Dear Mark Zuckerberg

An Open Letter From a Fellow Traveler

Illustration by Dean Terry

Dear Mark:

We need to talk.

I’ve seen your video about how Facebook is changing its name to Meta and how you’re going to bear-hug the metaverse and change the world. Again. I’ve heard you describe the metaverse in breathless, almost religious terms. This mashup of virtual and augmented reality will be all pervasive, you said, like the air we breathe, “a persistent, synchronous environment where we can be together.”

I don’t know how to break this to you, Mark, but the metaverse is a bad idea. An unnecessary idea, a redundant one. The metaverse already exists. Long before Facebook, before the iPhone and before the telephone, before the telegraph and, yes, before the printing press, there was travel.

While you were amassing users and money, moving fast and breaking things, I was traversing the world — not the metaverse but the real world — first as a foreign correspondent then as a travel writer and cultural appreciator. I write about happy places and about creative places, and wise places too. You know, Mark, the Internet of Your Dreams.

We’re not all that different, you and me. We both want to make the world a better place. We both compress time and space. We just do it in very different ways, and therein lies the rub.