But then, even as we’re only building it, it has begun to look more and more like this world to which we are desperate for alternatives

In the early 2000s, I signed up on Second Life. My objective was to have a spare life, one unlike my own, where I could create an alter self. My plan was to be what I couldn’t be IRL. I wanted it all—tons of money, drinking as much as I could without passing out on the club floor, mansions and châteaus and log cabins and beach houses where I was promised I could be anyone I wanted to be, including good looks, cut arms, abs galore, bold, bald hairstyle or big afro or a flat top, depending on how I would fashion my avatar.

The metaverse to me, before the word came to my attention, was what Harar in Ethiopia was to the French poet Arthur Rimbaud in 1880 or what Paris was to African-American novelist James Baldwin in 1948—the new frontier, an escape from the “realness,” the drudgery, or the cruelty of life back then or even now with technology having disrupted everything. To Rimbaud, Harar was everything Paris was not. He went there in search of peace. For Baldwin, a key figure in the fight for racial equality, Paris was a refuge from racism, which defined his so-called American life.

Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to rebrand Facebook to Meta has made the word known even to circles outside of tech enthusiasts, but even the core believers of metaversal possibilities remain unable to explain the metaverse beyond virtual reality, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, cloud gaming, e-commerce, NFTs, cryptocurrency, and the like, which in one form or another, in fact, already exist. Holograms, perceived even now as futuristic, have been a pop phenomenon since Princess Leia Organa sent a secret message through R2-D2 to Obi Wan Kenobi—“You’re my only hope”—in Star Wars: A New Hope, the first of the franchise released in 1977.

The best way we can define metaverse is to pinpoint something about it that doesn’t already exist in the present. So far, however, the only indication that the metaverse will be the thing in the foreseeable future is that big companies like Meta and Microsoft are investing heavily in it, putting big money where their imagination is, although pundits, even among tech visionaries, think that the key players with enough resources to pour into the enormous infrastructural needs of the metaverse aren’t exactly that imaginative, let alone empathetic.

To Keza MacDonald, video games editor at The Guardian, there is danger that the metaverse is “being constructed by people to whom the problems of the real world are mostly invisible.”

Come to think of it, Zuckerberg, shy and socially awkward, was cocooned from, instead of immersed in real life when he conjured up Facebook. Which is exactly how he was able to build an empire out of the desire to create a whole new world in which you can have as many as 5,000 friends without having to harness the social skills like honesty, compassion, even presence that it takes to build solid relationships.

Personally, my idea of the metaverse is a parallel universe that is as infinite as what the Bing Bang theory claims to have started as a tiny, dense fireball, which exploded 13.8 billion years ago, or the one that, according to the faithful, was created by God in seven days.

As on any new frontier, much hope has been pinned on the metaverse. From the time cyberspace began to exist, we had this idea that it could be a bright new world in which we could all be equal, where our physical limitations would not get in the way of what we were capable of doing based on our intellectual capacity, based on who we were inside of our heads. If it’s just a virtual world, it must be perfect, right? A world limited only by our imagination.

Alas, we are only human. As on all the once-new frontiers that preceded it, the first to stake territorial claims on this bountiful, boundless new space is the big corporations. And cynics have every reason to fear that chances are the metaverse will serve no higher purpose than to raise profit margins, expand markets, and create desire for things we don’t really need, such as another reality, the metaverse itself, which, like reality, will operate, change, and evolve continuously, persistently, whether or not we are in it or we are asleep or whether we are logged on or off.

Utopian dream or dystopian nightmare? Although the word metaverse originated in the 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash, in which people sought digital avatars to escape their crumbling reality, the metaverse is still effectively under construction, which is to say that we are at a point we can still choose to make it either heaven or hell.

What is happening IRL, however, is pushing us more and more to see the metaverse as an escape hatch from a world that is running empty of natural resources, like food, water, fresh air, and space, from which result increasing conflict and violence, health issues, and general unhappiness.

Maybe what the world needs right now is to send us all off to dreamland, safe in a high-tech sleep bubble, with our VR headsets or AR goggles strapped on, where we are fed intravenously with some meal replacement liquids and supplied with everything else we need by technology.

We’ll be able to feel present, like we’re right there with people no matter how far apart we actually are. —Mark Zuckerberg

We may develop muscle atrophy and degenerate into corpulence, like the passengers on the starliner Axiom in the 1998 science fiction film WALL-E, but our brains will remain active, metaversally connected, so we can use the time to devise solutions to the planet’s sustainability problems as it awaits our physical return.

Meanwhile, in an effort to further understand the biggest challenge to our continued existence, climate change, stuck in the metaverse, though the metaverse should also enable connections between real and virtual, we can take history lessons, transporting ourselves directly to, say, 1928 and have Henry Ford himself tell us more about how he established Fordlandia in the Amazon jungle to harvest rubber for automobile production. Or we can take lessons in futurism with hotshot environmental author Alan Weisman reading to us his 2007 eye-opening bestseller The World Without Us.

Don’t worry, there’ll be plenty of chances for fun. We’ll have the wherewithal to go to a Mardi Gras in New Orleans, our avatar covered in dead insects in a virtual Alexander McQueen getup, or get our freak on at the Venice Carnival in digital Jean-Paul Gaultier-designed plague masks. If we’re in no mood to commune with the cybercrowd, we can arrange to have a private hologram concert with Europe’s Israeli sensation Asaf Avidan by the fireplace of our fake Swiss chalet in Gstaad.

We can do all that and more, but first, in order to afford it, we have to buy and sell NFTs or open an art gallery in cyberspace. Better yet, we must invest in metaverse land.

Wait a cryptominute, all these money issues… are we awake now?