Greg Daniels on How the Metaverse Influenced ‘Upload’ Season 2

variety.com:

Selome Hailu “Life imitates art” has become uncomfortably true in the two short years between the first and second seasons of Greg Daniels’ sci-fi comedy “Upload.”The series follows recently deceased computer programmer Nathan Brown (Robbie Amell) as he attempts to navigate Lakeview, the digital afterlife space created by a company called Horizen.

The first season debuted in 2020, when rumblings of the “metaverse” had yet to make it into the zeitgeist. Since then, the company previously known as Facebook has rebranded as Meta — even taking a few pages from Daniels’ book.“It’s kind of hilarious that Facebook is now calling their metaverse Horizon a couple years after we did,” Daniels told Variety, referencing the company’s free virtual reality game Horizon Worlds which was released in December 2021. “The nugget of the idea is that if you could technologically record people’s minds, and then reconstitute them in a metaverse where they live full-time, then you would basically be able to create heaven,” Daniels said. “Because people would be able to persist as long as the computers were powered up.

They would be safely in the metaverse.”“But if that was the case,” he continued, “then human beings would be making it. [So] it would not be fair.

It would be for profit. I thought, ‘Oh, that’s a great metaphor.’ Just to talk about how there’s a lot of unfairness already in the distribution of technology and the good things in life.”Thus, Lakeview is utopic on the surface, but it also showcases the horrific inequalities created by capitalism with more fervor as the series progresses.