Featured Image Credit: Sipa US/Abaca Press/Alamy
Topics: Grimes, Mark Zuckerberg, Social Media, Facebook
Jake Massey
Topics: Grimes, Mark Zuckerberg, Social Media, Facebook
Grimes has claimed that the metaverse is dead before it's even begun with Mark Zuckerberg at the helm.
The Facebook co-founder and CEO of parent company Meta has set his sights on transforming his social media network into a metaverse - where people can game, work, communicate and buy digital goods in an online virtual environment, often using VR headsets.
But while the 38-year-old billionaire is excited to usher in this new world, Grimes - real name Claire Boucher - is convinced he isn't the right man to do it.
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Sharing an image of his avatar, the 34-year-old musician - and ex of Elon Musk - tweeted: "If zuck 'oversees the Metaverse' it is dead and people who care about art and culture are building something else. also this is bad art.
"The quality of this image alone speaks to how wildly under qualified he is to build alternate reality, literally every indie game looks better."
'Zuck' is unlikely to be perturbed by her criticism though, and he recently declared he wants his metaverse to have a billion users.
Speaking to CNBC in June, he said: "We hope to basically get to around a billion people in the metaverse doing hundreds of dollars of commerce, each buying digital goods, digital content, different things to express themselves, so whether that’s clothing for their avatar or different digital goods for their virtual home or things to decorate their virtual conference room, utilities to be able to be more productive in virtual and augmented reality and across the metaverse overall."
He added: "I've been really happy with how that's gone. It has exceeded my expectations.
"But I still think it's going to take a while for it to get to the scale of several hundreds of millions or even billions of people in the metaverse, just because things take some time to get there.
"So that’s the North Star. I think we will get there. But, you know, the other services that we run are at a somewhat larger scale already today."
Nick Clegg - the former deputy UK prime minister and Meta's current president of global affairs - has said the metaverse is the 'logical evolution of the internet' and will become mainstream 'one way or another'
In an online essay, Clegg said that although the technology was unlikely to come to full fruition for 10 to 15 years, the metaverse would eventually have global ramifications.
"When Facebook started 18 years ago, we mostly typed text on websites," he said.
"When we got phones with cameras, the internet became more visual and mobile. As connections got faster, video became a richer way to share things. We've gone from desktop to web to mobile; from text to photos to video.
"In this progression, the metaverse is a logical evolution. It's the next generation of the internet — a more immersive, 3D experience."
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