A Warning From Another Time

Charlie’s acid commentary reminded me of our colleague Megan Garber’s March 2023 cover story, “We’re Already Living in the Metaverse,” which argued that reality has become distorted by our pathological need to be entertained. Megan examined society’s addiction to illusion and trivia and cited the great dystopian writers of the recent past, who warned that “we will become so distracted and dazed by our fictions that we’ll lose our sense of what is real.” The result, Megan wrote, “will be a populace that forgets how to think, how to empathize with one another, even how to govern and be governed.”