A million little metaverses

But the truth is, mostly, these little experiences end up being perfectly fine. It’s true that airlines have absurdly complicated fare categories, but the trouble can usually be sorted out in a few minutes. And customer service people, in most cases, actually want to resolve the problem. If there’s a delay in getting to the solution, it’s often because for the first 15 minutes of the conversation, I’m too angry to notice there’s no reason to be angry.

“Your problem,” a friend of mine once said to me, “is that you only hear what you want to hear.”

Which isn’t true, as I tried to explain. My problem, I told my friend, is that I never hear what I want to hear, even when what I want to hear is being said. For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a very hard time taking “yes” for an answer.

I thought of this when I saw a recent photo of Mark Zuckerberg, the impresario of Meta (nee Facebook) with a pair of opaque white goggles attached to his face. He was demonstrating something called Horizon Worlds, an interconnected virtual world that his company has introduced to the actual world.

Horizon Worlds is an alternate reality space — a “metaverse,” in nerdspeak — that Zuckerberg is trying, so far unsuccessfully, to sell to the public. There are many reasons for its sputtering lack of success. The headset costs about $400, for one thing. Its virtual world is sparsely populated, for another. Recent reports suggest that most people who buy the headsets and visit the Horizon Worlds metaverse get bored and leave within a month.

But I think the real reason no one seems to be interested in Zuckerberg’s metaverse is because we’re all already living in our own individual Horizon Worlds.

For instance, when I’m fuming with pre-outrage at this or that customer service representative, it’s like I’m wearing a big fat headset and living in my own metaverse. I have a hard time hearing the person on the other end of the line, a person who is usually trying to solve my problem in a cheerful and cooperative way, because I have my figurative goggles on so tightly the outside world is entirely shut out.

I don’t need a $400 headset. I live this way anyway. I’m moving around in a virtual world — an irritating virtual world — of my own creation, all the time.

And in a way, that’s how we all live in 2022. We watch the television news channel that depicts politics and policy the way we want. We scroll through TikTok or Instagram or Twitter, encountering a content feed that’s algorithmically designed to reinforce our tastes and preferences.

For instance, I have a friend whose metaphorical metaverse goggles tell him that COVID-19 cases are on the rise, that we’re facing another deadly outbreak, that we should all be masking up. My goggles tell me the exact opposite — that is, when they’re not telling me that the guy on the phone from Spectrum Cable is not going to be able to solve my problem, so I should keep yelling.

Joe Biden’s metaverse goggles tell him that voters want to talk about climate change, that inflation is under control, that the economy is roaring. Vladimir Putin’s Horizon Worlds headset told him that the Russian army was well-trained and equipped to roll into Ukraine and occupy Kyiv, and it’s still showing him a version of that world every day. Former President Donald Trump’s headset is telling him … well, actually, I have no idea what Trump’s metaverse looks like, but he sure has those goggles on tight.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Horizon Worlds initiative is bound to fail because it’s trying to sell us something we already have: a perfectly constructed virtual world hermetically sealed from reality. He’d do better — and we’d all be happier — if he could figure out a way to get us to take the goggles off.

Rob Long is a television writer and producer and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.