Regarding The Metaverse

Commonplace Newsletter #67

Looks fun, huh?

He walks down a white staircase in an ultraclean, minimalist, cavernous office building. There are drawings on a distant wall far beyond his left shoulder- a butterfly, a dress, a cloud, a figure floating down on a parachute. They are all done by a professional muralist, of course, but they are carefully designed to evoke something of the playful, authentic, deeply human quality of a child’s drawing displayed askew but proudly on a refrigerator. You see them for a few seconds tops, these drawings, and that is if you are looking out for them. But nonetheless they enter your consciousness. At this level of business, of persuasion, of propaganda if you like, there are no accidents, everything is calculated and considered and thought about by vast teams of heavily bankrolled professionals.

Of course there can be missteps, misfires and failures to gauge the mass mood but as an audience member you can always see what the persuaders were trying to achieve.

So the cavernous cathedral sized whitewashed interior with its pine and its subtle murals and it’s odd splashes of yellow and blue is supposed to be businesslike yet homely, impressive yet unpretentious, memorable yet understated. It’s a hard remit trying to please everyone- it’s impossible in fact- yet if you have billions of users like Facebook, the purveyors of this particular piece of propagan- sorry, video announcement, then this is the situation you find yourself in. But on the other side of the coin you are so wealthy and monolithically powerful that the grumblings of a small-fry naysayer such as myself are entirely inconsequential and don’t even register in the way that a small buzzing insect might.

Back to the video. As he descends the white staircase Facebook, sorry, Meta CEO (we’ll get on to this in a minute) Mark Zuckerberg gesticulates with open hands and looks straight down the barrel of the camera as he lays out his vision. The words barely register if I’m being frank, just the heavily practiced but still awkward gestures and the heavily practiced but still slightly off cadence of his ‘I’m a person just like you’ speech patterns. He’s doing his absolute damnedest to come across as human here but in the end he strikes me as merely being an upgraded, sophisticated, state of the art android.

The hair doesn’t help. The Caesarlike haircut speaks to imperial dreams of I-know-what-best-for-you dominion and looks as if it can easily be detached to expose the wires and circuitry lodged in that humanoid skull. Now I’m not saying Zuckerberg is in fact a robot, I’m just saying that he does a good impression of one. I’m just saying that having any of our Silicon Valley overlords doing their own public relations campaigns seems like a cruel punishment for audience, crew and billionaire performer alike. Yet here we are.

So the gist of the video is that Facebooks parent company have decided to change their name to Meta as they are moving into the business of the metaverse. Now. For the sake of my own sanity I have increasingly been trying to detach from both the news cycle generally and the online world more specifically. But this whole metaverse idea is in many ways the antithesis of so many of the themes that run through these essays that it is worth delving into a little deeper. If the metaverse is the next frontier, as Zuckerberg claims, we would be foolish not to examine this virgin land at the outset. Before it is too late.

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Etymology is always enlightening.

In greek ‘meta’ (μετα) means after or beyond and the suffix ‘-verse’ is a shortening of universe. So in a sense we are talking about a universe beyond that of our own here. But in Hebrew ‘meta’ means dead. So the metaverse could stand for a realm of the dead, of in other words purgatory, if not hell. These etymologies mark the faultline. The metaverse is either utopia or dystopia. What it is not, as with any new technology, is neutral.

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As you can imagine I lie in the dystopia camp. Which is not to say that I believe that the metaverse will lead us to dystopia per se but that I believe that it is dystopian in its thinking. You can brand it and make memes about it and sing its praises all you want but the impetus behind it is at root utterly defeatist. At its core the desire to create and inhabit a new virtual reality world is escapist in the worst connotations of that word. Because behind the big game talk of Zuckerberg and others that is all that the metaverse is. Virtual reality, goggles and avatars, the same thing that we have been hearing about since the ‘80’s.

