Meta has unveiled its plans for the metaverse – and what we’re presented with sounds a lot like the villain’s plans in Ready Player One.
Mark Zuckerberg’s opening keynote at the recent Facebook event ( now called Meta) was a sight to behold. Over the course of one and a half hours, the CEO – joined by various experts from his company – rambled through his vision of a future with the metaverse at its core. No longer would we be constrained by our physical limitations as our digital and virtual worlds blend into one. According to Zuckerberg, we’d be able to work, live and play in this new universe, and Meta’s technology and innovation are what will usher us into this new always-online era. Yet as Zuckerberg continued to make grandiose promises of a future we might see in a decade or two, it dawned on us that we’d heard all of this already. This is Ready Player One – specifically, it’s what would have happened if the bad guys had won. Love or hate the story of Ready Player One, the book’s main setting – the Oasis – sounds like a digital wonderland. It’s an incredible virtual reality space where players can go anywhere, do anything and be anyone free from most of life’s restrictions – it’s the full realization of the internet’s potential. But the Oasis, like the internet, isn’t flawless. Ready Player One’s Oasis is shown to be corrupted at its core by corporate greed, with individuals seeking total dominance of the space and already enacting significant control over how users can engage with the digital space. This is demonstrated by Ready Player One’s antagonist, Nolan Sorrento, and his company Innovative Online Industries (an organization with a name almost as silly as Meta).
