Bokhari: Metaverse Hype Was Born of Coronavirus Groupthink

There’s an arms race to capture the “metaverse,” the posited futuristic world of interconnected virtual realities. Microsoft and Facebook are locked in an increasingly expensive battle for control of what they believe to be the future. But where did this hype come from?

The tech giants are certainly confident in their predictions. Microsoft spent $68.7 billion to acquire Activision Blizzard, the largest games developer in Europe and North America, in a metaverse push.

Mark Zuckerberg is so convinced of the future VR-powered world that he renamed his entire company to “meta,” and is busy pivoting his entire company to a focus on the metaverse.

The tech companies might be right. If VR technology advances as far as its most optimistic advocates suggest it will, then the addictiveness of immersive virtual worlds will be hard for consumers to resist. But these predictions have been around for a long time.

Why has Big Tech reached the conclusion that now is the moment?

It might have something to do with the fact that so many people found themselves locked indoors for the coronavirus pandemic, something that left-wing tech magazine Wired has also noticed:

The shift that Big Tech has spotted is obvious: Over the past few years people have started spending much more time online. The Covid-19 pandemic accelerated that vertiginously. For the white-collar workers who were asked to work from home, the office instantly shrunk to the size of a screen. Free time, for identical reasons, was also forced to find digital alternatives. With cinemas closed, and bars shut, and parties out of the question (unless you worked for the UK Government), bored people spent an inordinate amount of time playing video-games, on engaging in gamified activities such as flipping meme stocks and dabbling in crypto or crypto-adjacent products (like NFT pictures). In some cases the two things merged into strange chimeras of games and cryptofinance, making online pay-for-play universes like Axie Infinity, the NFT-based video game, a source of revenue for impoverished Filipinos. Meta et al’s gamble is that this state of affairs will persist, and eventually evolve—by way of faster internet, better VR, and a more functional online economy—into the Metaverse, aka the next internet.

If the groundwork for the metaverse had been laid before the coronavirus pandemic, the bet would have been a good one. But it now seems that tech companies are betting that people will want (or need) to spend even more time indoors:

It is a perverse gamble. In order to really work, it requires us to be bored at home for the foreseeable future. Barring extreme cases, it is only when clubs are closed, and concerts are cancelled, and in-person meetings are off-limits that one would go for their Metaverse equivalents. It might be a smart gamble—a new variant, the climate crisis, or a nuclear apocalypse might force us all indoors again—but it is, to put it dramatically, a bet against humankind.

Framed this way, the bets that the world’s largest tech companies have placed on the metaverse are rather gloomy and pessimistic. Are there more pandemics coming? Do they know something we don’t?

What’s more likely is that tech companies have fallen victim to what former Google engineer James Damore identified as an “ideological echo-chamber.”

Aside from national governments, the most draconian responses to the coronavirus pandemic came from Big Tech companies, which used the crisis as an excuse to censor their platforms more than ever before. They were the first companies to send their employees to work from home, and diligently worked on contact tracing apps and other tools for governments to control their citizens during the pandemic.

If the atmosphere was anything like the wokeness of Silicon Valley companies, then opponents to the hysteria inside the tech companies would have kept their mouths shut. Little wonder then, that tech companies might believe the lockdowns are going to go on forever, and that after two years of lockdowns and masking, people will want to retreat behind a headset and go to VR Zoom meetings.

Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.