The strangest thing about this is that neither Zuckerberg nor Andreessen has ever cited some sort of consumer research to show that “the vast majority of humanity” longs to escape the physical world, through a face prosthesis, to a world where nature’s comforts are absent, a world entirely curated and controlled by enormous unaccountable corporations.

In other words, Facebook — I mean Meta — will do better than God Himself, and actually rescue the wretched and poor from their fates here on earth. The physical infrastructure around you is already suffering from decay and underinvestment, so let’s abandon it for the seamless cartoon strapped to your forehead. As fertility continues to decline, family life is already disintegrating, so let’s furnish you into a land of billions of avatars. You can meet and interact with any of them, and then they can block you, or get a viral digital mob to report you to the controllers of the Metaverse, who will then put you in their equivalent of digital time-out.

Another technologist, speaking to me almost a decade ago, also saw something like the Metaverse coming, but he had a slightly more sinister take on its purpose. He said that a version of entertainment so immersive would eventually come down the line, and it would simply swallow up the vast majority of “useless people” in its mouth. There would be less crime and disorder. They would breed less. It was a vision of Big Brother giving the proles something that entirely erased their way of life, making them as politically inert and harmless as ice cubes preserved in a tray.