The Metaverse Is Unfair to Real People

Annamaria on Monday

Even before I began to type this first sentence, the virtual people - the ones we call bots – had already pulled one of their annoying tricks.  Every week for years now I have chosen a nice dark shade of my favourite colour to identify myself at the top of my blog.  All of a sudden, today, my choices are changed and that lovely shade of green that I prefer is no longer available.  This is exactly the kind of treatment I am here to complain about.

And then before I even got to the third sentence, I noticed that the words "colour" and "favourite" were automatically changed to the British spelling.  Did I ask the Metaverse to switch to British just because I happen to be in Europe? No. I did not. Did it ask me for permission to change to British, just because I happened to be in a European country, even though Britain isn't even in Europe anymore? No. Completely without my permission, it not only took it upon itself to change my favourite colour, it also took the liberty of changing how I spell those words.

Also, when I am trying to dictate, it pulls another little annoying trick. When I dictate in the Western Hemisphere, and I say "period" at the end of a sentence, it puts in the punctuation I require.  Here if I say "comma" it puts in a , ; however, maybe it's just bad karma or maybe it wants to put me in a coma, but when I say – at the end of the sentence – "period" it puts in the word period period   I quickly found out that it wants me to pretend that I'm British, because I'm in Italy (??) So, if I want to punctuate the end of the sentence I have to say "full stop".  But you see what happens, when I say. It puts in a period period 

Another way the bossy bots of the Metaverse try to drive me crazy is that they often require that I prove that I an am not one of them, that I am a real person.  I must do this by proving I can tell the difference between a picture with a traffic light in it and a picture without a traffic light in it.  Then, I have to check a box that says "I am not a robot."  Then and only then will it let me do whatever innocent thing I had intended--like look upthe difference between "border" and "boarder."  The conclusion is obvious.  Since the bots have all the power, they would not want an ordinary human being like me to pretend to be one of them.

I've had enough of this for today period  I could go on talking about things like pop-ups and overlays period  And all those passwords that are supposed to protect our security and privacy when everyone knows that there are no such things as privacy and security in the Metaverse period  So I'm going to give up for now, and I really mean it I am coming to a.