New discussions about the metaverse have been both welcome and disheartening, she said. What happens when a company that’s hostile to all things intimate tries to take over the metaverse?Īngelina Aleksandrovich, founder of sex-positive virtual reality community RD Land, told me that people involved in building virtual reality communities have seen Zuckerberg’s latest project coming for a long time. In most of those communities, sex has played a defining part. But in the 30 years between that book and now, people have created constellations of actual virtual worlds, building complex, vibrant communities where residents live rich lives parallel to their physical one. Yes, the concept of a metaverse-a digital dimension where people exist as non-corporeal avatars online-was originally the idea of science fiction author Neal Stephenson, as part of his 1992 book Snow Crash. The metaverse did not spring fully formed from Mark Zuckerberg’s $121.6 billion forehead. If Facebook is actually aiming to build a virtual reality that will supplant many of the ways we communicate and move through the world today, is it going to change the anti-sex policies that have defined it so far, or create a dystopia where sex doesn’t exist?
And if he refuses to allow sexuality to be a part of his metaverse for adult users, it’ll suck as much as Facebook already does. If Facebook doesn’t carry its anti-sex terms of use over to the metaverse, the time-to-penis would probably set a speed record. Last month, Mark Zuckerberg announced that he thinks he can create his own metaverse, and his head of virtual reality, Andrew Bosworth, said he’s aiming to institute “almost Disney levels of safety.” Facebook, as a company, is incredibly hostile toward all things sex. If we’re given the tools to create in a virtual environment, dicks are inevitable. We pondered that orb for hundreds of thousands of years, and when finally given the chance to touch it, we stamped it with a cartoon dick.
It’s in our nature to christen the freshly-driven snow of untouched lands with lewd little doodles: just four months after humans set foot on the moon for the first time, we left a dick drawing on its pristine surface. No game or platform is immune to TTP, because no world is immune.