Friendship in the Age of Digital Simulation
Only echoes.
The new version of Mark Zuckerberg — I’ll call him alt-Mark — is peddling a new version of the metaverse. The original idea behind the virtual world, as you may hazily recall, was that we’d be digitally transformed into legless cartoon characters who would fly around a cartoon planet having sword fights and doing other supposedly fun things. It was a reboot of The Jetsons with Mr. Spacely as executive producer.
That version didn’t come close to achieving critical mass — I think only five people have signed up for Meta’s Horizon Worlds — and it was ditched when the release of ChatGPT rerouted the future onto a new and more lucrative path. With generative AI, you don’t need a critical mass of people to populate a user’s virtual social sphere. You can use chatbots, which have, to companies like Meta, distinct advantages over their human brethren. They’re cheap to produce, limitless in supply, and tractable in the extreme. Told what to do, they do it.
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