Reports indicate that Mark Zuckerberg is losing interest in the metaverse. “Both users must be devastated” is one of the tarter reactions doing the rounds. To remind readers — how telling that I need to — the metaverse is a virtual world in which people interact as graphical representations of themselves: as “avatars”. Who was ever going to choose it over real life, even for an hour, beats me. But the tousle-haired one was so devoted to the idea as to rename Facebook after it in 2021.
He can blame the zeitgeist, at least. There was a wider belief around then that physical reality was becoming less important. In Britain, the techno-utopian case for leaving the EU was that territorial distance no longer counted for much. Australia could be as natural a trade partner as Spain.
If some good comes of the war in Iran, it is that all such talk will struggle to receive a hearing for a while. To slip into Thiel-ese for a moment, what we are witnessing in the Gulf is the victory of “atoms” rather than “bits”. It is the reassertion of the material world. Geologic forces put fossil fuels in the Middle East and created the aperture now known as the Strait of Hormuz. There is still laughably little that anyone can do to get around these hard facts. And not just these ones. Investors are surprised that quite sporadic attacks on commercial ships and their personnel are enough to stop them. But human beings tend to have just the one body and to feel some attachment to it. “Disrupt” that.