Just like the video I shared last week, this 20-minute video by Mariana Colín at The Morbid Zoo is sharper than most, and also extremely entertaining:

Colín is not “in tech,” and the video is of “the king is naked” variety which is very, very refreshing.

Among many good observations, this caught my attention as relating to this blog’s topic:

It’s a little weird to have this almost adversarial relationship with your customer base. They’re not trying to solve a problem customers have. They’re trying to convince people that the product on offer is something more than it clearly is.

What VR is, is a fun parlor trick. What they want VR to be is literal reality.

It does indeed feel Meta’s version of VR/metaverse has always been cargo-culting real world in a particularly awkward fashion, which Colín analyzes deeper.

Too many quotable laugh-out-loud moments, so maybe just this one more:

Down here in the real world, there are really only two things a media technology can be. It can be a solution to a specific discrete informational problem, or it can be an artistic medium. These two things are not mutually exclusive. There is crossover here – like, radio was a military tool before radio plays were ever a thing.

But by the former, I mean you’re literally just making information go faster. You’re reducing the amount of noise between a message and its receiver. Any kind of metaverse is going to be really, really bad at this because you don’t need to look at a weird Pixar version of your coworker in order for them to convey what a deadline is.