Hardly a day goes by without some new claim promising to bring us closer to the metaverse (元宇宙) in the not-too-distant future. On hearing this, some will feel pure excitement, but others will feel unsure or downright opposed. Our habit in recent history has been looking down upon those with doubts on technological progress. It may be time to re-examine that.

There has been a backlash to technology since historical memories began. Every new form of communication has attracted criticism for increasing the pace of life. For example, people once feared that cars travelling at 20 to 30 miles per hour might rob their passengers of oxygen.

When we look back, contemporary resistance to technological advancement can look completely foolish, but often it isn’t. The Luddites, for example, the destroyer of mill (作坊) machinery in the early industrial revolution, are generally referred to as a historical joke. But if we look at their real complaints, it wasn’t some naive anti-progress movement; it was about economics. Cotton mills replaced skilled, home-based, independent work with lower-skilled work in a factory, accompanied by much less autonomy and much less pay.

The mill might have been more efficient and thus more profitable, but it would take decades of campaigning to distribute those gains even approximately fairly — with the birth of the trade union movement, the welfare state and more. So, was their resistance really so unreasonable?

While metaverse advocates would like to paint skeptics as simply rooted in the past, at least some doubts are well founded. The reasons to be cautious of the next wave of technology are varied. One is simply whether the technologies in question are where they are claimed to be. If the company has a habit of over promising, few in the know will take its claims of inventions seriously.

Other more striking metaverse technologies rely on virtual reality, which still largely consists of heavy headsets and odd arm controls — all just to be able to operate an avatar through an awkward online world. VR has been “the next big thing” for decades and the public has consistently felt otherwise: there isn’t much to do once you are there, the technology gives many people motion sickness and, perhaps most problematically of all, the whole thing just seems extremely silly. Another popular innovation, health tracking, hasn’t caught the wider public by storm because many consumers worry about what will happen to their data.

There is much to anticipate as we bring online and offline worlds together. But we should learn not to dismiss concerns or caution about this, either. There are many rational reasons for people to take part in the techlash.

Food brings us together and connects us to our families, friends, nature and to foreign cultures. Food is universal. Food waste, on the other hand, has become a universal problem, as it significantly contributes to climate change. Luckily, there are countries that have laws to require supermarkets or other businesses to donate unsold food.

About one third of all food grown for human consumption is thrown out or wasted according to the Food and Agriculture Organization(FAO). This creates both environmental and financial problems, since traditional agriculture requires large amounts of resources including land and water. Food production is also a major cause of greenhouse gases and climate change.

Food waste occurs at every step of food production from the field to the store. In fact, fruits, vegetables, and roots have the highest waste. Donating food that is unusually wasted does not mean giving away damaged food. Sometimes it is simply a case of food being mislabeled, a can that has a torn label, or slightly bruised fruit.

To reduce both the financial and environmental pressure, Italy passed a law to encourage businesses and farmers to donate unsold food to charities. Companies that donate their leftovers will pay lower taxes on waste removal.

Waste management is also a very costly thing for governments. In fact, according to Global Citizen, in 2016, Italy spent over $13.3 billion on waste management. The idea behind the law is that when it is economic and convenient, companies will happily follow the law.

France was the first country to pass a food donation law in 2016. It required supermarkets that are at least 4,300 square feet to donate unsold food to charity. Since then, 90 percent of supermarkets began donating food, the number of which was 66 percent before the law.

To increase food donations, Israel passed a law in 2018 to ensure that unused food from restaurants, hotels and other places goes to the people that need it most.

Over the past century, more than a few great writers have expressed concern about humanity’s future. In Brave New World (1932), the British author Aldous Huxley pictured a near-perfect society in which unhappiness and aggression had been removed out of humanity through a combination of genetic engineering and psychological conditioning.

It might surprise you to hear this, but these things have already happened. Now we are living in a world in which a handful of high-tech companies are not only monitoring much of our activity, but are also invisibly controlling more and more of what we think, feel, do and say.

Take Google, the biggest and the best search engine. It gives us exactly the information we are looking for, almost instantly and almost always in the first position of the list after we launch our search—the list of “search results”. And that ordered list is so good, in fact, that about 50 per cent of our clicks go to the top two items, and more than 90 per cent of our clicks go to the 10 items listed on the first page of results. Seconds later, the decision we make or the opinion we form is determined by that short list we are shown, even though we have no idea how the list was generated.

Of course, Google decides which of the billions of web pages it is going to include in our search results, and it also decides how to rank them. However, how it decides these things is a deep, dark secret—one of the best-kept secrets in the world, like the formula for Coca-Cola.

The technology that now surrounds us is not just a harmless toy; it has also made possible undetectable and untraceable control of entire populations. If we choose to ignore this, we do so at our own risk.