I agree with you, a profit driven metaverse would be a Dystopian nightmare, if it was even possible, but I don’t believe it is possible.
I did some research, using my already longstanding experience as a systems Engineer, on a technical element of this as part of a PhD and it quickly became apparent that this pushes the idea of profit over the edge.
We’ve watched as virtual world startup after virtual world startup has gone bust, leaving Second life still there with the lions share of what remains a niche market.
I believe that fundamentally, this is because we rebel against allowing complete authority, but more than that, it fundamentally is not possible to maintain profit in a world of slaves, a modern version of which is what everyone except the very wealthy has become, if we admit it.
Truth is to create value, we need to be free, to create whatever we wish to create as individuals. A controlled crowd creates no value at all, unless it is maybe to attack the crowds owned by perhaps a rival ruler, who’s wealth the owners of our particular crowd would like to steal.
But if there are no rivals, then there is no-one to attack, therefore no way to obtain value from a single, global captive market.
Rome, and now the US, failed in exactly the same way.
In fact a captive market has to be funded, empowered by money (hence UBI), in order to create value, but by that empowerment, they are no longer captive ☺, and issuing significant UBI does not fit in a profit driven organisation.
In reality, the profitability of facebook is stumbling, for exactly that reason, it has run its course as far as a profitable business can, with such a large captive market.
Now they are under fire from many directions, paying fines and employing armies to try to react to rules being put on them by the governments of many places, it won’t be long before we hear they actually have financial problems as an organisation, in my opinion.
That is why they are now turning to try to create a metaverse, it is desparation, they have run out of profitable ideas, and are hoping the metaverse might be the answer.
But it isn’t, in fact the metaverse is the rock they are likely to perish on as an organisation, because fundamentally, it isn’t possible to profit from a market comprising more than a certain portion of the world population.
So in my opinion if they got even close to getting everyone into a metaverse, they would really struggle to maintain control of their company, it would very quickly become public property, which would be a great thing, if the users had control of such a thing, the benefits we would see as individuals would actually be huge.
The issues get even more complex when we take things like covid and the climate crisis into account, this whole issue completely occupies my writing efforts in Medium, as I started out wishing to promote a publicly owned metaverse about the time when I first realised the problem, around 2017.
The solution is solar power, to infinitely fund all in a publicly owned metaverse.
Solar, combined with proof of work tokens like Bitcoin, is the answer to all things, it seems to me.
That is the only possible future, in my best estimation.
It might be Zuck knows it too.
But I doubt it ☺
