(John Ransom, Headline USA) A tech expert told a podcast audience that Facebook’s new “Metaverse” artificial reality reminds him of the old Soviet claims that communism hadn’t been fully built yet, but when built, the world would be wonderful.
“I went to first grade in the Soviet Union,” explained Phil Libin, founder of notetaking app Evernote, according to Futurism. “I was subjected to a lot of Soviet propaganda, and I was told as a little kid repeatedly: ‘Communism doesn’t exist yet. We haven’t built communism yet. We’re building towards communism.’”
Lubin said that Facebook’s “Metaverse” makes similar claims about a future that he suspects will never come.
“You know, you can smell a bad idea before it’s fully built,” added Lubin.
“So I don’t want to hear [from Facebook] ‘Oh yeah, the metaverse doesn’t exist yet….The metaverse is coming — it’s coming,’” Lubin concluded about Facebook’s promises.
Lubin called “Metaverse” “squishscammy” on Twitter, a contraction of the words squishy and scammy that denotes it as indefinable verging on fraud.
“Metaverse” is a squishscammy word. If you include things like video games and, um, the Internet, it’s already a big success. AR has future potential. But I’m calling bullshit on a persistent, decentralized, skeuomorphic, interconnected 3D world, experienced primarily through VR.
— Phil Libin (@plibin) January 12, 2022
“AR has future potential,” he said via tweet. “But I’m calling bullshit on a persistent, decentralized, skeuomorphic, interconnected 3D world, experienced primarily through VR” that Facebook promotes as it’s “Metaverse”.
“Metaverse” is a virtual reality world created by Facebook that will allow users to experience the internet as an alternate reality with augmented-reality devices, around which Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has rebranded his company, said Business Insider.
“There’s a part of me that hates it and a part of me that fears it, but since I think it’s so spectacularly stupid, there’s actually not that much to fear,” Lubin said about the “Metaverse” according to Business Insider.
He noted that a major drawback of virtual reality is that users have to be strapped into headgear for hours at a time, noting “no one wants to spend any amount of time with a plastic thing strapped to their face.”
