It’s the op-ed that people can’t stop publishing: “We’re already living in the Metaverse.”
It started two years ago when Facebook went all in on its metaverse product‘s hype by changing the company’s name in October 2021. That month, I wrote a short blog post about how most of us live with a digital filter over our lives: We’re always “logged on,” even when we’re not. In November, Chaos Monkeys author Antonio Garcia-Martinez echoed the sentiment, writing that “the little ‘m’ metaverse is already here and firmly in place. It’s the elective, virtualized reality composed of Twitter, Instagram, and even the very Substack you’re reading right now.” And then, for UnHerd, around a year later, Jon Askonas wrote, “You are already in the metaverse,” where he offered something very similar to one of my core theses: The internet was once a place and now is a perpetual filter over day-to-day life. This year, Megan Garber, in a piece with another nearly identical title, wrote in the Atlantic, “Our constant need for entertainment has blurred the line between fiction and reality—on television, in American politics, and in our everyday lives.”
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