The Exquisite Banality of the Metaverse

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My favorite description of the metaverse will always be Jim Cramer’s. “The metaverse,” he Jimsplained, last October, “you’re looking at basically — you can be in Oculus, whatever — and you say, ‘I like the way that person looks in that shirt, I want to order that shirt.’” That exquisite banality puts Cramer’s vision at the top of the leaderboard. 

But, to be fair, no one does much better chyroning the metaverse. Matthew Ball, managing partner of venture fund EpyllionCo, may be its most self-assured definer, and his description is also flighty: “the metaverse is an expansive network of … 3D worlds and simulations.” Mark Zuckerberg, the aspiring emperor of the whole shebang, calls the metaverse “the sum total of all reality—physical, augmented, and virtual.​​” For what it’s worth, I see the metaverse as a kind of extended digital commentary on material existence, and admire the definition given by Mark Fielding, the eccentric blogger at Apocalypse Daddy: “the cultural, financial, artistic extension of ourselves, the digital representation of the human race.”