The reference is the third book in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, The Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything, FYI.
It’s traditional at this time of the year to either look back at the best/worst ofs from the year before, or to prognosticate about the year ahead.
This point in the trajectory of tech feels different, as we venture across the threshold of Web 3.0. meaning that there have been two prior iterations:
The line is a reference to a comedic variety show hosted by Drew Carey, Whose Line Is It, Anyway?, which was basically an homage to the absurd.
Enter Meta, the Company Formerly Known as Facebook, which some wags have referred to as Mark Zuckerberg’s attempt to escape his many problems in the physical world. Not the least of which is his loss of a younger audience, and every advertiser knows that it’s best to get them when they’re young. Even Instagram can’t seem to hold on to those younger eyeballs. In Meta, kids can strap on their headsets (and CFKAF is betting that they will) and enter their own virtual worlds – with friends too, if they choose. Although it won’t be the Oculus headset, since FB is killing off the brand, which means, btw, as Techcrunch pointed out, that it took Zuck roughly 15 seconds to tell his first lie: “Our mission remains the same — it’s still about bringing people together. Our apps and our brands — they’re not changing either.”
“Mr. Zuckerberg painted a picture of the metaverse as a clean, well-lit virtual world, entered with virtual and augmented reality hardware at first and more advanced body sensors (or neural implants?) later on, in which people can play virtual games, attend virtual concerts, go shopping for virtual goods, collect virtual art, hang out with each other’s virtual avatars and attend virtual work meetings,” wrote The New York Times.