DISPATCHES PERSPECTIVE
Trigger Happy
Shoot first, ask questions later
STEVEN POOLE
One of the core promises of media technology is that it will take you to a better place. This escapism can be purely aesthetic – the cinema will enable you to go travelling in the jungle; the smartphone will distract you at the bus stop – or more literal. Hence, in the second sense, the grand dream of a persistent cybercommunity that could replace the real world.
The latest iteration is, of course, Mark Zuckerberg’s ‘vision’ of the metaverse, a term borrowed from Neal Stephenson’s seminal 1992 cyberpunk novel Snow Crash, where it describes the totality of all virtual realities and the Internet. And, Facebook having become a poisonous brand, the holding company for it plus WhatsApp and Instagram is now called Meta, since that is Greek for ‘with’ or ‘after’, and ‘meta’ is apparently ‘what comes next’ for a world not yet sufficiently brutalised by social media.