Jack Dorsey, who used to oversee the bluebird dank bonanza that is Twitter, naturally has an opinion on VR, and in a recent interview in which he discussed the impact of VR on humanity as a whole, it seems that something dark is lurking deep in his mind. His words are tainted with a Pixar "Wall-E"-esque vision of the future, and I can't say that I haven't occasionally entertained similarly intrusive dystopian thoughts.

"The future we are aiming for is one where everyone in a floating chair drinks food through a straw and enjoys constant entertainment 24/7. You can see the whole world moving in this direction," Dorsey told an interviewer on the Breaking Points YouTube channel (via The Byte).

His comments follow Apple's recent announcement of the Vision Pro, whose potential metaverse nastiness still seems somewhat saturated, although it's hard to imagine a future where everyone has the disposable income to invest $3,500 in a VR headset.

"I am super concerned and concerned about how it will make people apathetic and how it will drive us further away," Dorsey notes.

This is a concern shared by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who was apparently surprised by the fact that all of the Apple Vision Pro VR demos "have a person sitting alone on a couch."

Dorsey actually cut to the chase. If you want to understand the future of any technology, read science fiction. These are the people who actually write the roadmaps, and it's clear that this book by Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash, is going to happen."

"Snow Crash" is the book that coined the term metaverse, filled with net-running, hacking, naked, virus-spewing avatar women. It is a highly privatized, franchised, digitized world where even the identity of the President of the United States is obscured.

He is right in that science fiction writers present a roadmap in a vague sense, but all of that may be going a bit too far. As the Torment Nexus spreads around us, as I have noticed recently, concerns about privatization are part of the reason I agree with Dorsey's other comments.

"The most important thing to me is that there is an open source model," he says of the Large Language Model (LLM) of artificial intelligence. I've been critical of Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg for most of my career, but I really respect him for open-sourcing his large-scale language model."

Let's hope the rest of Zuck's plans don't involve drinking dinner on the tube while meta-versing.