“If you don’t like the conversation, you try to change the conversation.'
around the world to crack down on Big Tech.
Meta, the new name for the parent company of Facebook, denied it was trying to divert attention away from the troubles it faces by pushing the metaverse. “This is not true. We have been working on this for a long time internally,” the company said in a statement. Launching that new brand, in fact, draws attention to the company, it said in a statement, adding that if it didn’t want the scrutiny it would have delayed or scrapped the launch altogether.But the new focus on the metaverse creates a whole new set of dangers, Haugen said. In “Snow Crash,” the 1992 the sci-fi novel that coined the phrase, “it was a thing that people used to numb themselves when their lives were horrible,” she said.
In a presentation last month, Zuckerberg described about how the metaverse would allow for mixed-reality business meetings where some participants are physically present while others beam in as avatars. The company has launched virtual meeting software called Horizon Workrooms for use with its virtual reality headsets, so co-workers can better communicate, brainstorm and socialize virtually, instead of, say, looking at one another on a Zoom call grid.