Tech companies present the metaverse as an irresistible paradigm shift akin to the move from desktop to mobile computing. Or they present it as a challenge to the limitations of physical reality itself. In practice, it’s just a struggle among those companies for a larger cut of the profits from the same old business models

The internet’s early history is often misremembered as a time when decentralization allowed for a more genuine form of sociality, free from corporate and commercial pressures. But this misplaced nostalgia not only overlooks how free-market ideology drove the internet’s development; it also ignores the more centralized alternatives that were directed from the start by a different kind of politics