christmas to be held via metaverse from now on, so you can roleplay as your digital fursona avatar or tell em that youd rather be able to mute dad when he goes on one of his libertarian rants again.

More on the metaverse:

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How to Talk to Your Family About the Metaverse - Futurism