Big Tech Needs to Stop Trying to Make Their Metaverse Happen

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/metaverse-big-tech-land-grab-hype

The Metaverse is a fuzzy concept: It entered dictionaries via Neal Stephenson’s 1992 dystopian sci-fi novel Snow Crash, where the Metaverse is the virtual refuge from an anarchy-laden world controlled by the Mafia, and was brought back by a series of blogposts by VC Matthew Ball.

The morality of the Metaverse project is the least of its problems. Unlike Google Glass, the gold standard of tech blunders, it is not an overhyped (and ill-conceived) product: It is pure hype, without a product—except for some hypothetical “building blocks.”

A letter by the CEO of Japanese game developer Square Enix, in which the executive expounded on his interest in NFTs and drew an odd distinction between people who “play for fun” and those who “play to contribute” was also badly received.