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Metaverse: the upcoming Snow Crash World

When 29 years ago, in 1992, Neal Stephenson described for the first time in his novel titled “Snow Crash” the Metaverse, he could not imagine that his prophecy would be realized. At the end of October 2021 Mark Zuckerberg announced the birth of Meta, a society which is parallel to the real world, where human beings dissolve themselves into 3D “avatars” and interact with each other in a virtual world where social and personal interactions become fiction, a shadow of reality.

Social classes are recreated in this world in a more cruel and distanced way. Differences are not removed but accentuated.

Human warmth is frozen in an aseptic universe of bits and bytes where everything is possible until the paradoxical impossibility of fully expressing one’s humanity: a “galactic delirium” that makes unwitting victim who will fall into this trap. Zuckerberg as usual has not invented anything: there had been timid experiments in this sense on the Internet, from virtual sites of online gaming with avatars up to chat or “Active worlds” and so on.

The difference between the other attempts and Meta is that the “theme worlds” of the other “experiments” get coagulate and immediately they liquefy themselves into a global and onnicomprehensive Universe.

The most unethical nihilism get translated into bytes.

There are no real and concrete needs that justify this parallel world: there is only the alienation of the contemporary man  that is amplified and exploited for commercial purposes by unspeakable men, useless beings who add nothing to the progress of humanity but on the contrary demean it by speculating on the problems of individuals.

In this world of ours, in our societies, we need something else: certainly to get away from this Moloch that devours the souls of individuals.

The thought goes to the medieval world that unlike the current one created the modern cities, realized the society as we know it made of real and profitable interactions, leaving concrete evidence such as those Gothic cathedrals, real expressions of entire communities that in generations created the real symbols of belonging, spirituality and socialization. There modern theater, music, poetry, philosophy were born.

In that world, even with its differences, with its atrocious contradictions and social and caste differences, social aggregations were born, the Freemasonry was born, the Guilds came to light, religious choices arose, modern politics developed.

Man built stronger and stronger ships and faced the oceans, explored the world, while being able to peer inside himself.

No cathedral will ever be built in the Metaverse, no social order, no hard-working and collaborating community will ever rise in such an Hell.

There will not be a real community with a generational continuity that realizes municipal palaces and city government building, cathedrals, places and symbols of real belonging, of concrete collective effort for the search of Identity and Tradition.

Outside the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris in the Middle Ages alchemists met and modern chemistry was born as well as spiritual reflections still valid and the subject of research.

Inside the cathedrals from the sacred representations at Easter and Christmas was born the theater that gave us Shakespeare, Pirandello and many others: the theater, a physical place where real human beings gather and watch, listen, think and become better.

Cinema has been the evolution of theater and even there we are not in a virtual reality but in the dimension of “Representation” taht the task of the same is to “holding up a mirror to nature”, as the great English bard would have said. and its task of “holding up the mirror to nature”, as the great English bard would have said.

Meta will not build cathedrals, it will destroy them; Meta will not produce Theatres and plays instead it will annihilate them in chat rooms among unreal avatars that have and will have no identity, virtual trangenders, the satanic parody of the complexity of mankind and at the same time of its beauty.

Meta will never create Beauty, Art, Aesthetics !

Who is writing these words is not a misoneist but quite the contrary: I am a philosopher, a logician, a mathematician who has always been attentive for many years to all aspects of society. I use the computer, the smartphone, the apps only if all this leads to communicate in a healthy and honest way my real individuality, my beliefs, my spirituality and cultural tradition.

The virtuality of the Internet is just a form of communication that has the value of removing distances: Meta, on the contrary, will increase them creating serious and real psychiatric disorders to individuals who will be sucked.

Already, addiction to the Internet and smartphones is a serious problem and we honestly don’t feel the need to give other massive doses, other means of increasing this drug to individuals.

Freedom is a misunderstood right: we are not free to harm ourselves, we are not free to do harm someone, we are not free to alienate and lose ourselves in nothingness because we have a responsability towards all other people, towards the whole of Humanity.

Already the Covid pandemic has taken away hugs, handshakes, innocent caresses, all those little manifestations of social interaction between individuals that built human relationships, cultivated them in daily real attendance. The Covid with the masks already prevents us from communicating with our face a smile or our disapproval of something with a frown.

What will you find in Meta ? Nothingness.

These internets initiatives born only from the greed of single immoral individuals, children and supporters of a sick capitalism, like the one described by Stephenson in his prophetic novel; beings that add nothing to the progress of Humanity making themselves thieves of concrete hopes and manipulators of the worst kind, are the real Pandemic that attends to the psychophysical integrity of individuals and of the real society composed by the same.

No one should be allowed to violate human dignity in any way.

A Pandemic, a real dictatorship that demeans human beings and paradoxically, through “virtuality”, at the same time reifies them to things without any meaning and individual and social planning.

The World of Nothingness, the End of History, the Death of thought and the individual, of individuality and projectuality: a world of “riders” to be exploited to deliver pizzas and not thoughts and feelings, culture and creativity, real social aggregations for passions or concrete political ideals and social and individual projects. Do you want to be free? Do you want to express your personality? Gather one evening at your friend’s house together with other people you know and read aloud a book or an interesting passage of the same and then discuss it while you are drinking a beer or whatever you like: in that moment, from that comparison, from that exchange could be born a philosophy, a scientific discovery…, or you will have just spent a wonderful evening full of human warmth, smiles, ideas, dreams and projects… but remember to turn off your smartphones and turn on your heart and your brain !

Otherwise, a Snow Crash World awaits you.

 

 

 

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Marco Ambrosini is an Italian lawyer, essayist and philosopher with interests ranging from formal logic applied to the disciplines of Law and Politics to Mathematics and Economics. By choice he has interrupted his vocation to teaching, giving up the academic career to devote himself entirely to the legal profession for more than thirty years for the defense of civil rights in particular of the weakest and most marginalized.

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