“Peta” might have been a better choice 
The ‘petaverse’ has a certain ring to it 
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https://www.reddit.com/r/unpopularopinion/comments/qi8jaj/meta_is_a_bad_rebrand_name_for_facebook/
"Meta is a BAD rebrand name for Facebook
It just reminds me of the word metadata or data revealing other data. That can come together to target individuals. Facebook does that and literally rebrands themselves to what they really make money off of.
The only thing that completes meta is YOUR data lol"
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I am so not keen on “the metaverse”. You know those VR headsets? They need to be calibrated very carefully for how far apart one’s eyes are in one’s specific skull. If this is calibrated wrongly, then one’s brain gets very disoriented because it’s highly accustomed to one’s eyes never changing their spaced-apart width randomly. This can cause nausea and vomiting, like one actually had brain damage. This creates a ripe target for hackers: to hack the headsets remotely, miscalibrating this setting on purpose, to cause brain-scrambling symptoms such as nausea and vomiting in their victims.
This hack will be a highly, highly attractive cyberwar weapon, especially in the use in cold war, and terrorism. Mark my words.
No VR headset for me, thanks. I don’t expect I’ll be getting any hearts clicked under this post, owing to the “bad news” nature of it.
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A friend who is quite luddite describes the internet as “a haunted slum.” Your comment resonates with this (forgive me, I can’t resist) petaphor.
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It’s probably my age, but I have zero interest in “augmented reality” games or VR headsets. I tried an Occulus headset and it made me ill after about ten minutes. I’ve talked to a few young’uns, friends’ kids, and they said the same thing, they used to play some augmented Pokemon game but the trend died out and they moved on to something else, same thing with Occulus, it just isn’t something you want to do for hours.
I think at some point even the most hardcore screen addicts butt up against a natural limit, some point at which they say “ok, that’s too much…” and want to return to something closer to reality. This whole metaverse thing seems like companies trying to create a market that isn’t there, desperately grasping for profits and growth so they can buy a ninth yacht.
I’m ready to return to this post in ten years when the world is walking around with VR goggles strapped to their heads 24/7 and laugh at how wrong I was.
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I think VR is like 3-D, destined to be a fad repeatedly, every time they make an improvement and delude themselves into thinking “this time, we cracked it”.
I was thinking the exact same thing.
There seems to be a limit in technology, we go a certain distance, then the next thing … isn’t necessarily a thing?
The big problem with AR/VR is that it’s so inconvenient to put on some face-thing. It’d only really work if you have an implant. That’s invasive and doesn’t exist, but I’m sure it’s where Meta is heading. They’ll absolutely want to stick hardware into your brain.
The purpose is not for VR or whatever: it’s so they can monitor your brain activity in real time and use it for harvesting data and targeting ads. Ahh, so you had a twinge of hunger? How about a pizza? Thinking about that cute brunette waitress you saw? Here’s some cute brunettes on Onlyfans! Worrying about government inaction on climate change and thinking about chaining yourself to the Minister’s office? Here’s a knock on your door, you’ve been swatted!
Their problem is that they’ll have to build up a huge use case for it beforehand so it has the momentum and the software problems are solved. Our problem is that we’d have to trust Facebook to be wired directly into our brains.
I don’t think those smart glasses like Google glasses from back in the early 2010s have gone away for good. Being somewhat faceblind, something that told me who I’m talking to would be awesome! 
I had a look at some AR bits and pieces about 15 years ago as part of a system for mechanics working on aircraft maintenance. It was pretty usable then and made a difference. It superimposed engineering schematics over the real parts. Instructions for diagnostic, tear down and rebuild were given, especially for novices or for old hands on new components. It’s probably a whole lot better by now, but I’m not going down that rabbit hole.
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Oh definitely, there are many uses for specific applications. I think Google pretty much pivoted Glasses to that kind of thing after they got a less-than-stellar reception.
It’s a lot easier to build for a specific set of technical requirements than to make a general-purpose device. And there are fundamental issues with privacy. Google might be less unethical than FB, or at least, more concerned with not seeming evil, but FB may well forge ahead where they hesitated.
This article may be relevant here (please note that it contains a profanity).
A Twitter user insulted a German politician. Police then raided his house.
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Here’s a decent article about the current billionaire obsession with escapism from the Guardian
I was really not expecting my future to end up as a chapter of the dystopian sci fi novels I read in highschool, but it looks like thats where we are heading.
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I suppose there’s some logic in this metaverse thing though.
I know next to nothing about economics, but the primary problem with capitalism seems to be “you can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet”, or so the kids are telling me.
