Our future was pronounced dead last week.

I mean that glorious future of "The Metaverse," promised to us by Silicon Valley's tech and financial geniuses. Just a decade ago, they were promising us that by now we'd all be playing, working and relating as digital avatars of ourselves, living out our lives in a phantasmagoric new world of virtual reality.

They boldly proclaimed that the next Big Thing in tech, replacing smartphones and all other personal devices, would be a "Metaverse," digitally connecting everyone everywhere. They exclaimed that by purchasing goofy-looking, reality-augmenting headsets, interactions could be done without any in-person human contact. And who better to sell this future than the super-goofy gabillionaire, Mark Zuckerberg?

The CEO of Facebook, he was so bedazzled by the digital hokum of the metaverse that he even renamed his corporation "Meta." Then he pumped a whopping $80 billion into developing and marketing his wondrous new world, including peddling a Meta brand of those magical headsets.

Not wanting to miss out on a bonanza, other tech billionaire geniuses joined the virtual reality rush. But it was just fool's gold, for the geniuses had failed to consider an essential factor: Customers. Specifically, customers! Far from dazzled, buyers pronounced the meta-mess — Goofy.

Even Zuckerberg has now pulled the plug on his fantasy of a digital, virtual, immersive, avatar world of tech "reality." Don't think, however, that goofy, avaricious, egomaniacal billionaires have gained any modesty from their Metaverse misadventure. They are the same ones now hurling trillions of public and corporate dollars into erecting intrusive, massive, wasteful AI data centers all across America. Why, to power their profiteering fantasy of replacing humans with AI bots.

WHY CORPORATIONS PAY MILLIONS FOR EXECUTIVE MEDIOCRITY

Most people believe the American economy is being rigged by and for bankers, CEOs and other superrich elites, because ... well, because it is!

With their hired armies of lawmakers, lobbyists, lawyers and the like, they fix the economic rules so even more of society's money and power flows uphill to them. Take corporate CEOs. While the economy was somewhere between a downer and devastating for most people, the CEO class made out like bandits, with each of the three top-paid corporate honchos pocketing as much as a billion dollars in personal pay!

Are they geniuses, or what? What. All three of their corporations ended with big financial losses and declining value. So how can such mediocrity produce such lavish rewards? Simple — rig the pay machine.

Today's corporate system of setting compensation for top executives is a flimflam disguised as a model of management rectitude. On its face, it sounds good — "Pay for performance," it's called, meaning the CEO does well if the company does well.

But who defines "doing well?" The scam at most major corporations is that the standard of corporate performance that the chief must meet to qualify for a huge payday is set by each corporation's board of directors. Guess who they are? Commonly, board members are the CEO's handpicked brothers-in-law, golfing buddies and corporate cronies. So, they set the bar for winning multimillion-dollar executive paychecks so low that a sack of concrete could jump over it.

Well, insist these flimflammers, corporate shareholders are the ultimate stopgap against CEO greed. These "owners" can just vote "no" on any executive pay they consider excessive. However, even "shareholder democracy" is rigged — corporate rules decree that votes by shareholders are merely "advisory," meaning top executives can simply ignore them, grab the money and run. This system is fixed ... and we need to break it!

To find out more about Jim Hightower and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

Photo credit: NASA at Unsplash