Mark Zuckerberg, founder of FaceBook who has turned his attention to developing the Metaverse, gave a presentation about BuilderBot, a facet of his new world-making technology. (See the video below.)
An avatar–that is, a 3-D animation–of himself and a colleague appears on a blank screen. “Let’s go to the beach.” A beach appears. “Pretty good,” he said. “Let’s add some clouds.” Clouds appear.
He goes on to speak into virtual existence an island, trees, waves, music, and a picnic.
He tells his audience, “You’ll be able to create nuanced worlds with just your voice.”
Do you see what he is doing?
God created the universe with “just His voice”; that is, by His Word. “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light” (Genesis 1:3). Mark Zuckerberg, in creating the metaverse, said, “Let’s go to the beach,” and there was a beach. God went on to create everything else. Mark Zuckerberg goes on to make himself a picnic.
When the creation of the universe was complete, “God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31). Mark Zuckerberg makes a similar pronouncement on his creation of his metaverse beach, which he declares to be “pretty good.”
Yesterday we posted about how Zuckerberg and his associates hope to make the metaverse the primary reality that people inhabit, a substitute and an improvement on actual reality. By actual reality, of course, we mean what God created.
The metaverse project not only rejects and replaces creation, it rejects and replaces God. We get to be God. Human beings–Zuckerberg, his engineers, all of us users with the feature that allows us “to create nuanced worlds with just your voice”–create their own worlds, just as they want, and inhabit them.
Now, of course, we human beings are not really “creating” a world, as much as we try to appropriate that theological term. The colors on the screen, the originals of the water and sand that are being animated, the electricity that powers the computer, etc., etc., are all part of God’s original creation, like it or not. The very standards we use to assess the virtual images–“that’s so realistic!”–refer to a prior and more authoritative reality of which the screen or goggle projections are a pale imitation.
And, of course, the virtual reality comes far, far short of actual reality. Mark Zuckerberg conjures up a beach, complete with waves and sand and a picnic. As I’ve said, I’m now in Australia, and next week we are going to an actual beach, where we can not only see something that looks like water, we’ll be able to plunge into it. We’ll be able to enjoy an actual picnic, which we will taste and savor. Best of all, we’ll be doing all of this with our grandchildren and other members of our family, as opposed to the lonely emptiness of Mark Zuckerberg’s fake world.
Just look at Zuckerberg’s creation video. (It only takes one minute and 22 seconds.)
The avatars have nothing below the waist! The world they conjure up is drab and flat. The picnic–void of life, joy, and human interaction–is the most depressing of parties.
I know, I know, the technology will get better. It will get more “realistic”; that is, the virtual reality will pay more homage to actual reality. And I realize that we can play around with such technology without all of this deeper meaning, though the deeper meaning is what the self-styled “creators” are bestowing on it.
But the point is that when we try to deify ourselves, what pathetic creations we make! What pathetic gods we turn out to be!
Illustration: screen shot of Builder Bot demo via YouTube.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In