Enough already. This week, Mark Zuckerberg held an internal meeting at Meta (née Facebook) to announce the company’s new values. Values are part of a company’s DNA, articulated — after paying consultants millions of dollars — to be the guiding principles of a brand. They are meant to help make decisions and dictate behaviors, signal to consumers what to expect when interacting with the brand, and to make sure everyone on staff is toeing the line. (As if Facebook’s turn to the dystopian weren’t frightening enough, if you work at Meta you are now called a “Metamate.”) Mark & Meta put forth these three values to help them forge their way, and ours, into the metaverse: “move fast,” “build awesome things,” and “live in the future.”

Let’s put aside for a second the fact that these are written as active verbs, not by accident. (By contrast, most humans perceive values to be nouns: honor, trust, ambition, transparency, kindness, and the like.) But for those who are unclear what exactly the metaverse is, it is the brainchild of Big Tech: an online world anyone can access through a virtual-reality headset, in which you can interact with friends (as avatars), companies (and spend money), and even the real, physical world with some sort of altered-reality filter. Meta has invested $10B already in its development. JPMorgan, the bank, is now setting up shop in the metaverse as Onyx Lounge, where you can hang out with a tiger. For those curious, the Onyx Lounge and its tiger are located in the blockchain-based world of Decentraland — whatever any of that means.

Will this all be cool? Of course it will. It’s the evolved version of Second Life from the early 2000s, but souped-up. And compared to what Mark & Meta hope to build, this initial version is sure to look like Burger Time looks to us now — basic, simple, OG, first-gen. In five, ten, and twenty years, this could be where life happens. If Mark & Meta have their druthers, this will be where life happens. Much like Twitter has taken the place of the office water cooler, the metaverse wants to take the place of nearly everything else. It is sure to be cool. But it also sure to be a disaster for humanity, especially if the entire venture is led by the three values Meta is now rallying around.

I know, I sound old and resistant to change. I get it. I’m not. I am simply a Geriatric Millennial. We occupy a very important space in the timeline of society. We are the mini-generation sandwiched between Boomers/Gen X before us, who had to learn email in adulthood, and Millennials/Gen Z after us, who grew up with screens in their hands. We had email for the first time in high school. We got our first cell phones in college. We entered the workforce just as the internet (then the “Internet”), MySpace, Friendster then Facebook, and all things online became the dominant way to do business and, well…do life. That vantage point is important, because most of us are in our 40s, so 50% of our life was pre-screen and 50% online. We are the people who jumped off the couch during the Super Bowl halftime show, overjoyed, because we finally felt seen.

Because of this position on the historical timeline, we are the last generation of humanity — literally — who knows what life was like before social media. In three words: It was better. Sorry to be the 44-year-old dude romanticizing his youth, but if you can suspend the clichéming for just a second, it’s important. All of what is to come, if it is led by Meta’s values, will rob us of whatever humanity we have left. It all started as a great idea: Let’s put the Harvard freshman directory — The Face Book — online. We can create a World Wide Web Site page that has everyone’s picture, and we can all rate how hot-or-not they are. Nearly 20 years later, we are dealing with an animal quite different. And these are the three values that animal now heartily embraces:

Move fast. Who wants to move any faster? The speed of our motion is what has made modern life unbearable for most. Fast, constantly sold to us as sexy, is exactly what we do not need. Our money moves fast — up the ladder. Our messages move fast. Our lives move fast. Too fast. We spend most of our days trying to slow it all down so we could do those wholly human things like eat, sleep, and love. In a world that moves fast, we hardly sit for a meal. We’re up all night, minds racing. We go, go, go. And our relationships to colleagues, friends, family, kids, neighbors, and partners suffer.

Move fast works for one tier of our society: the uber-wealthy. Move fast means that our money will move fast from our digital bank account into those of every major corporation in America. Last year, Facebook’s revenue was $33B and its net profit was $10B. Do we realize how much that is? Go ahead, count to 10 billion. It would take you 300 years. No one in 2022 needs to move faster. Except, perhaps, the government.

Build awesome things. We have already built an awesome thing: the world. Civilization. Society. What is truly awesome are the Pyramids, the Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China. Awesome is New York City as soon as night settles and the lights turn on. Awesome is a drive down the Pacific Coast Highway. Awesome is a concert in Nashville. Awesome is an infinite number of human experiences that an entire generation of people will not have if they spend all their time in the metaverse. I think of a generation of kids who now scream bloody murder if you take the iPad from their hands. The more we invest in the metaverse, the less they will experience the wonder and awe of the actual world.

All the while, the actual physical world will continue to fall apart around us. Our major cities are a mess. Have you walked down 7th Avenue between 23rd Street and 34th Street in New York City lately? For the first time in my life, I saw a group of junkies shooting up in an ATM in midtown Manhattan, in broad daylight. Can we not invest billions of dollars and what is sure to be incalculable time and resources into rebuilding the actual world? That is where we live and die. That is where we love and lose. That is where we bleed and heal. I feel deeply sorry for Mark, who I can only suspect has not had enough truly awesome human experiences in his life to want for us all to exist in a digital world.

Live in the future. What Meta means is live in their version of the future. Live in the science-fiction version that movies have sold us over the last century as inevitable. Live in something we can point at and call “progress.” This is perhaps the most manipulative and truly sad value on the list. We are already living in a future that Mark & Company have created. In 2000, it was all up for grabs. The last twenty years is a future created by Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk — among other tech giants who are not household names. Yes, some of their ingenuity and vision have changed the world for the better. That is undeniable. I am writing to you on one of their products.

But we have all paid a large cost for the conveniences, advances, and cool that the last two decades have brought us. Inequality is now as high as in the Gilded Age, no doubt the reason HBO Max just debuted a series of the same name. Homelessness and suffering, especially in our major cities, have gotten so bad that everyday conversation now laments the tent cities that have sprung up. Major industries have fallen, the economics of this future reorganizing entire worlds of commerce and art to benefit those at the very top and squeeze every living penny from artists, small-business owners, teachers, and millions upon millions of workers across the spectrum. And then came the pandemic, which brought unfathomable financial pain to countless business owners and consumers, let alone death to nearly a million American families. This is the future that Big Tech and Big Business have helped create. Why on Earth would we want more of this? Who exactly is clamoring for the next step, a future in an alternate digital realm?

What we continue to fail to realize — or at least harness — is our power to define the future we actually do want. That future may be more complicated and more complex and more nuanced than a shiny new online world we can inhabit simply with new goggles. In fact, plainly, it may be much, much harder to build. But we must find a way. Our leaders have failed to put forth a vision of the future that is more exciting than one that is full of tech and VR and the Onyx Lounge. These modern titans have failed us. They have the power, the money, and the resources to make actual progress. And instead they are investing in the metaverse. And flying rockets to outer space. And moving bridges so they can get their super-yachts out of the factory.

At what point do we say, enough already, no one wants your vision of the 21st century, no one wants every facet of our humanity digitized, commercialized, monetized, and commodified. No one wants your metaverse.