Your overlords are, among other things, completely nuts.

It’s impossible to believe otherwise, once you hear their plans for the digital future of humanity. The future, you see, will be in the Metaverse, which is Facebook/Meta’s name for virtual reality.

Obviously, they see a future straight out of Ready Player One: massive poverty for the masses, but a virtual reality in which people interact using goggles, sensory suits, and all manner of sensory stimuli that replace reality with a computer-generated world.

WEF Founder Klaus Schwab announces the “Global Collaboration Village,” a WEF virtual reality platform using Metaverse technology. pic.twitter.com/Mu9IzZWkNa

— True North (@TrueNorthCentre) January 17, 2023

That’s not exactly how they put it, of course, but that is what Klaus Schwab hinted at in a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Not the massive poverty, of course, but a utopian world where we live and interact in a virtual world, beginning with business and expanding outwards from there. I suppose if you restrict mobility and promote a world where the main source of protein is Solylent Bugs, it only makes sense to substitute virtual reality for genuine reality. 15-minute cities are a lot more viable if people leave their homes only occasionally, getting their daily allocation of crickets delivered while they lie back in their chairs staring at avatars. (I am using a bit of hyperbole here).

WEF Founder Klaus Schwab announces the “Global Collaboration Village,” a WEF virtual reality platform using Metaverse technology. pic.twitter.com/Mu9IzZWkNa

— True North (@TrueNorthCentre) January 17, 2023

It’s an audacious vision, and profoundly stupid. Accenture is apparently using the Oculus in its own business, and it has been an absolute disaster of massive proportions.

At the same time the Bond villains in Davos were praising the Metaverse as the next step in human development, Slate profiled the real-world problems that the drones at Accenture were facing in actually using the technology.

When a junior manager at the tech-consulting firm Accenture tried to organize her first work meeting in the metaverse, it was difficult to even log in. “I am totally immersed in the metaverse, have a big headset on, and then I need to take off the Oculus, look on my phone for the two-factor authentication code that’s been sent to my phone, then memorize the number, put my headset back on, and try to key it in,” she told me, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “But when you take off the Oculus it automatically goes to sleep mode, and I was trying to navigate the back-and-forth.” She wasn’t the only one who struggled with simply accessing an animated meeting room; by the time the meeting had concluded, some team members still hadn’t made it in.

Now to be fair, there are always growing pains involved with any technology, and curmudgeons like me aren’t exactly loathe to use glitches in a potentially valuable product to pooh-pooh it as worthless or worse. Paul Krugman, the always-wrong Nobel Prize winner, famously predicted the Internet would prove no more transformative or valuable than the fax machine.

On the other hand, internet-loving promoters didn’t envision how Instagram and TikTok would warp the minds of children and create a massive mental health crisis and a booming business in sterilizing and mutilating children, so there is that.

For anyone who has used Zoom, which is actually quite a mature technology built on teleconferencing tech that is decades old, it is clear that being in the same room as your interlocutors has significant value. Human beings are not merely voices and images, and communication and collaboration aren’t duplicable in virtual space. It’s not a coincidence that many of the people touting and building these virtual realities are “on the spectrum.” They are technical geniuses and emotionally stunted on the whole.

So far the Metaverse has been a big failure for the company most invested in it: Meta (Facebook). It has poured tens of billions of dollars into the project and produced a not-very-popular toy. It could just be that they are paving the way for a future where they, or some other company such as Apple or Microsoft, can cash in once the technology matures. Or it could just be that this is a niche, or worse, simply a place where people can both interact and be monitored while doing so.

Because at the WEF another interesting tidbit was dropped: the WEF’s vision of the Metaverse includes monitoring by Interpol. Such monitoring would only be there to keep people “safe,” but as the WEF and other Elites have made clear “safe” includes massive censorship to prevent the spread of “disinformation.”

When asked about declining trust in institutions and how the Metaverse can play a role, WEF Founder Klaus Schwab reassures attendees that “Global Collaboration Village” technology can be trusted because one of the partners will be INTERPOL. pic.twitter.com/WpvgHutaAa

— True North (@TrueNorthCentre) January 17, 2023

All in all, it is part visionary hype, and partly a serious attempt to ensure we live in carefully constructed and curated worlds where their totalitarian vision is more easily created.

What makes these particular villains so interesting and distinct is how convinced they are that they are the good guys. Few of them are Mafiosi aware that they are doing nothing but exploiting people for their own benefit. Surely some are, but for the most part they are just so invested in the idea that technocrats could better manage the world and that average people would be better off doing what they are told.

They truly believe that they are benefactors.

They envision a future where people are content, not free. It is a dystopia, surely, but as with many supposed utopias, it is based more on a misunderstanding of the human good than on ill intent.

A Brave New World.