Metaverse the land of Zombies

 I have been transferring the phone book from one cell phone to another for 25 years now without deleting any numbers.k

My address book consists of over 5000 phone numbers and about 3000 email addresses.

I never deleted the numbers or emails of deceased people, I couldn't do it especially for friends who disappeared due to illness or accidents.

Their numbers, which I occasionally read in the phone book of my mobile phone, help me remember them and turn an affectionate thought towards them.

The telephone numbers of deceased people are therefore like small altars, digital newsstands in front of which I pass randomly.

Similarly, their social accounts have digital rigor mortis, even years after their natural death they remain on the net, because no one knows the login password and it is often difficult, for privacy reasons, for heirs to delete them.

The UN says the world’s population will reach 8 billion by the end of 2022 and that internet-connected users will exceed 5 billion, of which almost all will have a social account.

On the other hand, WHO statistics tell us that every year 7 people die per 1000, so every year about 32 million people, who have a social account, die. We can assume that in the last 5 years at least 100 million people who had a social account have died.

Their social media pages are zombies in the original Haitian sense, that is, people whose soul has been stolen and are in a death-like lethargy, but the soul is life and life is time. Dracula is not alive because for him time does not exist, stopping the time that flows in life means creating a zombie.

On social media therefore there are 5 billion digital identities, digital twins of human beings and about 100 million digital zombies.

Amazon researchers said Alexa, through an AI, can simulate a chat between family members and their dead relative. Alexa listens to us and memorize all voices and matters and then can simulate the dead relative until coherent and contextualized speech.

In this case we would have an evolved digital zombie, which can even talk to family members still alive.

It is not an impossible thing, because in our homes the topics we are talking about are the same and change only according to the month, but they are repeated from year to year.

Days ago I was talking to my son about the Metaverse, explaining to him that in 1996 I wrote a little book, published by Stampa Alternativa, on the VRML language, a primitive language of 3D programming and I remembered Second Life, at a certain point he interrupted me by telling me: “Dad Metaverse are for you, we are interested in it”

And it seems to be true because, according to the survey conducted by financial firm Piper Sandler, Millennials and Gen Z – the main visitors to the metaverse – are still very skeptical of the idea of a “completely online” world.

Those interested are mainly gamers between the ages of 13 and 17 who are already used to a virtual environment.

So all these billions of dollars of investment in the Metaverse will probably serve to carry mainly us boomers inside, but we are the ones closest to physical death so the Metaverse will become, in a few years, the land of zombie avatars.

Puppets, avatars maybe even cute, stuck in the squares, on the streets, in the houses, with their eyes lost in the void, the Metaverse will be the land of Zombies.

In the Western revision of the Zombies culture (Night of the Living Dead) these are cannibals and eat living human beings to get life back,  reversing the rite of eating “the body of Christ” see Gospel of John:

“Whoever eats my flesh And he drinks my blood He has eternal life And I will raise him up on the last day.”

Jn 6, 54-55

Let's hope at least that Digital Zombies don't take on this culture.

During the Summer, in Italy, we buy the magazine the Settimana Enigmistica more often and have fun with crossword puzzles, anagrams and other games, so just to play I point out that the anagram of Metaverse is Mera Veste, nothing more than mere dress.