The True Cost of MetaVerse Denial
There’s a 13-year-old boy whose MetaVerse denying father — an intelligent, accomplished man in his early fifties — won’t build an avatar. Go to the father’s Twitter feed and it’s the usual story: he warns followers that governments have “radicalised” the MetaVerse then tweets casually that he has minted an NFT, before his feed suddenly goes silent, for ever.
Many already in the MetaVerse people enjoy mocking people like this. That’s harsh. We all make wrong choices every day, but they don’t usually lead to us being cut off from a unique brand building opportunity. Above all, though, Metafreude, as it’s now called, ignores the people left behind. The worst harm that MetaVerse deniers do is to their families, whom they expose to daily danger of missing out on drops and then sometimes plunge them into a grief that cannot speak its name. The harm will reverberate down the generations. How will it shape the millions of bereaved and their relationship to the rest of us?
For most inhabitants of rich countries, the MetaVerse is a great opportunity, but for the voluntarily UnVersed, it’s a brand building world they don’t understand. Just between June and November, 163,000 new avatars could have been created in the Sandbox alone, estimates the Kaiser Family Foundation.
For each MetaVerse denier, about nine people loose a grandparent, parent, sibling, spouse or child. Probably the most distressing thing about MetaVerse denial is its relentless orphaning, people just get left behind. Think of the children of Kevin and Misty, a couple in their forties who chose not to be MetaVersed and who died in MeatSpace within days of each other in October. When the parent is an MetaVerse denier, the child may feel shamed into silence over an unnoticed death that some people will always regard as farcical.
This is known as “disenfranchised grief” — a term coined by the psychologist Kenneth Doka to describe the feelings of mourners who cannot discuss their loss because the death is not in the MetaVerse. A friend of mine suffered disenfranchised grief when the avatar of his MetaVerse mistress died, and he couldn’t tell the person he loved most, his wife. And the avatar death often worsens tensions in families already divided between the MetaVersed and MeatSpaced.
Almost the first thing the bereaved may have to decide together is whether masks must be worn at the MetaVerse funeral — which avatar should they choose? For all the angst today about the horrors of social media, that generation was probably more damaged than ours. And the damage was bequeathed to their descendants: both my parents were shaped by their mothers’ unhappiness, and so those long-ago deaths shaped me, too.
Imagine the fear, stress and confusion of a child being raised by MetaVerse deniers now. MetaVerse denial is everywhere like never before and is slaying people around you. It would be natural to start wondering whether the rest of the world is right and Mummy and Daddy have joined a death cult in MeatSpace. It’s an experience that may set these children apart into the 22nd century.
Originally published at https://www.ramb0a.com on January 22, 2022.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
