Right now, the concept of a metaverse seems like a fancy buzzword and while for many tech giants that might be true, it is much more than that. The term meta and metaverse were first used in the same context we use for the concept of a digital metaverse that first appeared in the novel 'Snow Crash'. It was an open-source digital world where anyone could interact with one another and even someone bedridden in the hospital could be able to spend time with others as if they were in the real-world. Doing tasks in the virtual world could also earn you income to do things in the real-world, allowing people to spend time in the digital world and survive in the real world too. This seems to be what Facebook is attempting to accomplish as it moves towards this goal, starting with rebranding the company with the name 'Meta'.
Now, a lot of people have problems with Facebook coming out on top when it comes to the game of creating a proper metaverse, and I can see why. For one, as stated, most versions of the Metaverse in fiction like in 'Snow Crash' and 'Ready Player One' have some portion of the system being open-source with some of the items in the multiverse not simply controlled by a single company or corporation. However, with Facebook at the helm, their metaverse will definitely be fully controlled by the tech giant and its shareholders with no input from others. Also, if the servers for Facebook go down, everyone loses everything that they have been progressing towards. Remember the recent outage Facebook had this year where billions of people had their service cut off and businesses that depended on Facebook for ads and communicating with customers basically lost precious business hours: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/04/technology/facebook-down.html. Well, that can happen again with the Metaverse if a tech company like Facebook is in charge and continues to put all of its eggs in one basket. Also, it means it is easy for the company to censor you and take away any items you earn in the metaverse if you say anything bad about them. A lot of this news of Facebook getting into the metaverse literally happened after a study came out that showed Facebook was ignoring the damage their platform was damaging the self-esteem of teens and was trying to get children hooked to platform’s owned by Facebook like Instagram, so this move to the metaverse feels less like Facebook suddenly showing interest in progress and more like finding a way to do two things: move away from the bad press and attempting to find ways to potentially hold hostage whistleblowers of the future if they decide to go against Meta while using their metaverse program.
However, crypto is able to come to the rescue by offering some other metaverse alternatives to Facebook and other larger tech giants. Hopefully, this will lead to a more open version of the Metaverse similar to those depicted in fiction that are not solely owned by a single company, but owned by people or simply regulated by a company while a decentralized ledger guarantees people can keep their things no matter what.
