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Don’t mock the metaverse
不要嘲笑元宇宙
“A revolutionary approach on how to connect our world without being super-weird…In the Icelandverse, there’s…skies you can see with your eyeballs, volcanic rocks you can caress, and really big geysers you can observe from a safe distance.” So runs a viral advert designed to lure tourists to Iceland. The target of the parody is Mark Zuckerberg in particular, and Silicon Valley in general, for whom the idea of the “metaverse”—a sort of 3D sequel to today’s two-dimensional Internet, in which users work, play, buy and sell inside immersive virtual worlds—has become the latest Next Big Thing.
“这是一种革命性的方式，让我们的世界在不至于变得超级怪异的情况下连接起来。在冰岛元宇宙，你可以用眼睛看到天空，可以抚摸火山岩，可以在安全距离观察到真正巨大的间歇泉。”这是一则旨在吸引游客前往冰岛的病毒式广告。这一模仿的目标尤其是指马克·扎克伯格，乃至整个硅谷，对他们来说，“元宇宙”的想法已经成为最新的“下一个大事件”。元宇宙是当今二维互联网的一种3D续集，用户可以在身临其境的虚拟世界中工作、玩耍、买卖。
Iceland’s tourist board is not the only sceptic. When, on October 28th, Mr Zuckerberg rebranded Facebook as Meta Platforms, to signal his commitment to the new idea, many assumed it was a PR stunt to divert attention from the social-media giant’s scandals. When Satya Nadella and Jensen Huang, the bosses of Microsoft and Nvidia, made their own pitches a couple of weeks later, people muttered about bandwagon-jumping.
冰岛旅游局并不是唯一持怀疑态度的一方。10月28日，扎克伯格将Facebook更名为Meta平台，以表明他对新理念的支持，许多人认为这只是一个公关噱头，目的是转移人们对社交媒体巨头丑闻的注意力。几周后，当微软和英伟达的老板萨蒂亚•纳德拉和黄仁勋发表自己的推介宣传时，人们都在抱怨他们的跟风潮流。
Mr Zuckerberg may well prefer to think about exciting new products than deal with the downsides of his existing ones. And hype is the water in which techies swim. But to stop the analysis there would be too dismissive. There are good reasons to take the metaverse seriously. One is historical: as computers have become more capable, the experiences that they generate have become richer.
扎克伯格很可能更愿意考虑令人兴奋的新产品，而不是处理现有产品的缺点。而天花乱坠的宣传正是技术人员喜闻乐见的。但如果停止分析，就太不屑一顾了。我们有充分的理由认真对待元宇宙。理由之一则是历史性的：随着计算机的能力越来越强，它们产生的体验也越来越丰富。
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