Are We Going to Have a Virtual Reality Future?

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Zuckerberg is trying to sell us this vision of the virtual space where we all kind of commune and come together. I'm not sure the i think it is unlikely that we get his version of the metaverse In the next certainly the next five years I think they're going to make a bunch of advances in hardware. And then and here's where I like i'm going to sort of go back to my roots as a dystopian What I think comes after that if we imagine 10 15 years into the future I think we need to take the climate crisis seriously in our imagining But one of the biggest critiques that I have of the Metaverse and of web 3 and of ai Like I

Paris Marx is joined by Dave Karpf to discuss Meta’s misguided attempt to turn Facebook into a metaverse company, how Wired Magazine has evolved, and why the tech billionaires are destroying the world.

Dave Karpf is an Associate Professor of Media and Public Affairs, George Washington University. He’s also the author of The MoveOn Effect: The Unexpected Transformation of American Political Advocacy and Analytic Activism: Digital Listening and the New Political Strategy. Follow Dave on Twitter at @davekarpf.

Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.

The podcast is produced by Eric Wickham and part of the Harbinger Media Network.

Also mentioned in this episode:

Dave wrote about the history of WIRED Magazine’s future predictions and why VR never dies.
People Make Games made a video looking at what’s going on in VRChat.
Meta’s legs demo wasn’t real.
Douglas Rushkoff’s new book Survival of the Richest looks at how the rich are trying to protect themselves from the crises they’re making worse.
Science fiction books mentioned: Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, and William Gibson’s The Peripheral.