Ten days have passed since Mark Zuckerberg announced that he wanted to build a metaverse, a sort of new Internet where we can live through our avatars, and the concept has already established itself as the word of the year. Every day someone adds their piece of metaverse: there will be that of fashion, industry, entertainment, video games, romantic or sexual encounters and even a marine metaverse for sharks. It almost seems as if the world of technology was looking forward to a new frontier to head towards. Far from here. In a virtual world. The picture couldn’t be more jarring: while the summit is underway in Glasgow to find an agreement to reduce human-induced climate change and save the planet, some of the most important minds in Silicon Valley are chasing the dream of move into a parallel reality. From a certain point of view, the attitude is no different from that of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk when they propose the colonization of space as a perspective for our future. Leaving planet A. Epper, the metaverse has a different profile: it’s not about going to Mars but about staying here, putting on virtual and augmented reality viewers and starting to interact with others like in a video game.
We would make a mistake to consider everything virtual in the sense of not real: the same mistake that was made at the dawn of the web, when digital life was considered virtual and instead we are on the web, with our stories, our dreams, needs and fears. Even in the metaverse it will be like this. Epper I find myself in the words of the CEO of Niantic, perhaps the only company to have already made a successful product in virtual reality, Pokemon Go. Says John Hanke: “We should use technology not to escape this world and take refuge in an artificial place, but to live better with others on this planet. We have seen with the covid what effect it has to be without the others “.
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