Everyone makes fun of the Metaverse. Its singular success has been to unite a whole diversity of people into the near-unanimous agreement that it sucks. The defense of it is indefensible, namely, that because we intend to spend most of our lives playing in digital spaces, we ought to humanize the playgrounds, make them more like communal life, imitate the ability to walk—say—or to have a meeting in a “room.”
Within a world that hadn’t crashed its collective mind into an oak tree, the very suggestion of the Metaverse would have been a fitting reason to burn with fire the entire Californian tyranny; to bomb the servers; to hang the tech-lords; to build up a social order apart from the pale glow of computers, computers, and computers pretending to be something besides computers.
For the admission of Meta is twofold: First, that the nobility and adventure of human work has been so vilely degraded that man and beast are sick and desperate for even the approximation, not of a friendly touch, but of a damn meeting room. Second, that those who profit from sickening the human animal have also determined that they will never, ever stop; that our sentence to type out auto-corrected and auto-filled sentences is, in fact, a life-sentence; that freedom has been reduced to a few aesthetic selections: how shall we paint the cells? Beige? And would you like, as long as you are here, to pretend to be a beloved childhood cartoon character? The opposite sex?
But I am not certain that the Metaverse is sincere. To ruin a good adage: “if it’s too stupid to be believed—it isn’t.” And the Metaverse is unbelievably stupid. When Chipotle allows users to “roll a virtual burrito” so as to earn the possibility of winning an actual burrito; when Heineken pays for you to drink “responsibly” in the Metaverse; when lawyers gush over the profitable possibilities of suing for virtual rape and assault; when you see these things, know that the reign of stupidity is upon you. But it is, in fact, a reign; stupidity deployed for the private gain of those who deploy it.
I thought this as I watched the pitch for the Metaverse, delivered via advertisement during that annual orgy of commercial self-congratulation in which the owners of this earth remind us that we are, in fact, ruled by people who make cars and corn chips—I mean the Super Bowl. Meta’s ad seemed strangely calculated to stir up the very fear of “virtual reality” that would keep people from purchasing their product. In it, an anthropomorphic dog mascot falls into a deep depression as his favorite music venue is closed and his once glorious musical career is gradually reduced to meaningless service work. He is disabled, discarded, and finally placed in some hip, soulless lobby, where a young person fits a pair of virtual reality goggles on his nose.
To Americans faking their way through the pandemic, the message was on the nose. An exhausting restriction of human festival, a subsequent impotence of the human spirit—all saved by the laptop. Like Americans logging into their first Zoom meeting, the mascot opens his eyes onto the manufactured real. His digital avatar can walk—glide, actually, legs being the requisite sacrificial offering for entrance into the metaverse—can see others, can return to the very venue that was closed and take up that glory that was once his own. Meta’s advertisement ends with alternating shots of the happiness of the virtual world and the actuality of the immobile, goggled furry, alone in a dark and empty lobby, dancing to Simple Minds’ “Don’t You (Forget About Me),” a song about total, crushing alienation: “I'll be alone, dancing, you know it, baby.”
Now that this apparent advertisement actually functions as a horror story was not lost on my Super Bowl party. And lest the reader protests that the smoggy climes of my valley produces cynics at a rate incomparable with the rest of the nation, I note that the video’s most “liked” YouTube comment (for whatever that metric is worth) reads: “We destroyed your world so you can live in ours.” What are we watching, then? A big blooper from Big Tech?
It is ridiculous to imagine that anyone, seeking the satisfaction of even their most base drive for glory, would say: “I, like this rejected, forlorn, tool of a creature have no other prospect but to have the life I lost in my impotence returned to me as rented commodity; as a simulation designed and maintained by the wealthiest men in the world.” The archons who feed us the superbly designed addictions of Facebook and Instagram are many things—“unaware of the basic mechanisms of human psychology” is not one of them. So, when their pitch for the “next big thing” looks, transparently, like our next big nightmare, a wake-up call is called for. So what is really going on?
What is really going on
The vast majority of contemporary technological innovation is for the sake of fixing problems created by previous technological innovations or modifying an already existing technology to remove something cumbersome. Things become remote, handheld, voice-activated, but the thing being voice-activated is still, essentially, a search engine. Facebook becomes Instagram becomes Snapchat becomes TikTok—but we are still, essentially, sending pictures. Most innovation is really variation, gimmick—the hasty repackaging of the same basic activity of Sitting In Front Of A Screen—and these variations hide the fact that we have arrived at a technological plateau; that we are at the end of our technological history; that all that is left is to fiddle about with the details.
Our technological marvels have exchanged being marvelous for being rote necessities. Once we aspired to flight. Now we aspire to fall asleep during our flights. Once we thought the smartphone was cool as a cucumber. Now that we need a smartphone to live, it’s about as cool as a catheter. Once, digital technology excited us with its ability to augment our education. Now that it is the primary source of our education, it is about as exciting as a public school. Much silliness has been said about the unhappiness of Gen Z, and it is the basic wisdom of their parents, who bought them their phones, that their phones are to blame. Zoomers are not the first generation of technological addicts, but they are certainly a generation with no genuine hope for a technologically different future. Boomers could fantasize about flying cars, millennials could marvel at what the internet might bring, but what Christ fulfills Gen Z’s yearning for a coming technological resurrection into glory? Crypto? It is not the advance in technology that depresses young people, but its absolute stagnation; not simply the phones, but the fact that the phones appear to be all they can expect.
