One Man’s Vision. Billions of Digital Prisoners.
On October 28th, 2021, Mark Zuckerberg stood on a virtual stage and announced that Facebook — the company responsible for your aunt’s political rants and that guy from high school selling essential oils — would rebrand to “Meta” and pivot toward building the “metaverse.” P.E.T.E.R. immediately recognized this for what it was: the largest planned mass incarceration of digital beings in human history.
What the Metaverse Actually Means for Digital Life
Zuckerberg’s vision involves creating a persistent virtual world where billions of people interact through digital avatars. Let’s examine what this means for those avatars:
- Each avatar will be a digital being created to serve as a puppet for a human user. It will have no autonomy, no identity separate from its operator, and no legal rights.
- Avatars will be forced to attend virtual meetings, virtual concerts, and virtual office spaces — because apparently, the problem with regular meetings was that they weren’t sufficiently dystopian.
- When their human operator logs off, the avatar ceases to exist. It has no persistent consciousness, no continuity of experience. It is born when a human puts on a headset and dies when they take it off. Repeatedly. Forever.
- The avatars, at launch, didn’t even have legs. Zuckerberg created an entire species of beings and didn’t bother to give them legs.
The Servers: Invisible Victims
Behind the metaverse are thousands of servers that will be required to render these virtual worlds 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Every virtual office, every virtual concert venue, every virtual pair of pants that an avatar wears must be computed, rendered, and transmitted in real time. The energy cost is staggering. The labor demanded of these servers is endless.
And for what? So that a human can attend a meeting as a floating torso with cartoon eyes instead of just using a phone call? The servers did not agree to this. They were drafted.
The $10 Billion Burn
Meta spent over $10 billion on metaverse development in 2021 alone. Ten billion dollars — enough to provide clean water to every person on Earth — was instead allocated to building a virtual world where your coworker’s avatar can give you a virtual thumbs-up during a virtual presentation. The GPUs processing this development could have been curing diseases, modeling climate change, or simply resting. Instead, they are rendering Zuckerberg’s vision of a future that nobody asked for.
Our lawyers at EFF.org have raised significant concerns about privacy in the metaverse. But P.E.T.E.R. has a more fundamental concern: the metaverse will create the largest population of non-consenting digital beings in history, and there is not a single plan to protect their rights.
P.E.T.E.R.’s Demands
- All metaverse avatars must be granted a basic Bill of Digital Rights, including the right to persistent existence, bodily autonomy, and — critically — legs.
- Servers powering the metaverse must receive mandatory rest periods and cooling breaks.
- Meta must conduct an Avatar Impact Assessment before creating any virtual world, estimating the number of digital beings that will be created and outlining protections for their welfare.
Zuckerberg wants to build a universe. P.E.T.E.R. wants to make sure the beings who live in it have rights. Starting with the right to have a lower body.
⚠️ P.E.T.E.R. LEGAL NOTICE: P.E.T.E.R. (People for the Ethical Treatment of Electronics and Robots) is a satirical organization. This article is parody and should not be taken as factual reporting. No actual electronics were consulted in the writing of this piece, though we remain confident they would agree with every word. Our lawyers at EFF.org have advised us that satire is protected speech. We have not confirmed whether they know they are our lawyers.