So with all the changes that capitalism needs to make for the climate crisis, I guess we are looking towards a sustainable planet made out of actual real stuff that is recycled and keeps (ahem … ‘remakes’) the planet safe and healthy for us all.
So if we (a society with ‘infinite growth’ at the heart of world economics) wish to carry on with this growth model, then we need infinite virtual planets to play on or otherwise move off-world?
Any economist want to weigh in? @Gabriel_L
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Yes you have a fair point.
Either capitalism collapses in a massive default crisis or it will have to create new frontiers for surplus value expropriation to feed its accumulation engine.
These new frontiers can be real or imaginary. For example, financial markets or metaverses.
As long as there is human labor to play the dual role of production and consumption, it carries on.
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Same happened with 3d imagery glasses to cinema screens of side-effects mental differences heading to seizures n headaches of lineral adaptations like sea n travel sickness all unatural adaptations to the brain 
Great article at the Atlantic:
Hey, Facebook, I Made a Metaverse 27 Years Ago
Choice quotations:
Zuckerberg isn’t building the metaverse because he has a remarkable new vision of how things could be. There’s not an original thought in his video, including the business model. Thirty-eight minutes in, Zuckerberg gets serious, talking about how humbling the past few years have been for him and his business. Remember, he’s not humbled by the problem of Russian disinformation, or the spread of anti-vax misinformation, or the challenge of how Instagram affects teen body image. No, he’s humbled by how hard it is to fight against Apple and Google.
Faced with the question of whether Facebook’s core products are eroding the foundations of a democratic society, Zuckerberg takes on a more pressing problem: Apple’s 30 percent cut on digital goods sold in its App Store. Never fear, though: With a Facebook ecosystem, Facebook developer tools, and Facebook marketplaces, the custom skin you buy in one video game will be wearable in another video game, just like Mark’s black T-shirt. Just as long as that video game is in Facebook’s metaverse. … Did I mention how dystopian this all is?
Facebook can claim originality in at least one thing. Its combination of scale and irresponsibility has unleashed a set of diverse and fascinating sociopolitical challenges that it will take lawmakers, scholars, and activists at least a generation to fix. If Facebook has learned anything from 17 years of avoiding mediating those conflicts, it’s not apparent from the vision for the metaverse, where the power of human connection is celebrated as uncritically as it was before Macedonian fake-news brokers worked to sway the 2016 election.
…
Facebook’s promised metaverse is about distracting us from the world it’s helped break.
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But what about robots doing all the work? Isn’t that a thing that should be happening in a little while? Or is it that the robots sort out the mess we’ve made of the real world while we go to work in the metaverse to pay for it!? This is beginning to sound even worse than I imagined. I really can’t get my head around economics and/or capitalism.
Robots will only be deployed at scale if that allows capital accumulation to perpetuate.
A possible outcome is a very weird dystopia in which robots displace so much of the workforce that those left unemployed will be living on handouts and coupons only sufficient for them to keep consuming the services and products provided by the businesses automated with robots.
It is like what is already happening in US in which the poorest class literally survives on a combination of insufficient handouts, discount coupons for services and products produced with quasi-slave labour (aka Mc Donalds, WalMart, etc).
In the big picture, this goes on as long as you have a way for central banks to create currency and that currency to flow through the economy at the speed and complexity needed for capitalists to get their “fair share” of it in their pursuit for eternal accumulation.
But as you hinted, and has been foreseen by Marx and now arithmetically proven by economists like Piketty, because of maths the rate of return and accumulation tends to decrease as the accumulation and inequality progresses.
Eventualy that falling rate of return or rate of profit goes to zero and comes at risk of turning negative. That’s when we will have either a massive default crisis or the system will spin into a higher dimension of abstraction (metaverse economy etc).
The only certainty is that in the process millions, if not billions, will be born and subject to a lifetime of pointless exploitation in exchange for survival and the “privilege” of conditional access to the productivity and technological advances the pursuit of profit based on growth “blesses” us with…
But I would say we are probably 50-100 years away from that crisis as there still is a massive stock of humans at the border of the system ready and willing to be consumed by this process. Africa and much of Asia is where most of that stock of human capital is currently found.
Until that “well of labor surplus value” is fully explored and depleted, robots will have a limited role in fueling the capital accumulation engine.
Few interesting reads on the topic:
Did Karl Marx Predict Artificial Intelligence 170 Years Ago? | by Michael R. McBride | Medium
oftwominds-Charles Hugh Smith: Marx, Robotics and the Collapse of Profits
Automation, robots and the ‘end of work’ myth (theconversation.com)
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