‘Metamates’are in for a rough voyage

Motivating people is hard, especially when you’re trying to convince them to join you on a perilous quest that may not succeed.
So perhaps you can understand, once you stop laughing, why Mark Zuckerberg has encouraged his employees to call themselves “Metamates” instead of “colleagues” or “co-workers” or “Steve.” It’s nautical! We’re going on a swashbuckling adventure! Ahoy, Metamaties!
But nautical adventures don’t always end well. Indigenous Hawaiians killed Captain James Cook.
Even successful explorers spread disease, enslavement and general human misery through the world.
Similarly, the metaverse on which Zuckerberg is gambling the fate of Facebook Meta has been a source of misery of a different sort. Virtual assault, sometimes of minors, are so rampant that even Metamates testing the experience have suffered from it.
Meta has taken steps to address the problem. But exec Andrew Bosworth, who tweeted enthusiastically about the Metamates rebranding, has suggested policing the metaverse “at any meaningful scale is practically impossible.”
Even if you’re not being assaulted in a criminal sense, your senses may
still be assaulted by
general creepiness, as my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Parmy Olson experienced on a recent foray into the metaverse, where a crowd of male avatars circled and took photos of her. And that was before she met the tween screeching obscenities or the “giant blonde man called BabyFace” making “strange, animal noises.”
The metaverse of Zuckerberg’s vision is still likely years from coming to fruition. Jamie Dimon’s decision to hang a portrait of himself in JPMorgan Chase & Co’s little corner of the metaverse may seem like an endorsement of it. Except JPMorgan is playing with house money and can afford to take a flyer by slapping up an outpost on a patch of land in an undeveloped country.
The driving ideal of Web3, of which the metaverse is a key part, is
supposed to be decentralisation. The fact that big companies like Facebook Meta and JPMorgan are already conquering the New World suggests a different goal: to financialise every aspect of the internet and life. That JPM Coin isn’t going to hype itself. Zuckerberg’s Metamates might have plenty of reason to stay on board for a while. But maybe they should start paying closer attention to those lifeboat drills.

—Bloomberg