A peril of writing about new technology: when I started working on this essay, Mark Zuckerberg had just announced the rebranding of Facebook into Meta, signaling his desire to engineer, monetize, and control the vast networked virtual something called “the metaverse”; when I completed a draft of it, the multinational conglomerate Siemens had teamed up with the technology titan NVIDIA to pioneer a form of the metaverse geared to industrial applications; and by the time I had submitted it for consideration, thousands of Meta employees were in the process of being laid off following another massive quarterly loss from Reality Labs (Meta’s metaverse-creation division). It was a familiar cycle to anyone who follows virtual reality, which has long obeyed laws of hype and humiliation. But fixation on such booms and busts should not occlude recognition of the real progress being made. The metaverse, which under one name or another (cyberspace,...

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