Big Tech, stop saying ‘metaverse.’ It’s unbecoming.
Every couple of years a new piece of jargon comes along that gets Silicon Valley very, very excited. We are now at that juncture once again, wherein “metaverse” has become the word du jour. Things you used to know simply as “VR” or “video games” have now become part of the omnipresent “meta” vortex. Meta this, meta that. In the words of the late, great Norm Macdonald: “I hate meta.”
The very concept of meta and the metaverse wouldn’t be so frustrating if Big Tech had a cohesive vision for what it meant. But each company appears to be saying the words within the context of their own disparate inventions, analysts and “experts” are spamming “metaverse” in what feels like an effort to stay on top of a trend they didn’t know was coming, and everyone’s making a big fuss out of nothing. This phenomenon needs to stop.
A metatextual misunderstanding
Source: Windows Central
It was the aggressive influx of analysts and experts saying “metaverse” in response to Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision that sent me into this meta conniption. Three months ago, most of us would’ve said “Microsoft has bought Activision for IP and vidya games.” Now, the proper dialogue is “Microsoft’s purchase of Activision is a metaverse investment,” with the term “metaverse” being a cover-all for games, software in general, any sort of virtual or augmented reality endeavor, and basically anything relating to the word “virtual.” For example, that dream you had of your high school crush? Yeah, that’s not real; it’s virtual. Ergo, it was a metaversal dream.
Three months ago does, in fact, mark the real birth of the “metaverse” frenzy, for a reason you can probably deduce. While the concept of the metaverse has been around forever — just watch The Matrix or read Ready Player One for proof — it took Mark Zuckerberg rebranding Facebook as Meta to send all of Big Tech into panic mode. Facebook has a vision for a virtual landscape it wants to pioneer, and it dubbed it the metaverse. That makes sense. That’s all well and good. What’s not good is virtually every other company now cannibalizing the word, chasing after it by claiming that all their products were metaverse products the whole time and that we just couldn’t see that fact yet.
A meta comedy of errors
Source: Jez Corden / Windows Central. Photo by Meta Inc.
So here’s what I’m asking for. I want Microsoft, Activision, all the stock bros who keep selling the “metaverse” idea without knowing what they’re saying, all the analysts trying to sound in the loop, and everyone else to get on the same page with this metaverse thing. I want conformity and the restitution of language as a means of communication rather than a vessel for noise. Maybe Facebook’s definition is the winner because one could argue it made the first and biggest splash in modern tech. On the other hand, anyone can point back to an earlier event and claim that was the metaverse’s inception. Maybe we all need to get on board with Aristotle’s Metaphysics and call it a day.
The point is, metaverse branding is all over the place. There’s nothing wrong with the word sticking around, but it needs to mean something, just like how “books,” “movies,” and “augmented reality” all clearly define a specific medium. Big Tech owes it to each and every one of us on this metaversal experiment of a rock to clean up its act and give us a metaverse that doesn’t disrespect the very concept of language.
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