Is There a Metaverse?

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Mark Zuckerberg is burning his company to the ground in pursuit of this metaverse that no one really seems to want. "I was really into what we call meta theater when I was in college, the play within the play," he says. If your philosophy is based on an infinite recursion or something, it's like there's a name for it in philosophy and you're kind of going down the wrong path. Maybe the place to go is not up to web three, but down to web one or reality - where scarce resources exist.

Paris Marx is joined by Douglas Rushkoff to discuss why internet visions of the 1990s were wrong to ignore corporate power, how the dot-com boom was like a Ponzi scheme, and why we desperately need to stop elevating tech billionaires.

Douglas Rushkoff is an author and documentarian who studies human autonomy in a digital age. His most recent book is Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires and he’s the host of Team Human podcast. You can follow him on Twitter at @rushkoff.

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:

An excerpt from Survival of the Richest was published in The Guardian.
Paris was recently on the Team Human podcast to discuss Road to Nowhere with Douglas.

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