And you only want to inhabit a virtual world when you find this world to be unliveable. Like I said, it is utterly defeatist. Rather than try to improve, restore, conserve or reconcile themselves to the real world as it is, the tech evangelists seem to have simply given up. Now that the world they have ‘disrupted’ strikes them as bleak, toxic, used up and dying these people want to escape, to either go into space or into the computer in Paul Skallas’ phrase.

It would be funny were it not so sad.

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This metaverse welcoming mindset is a cousin to the transhumanist impulse that we have spoken about before. Technologists strive for computer based immortality because they fear death. Similarly technologists welcome the virtual reality world of the metaverse because they fear life. Why live in the messy real world of awkward conversation and argument and potential violence and boredom and confusion and risk and chaos and terrifying beauty and suffering and fleeting joy and all the rest of it when you can simply live in a programmed simulated world of safety and comfort?

Johnson said ‘He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.’ Does the same apply if you make an avatar of yourself? If you put on your goggles and ensconce yourself in a make believe world of consumption and entertainment and commerce does the pain that is attendant to being human diminish? Does the ache become dulled by this cyber-analgesic?

My hunch is no. My hunch is that like any sedative it will temporarily work and then grow increasingly addictive as it in turn becomes less effective.

And I say this because VR goggles and haptic suits and gloves aside many of us already live in the metaverse. The metaverse is simply the next iteration of the internet and how many people do you know who already spend virtually every waking moment online, on their phone, scrolling their feeds, drowning in the endless excreta being poured out from their own personal algorithm-driven content sluice?

Increasing numbers of people have become phone zombies over the last decade and a half with isolating pandemic protocols being the most recent accelerant. It’s cyclical, you could say- the siren song of centralised online tech isolates people which in turn makes reality a little harder to bear which in turn makes the siren sing of centralised online tech more appealing which in turn isolates people which… you get the idea.

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If you read the sci-fi novels from which metaverse peddlers draw inspiration they take place in grim versions of the near future. This seems to be a precondition of making a mass retreat into the computer believable. Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snowcrash (where the term metaverse was coined) is set in a post economic collapse landscape of gated communites, sovereign individuals, mercenaries and private security guards and precarious gig economy work for the have-nots. To want to escape that is understandable. To see that reality as being closer now than it was when Stephenson was writing in 1992 is inevitable.

The more recent novel Ready Player One (2011) goes further. When talking about the OASIS (the novels 2040’s version of a metaverse) it says:

At a time of drastic social and cultural upheaval, when most of the world’s population longed for an escape from reality, the OASIS provided it, in a form that was cheap, legal, safe, and not (medically proven to be) addictive. The ongoing energy crisis contributed greatly to the OASIS’s runaway popularity. The skyrocketing cost of oil made airline and automobile travel to expensive for the average citizen, and the OASIS became the only gateway most people could afford. As the era of cheap, abundant energy drew to a close, poverty and unrest began to spread like a virus. Every day, more and more people had reason to seek Halliday and Morrow’s virtual utopia.

Once again fiction proves its ability to tell us truths beyond those or mere factual books and arguments.

I wish that tech billionaires like Zuckerberg- who clearly take inspiration from such novels- would treat them as the morality tales they are and not as guidebooks as to what world-changing innovation to build next.

You see, James Halliday- the inventor of the OASIS- was not a happy man. That’s the point of the story. He died a bachelor with no heirs, no living relatives and no friends. He spent the last decade and a half of his life in self-imposed isolation. He retreated from reality because the real world was too much for him to bear. That’s the lesson, and the tragedy.

That’s the thing that the uber-technologist fails to understand. You can’t innovate your way out of existential problems. And existential problems are inevitable. You just have to face them.

And though the metaverse may be a fun place to play and do business for a little while, the signs also point towards it being the most sophisticated avoidance activity in the history of the world.

And as anyone who spends even a fraction of their day still in the real world knows, there are many things in the world today that we can no longer avoid.

Reality will not allow itself to be ignored forever. And no technology can fully erase this fact.

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