The world Zuckerberg is building

Recently I went to visit people I once new, in a city I lived in for more than twenty years. I spent time walking through all the new building that had happened since I left a decade ago, and some that had already happened before I left. And it was not awful. But, also, it wasn't anything at all. It could have been similar developments in London ('more London', or most of Canary Wharf) or just anywhere really: identikit expensive-modern bland sameness, with no sense of place at all. The city I once knew is being slowly devoured by some kind of soulless meta-city, leaking into reality from who-knows where.

And I realised that it was like walking through some open-world video game. The surfaces were all suspiciously smooth because that's easier to render, and whatever algorithm was generating the buildings just wasn't very good.

And pretty soon you get lost but you realise it doesn't matter at all because, although you might not find the coffee shop where you were meant to meet your friend, you can just find another, almost identical, one from the infinite number that the machine will generate for you. And in it there will be someone who perhaps is not quite the friend you meant to meet but is close enough, and you don't need to worry that they too are being generated by the algorithm. And somewhere else your friend is meeting someone who is not quite you, somewhere in this vast pretend world.

And outside the simulation, if there really is an outside, the environment is collapsing.