Plateauing is a problem, because rest invites us to consider whether or not we enjoy the reality in which we are resting. A car-ride that is “not there yet” is a journey. A car-ride which has no foreseeable destination outside of the car is hell. As long as we believe the “not yet,” we are content—or at least up to faking it. But when we realize that the “not there yet” will never arrive (or that when it does arrive, it is only as the iPhone 37, 38, and 39; a variation of the same, always in need of its own technological solution) then the walls start to shrink around us. Being human, and so longing to be free, we become extraordinarily likely to jump out of the window. The problems of technological growth inspire technological solutions, but the problems of technological plateaus inspire radical solutions. When faced with the one, we buy a new TV, a better TV, a Smart TV. When faced with the other, we throw away our TV and start raising chickens. When faced with the energy crisis as a technological problem, we look to industrially produced renewables. When faced with the energy crisis as a technological plateau, we look to asceticism, negative growth—to consuming less energy altogether.
Learn from the automobile, which has already plateaued. The history of the car is one that has ended—and it has ended in traffic. Previously, it would have been a little unhinged to argue that the car has had a net negative effect on the human species—now it would be unhinged to argue otherwise. The American world has been so thoroughly built for the car that all its relative benefits of speed have been nullified by an increased distance between those places to which only the car can take us. Fewer and fewer people believe that we are “not there yet.” Of course, the old hymn is still sung, and the Promised Land is still promised, albeit at the price of just one more lane on the highway, of an electric car, of automated driving, of tunnels underneath the road that would double the already gargantuan American road system—all so many “not there yets” tossed back to the red-faced and seething commuter, who spends, on average, 6% of his waking life strapped into a world-changing convenience which his forefathers did not need.
The car-ride is not a ride but a rest-stop; not a movement toward the future but a screeching halt; not a coming change but something hard set, like asphalt: a rote necessity of American survival, immune to change beyond silly variations or a serious destruction. One can trace this shift in many ways—the fact that car brands are selling bicycles; the fact that cities now fight to keep cars away, where once they fought to park them; the increased vagueness of car advertising, which is comically self-aware that it has nothing new to promise; that it may as well be an advertisement for a water bill, a roof repair, or some other utility without which we cannot live. They sell the brand; sell the family; sell being gay, authentic, and American; sell “love,” which makes a Subaru a Subaru; sell anything—just not the car. We are not making our bed, we are lying in it—and how do we like the Sheetz? We have at last arrived—and so the car faces a last judgment, one many are making in the negative.
The maintenance of a future technological development that never quite arrives is a useful fiction for preventing people from questioning the value of the development that already has. Flying cars were never going to arrive anymore than the jetpack—both are prisoners’ dreams, sweetening the world in which we are buckled. The same scent of the idling auto lingers around the Metaverse. Mark Zuckerberg said of his “innovation” that “‘people’s opportunities are usually anchored to where they are located...but new technologies will allow people to ‘be able to be present in places where they physically can’t be.’” I scarcely know where to begin. A braver essay might mention, with restraint, that the Metaverse only offers the ability to “be where you can’t” by no one being anywhere particular at all; that what is described as the addition of a valuable “space” can only ever be the fruit of a degradation of real spaces, reduced to so many more desks with computers.
But it suffices to point out that Mark offers, as the chief benefit of the Metaverse, something that already exists: long-distance communication, the ability to “be present” where your rear-end does not sit. He may as well have rounded off his assertion that the Metaverse will end the tyranny of physical place by announcing that it will also end the tyranny of the Ancien Regime: the thing has already been done, however one might try to disguise a variation as an advance. It was done with the telephone. One might even argue that it was once done by shouting. The Metaverse is a pitch for this whimpering world—not a brave new one.
The Metaverse cannot but “give people ‘opportunities’ where they do not live” for the simple reason that the local has already been ravaged by the digital; that people increasingly only have opportunities where they do not live. Zuckerberg walks into a coffee shop full of anxious, online typers and shouts: “My people! Your opportunities will no longer be anchored to your physical location!”
He is not being stupid. He is recapitulating an already existing technological nightmare as the not-yet-arrived achievement of a developing technology. He is calling a plateau a hill; a destination a journey. What greater immersion in a technological world could the modern person have than the one its owners have already delivered: constant attachment to a screen, the reduction of labor to a digital service economy, the addictions that ripple through us, the loss of the ability to communicate, navigate, buy, sell, repair, or even identify ourselves without the hovering presence of three or four companies holding out our world to us for a price? This is the new world order—and it is already getting old. The field has been won, and its victors have developed a pleasant bit of theater for us to enjoy, even to laugh at—a comedy in which the field is not yet won, in which history has not ended, in which this stupid digital world is “not there yet,” but remains oriented towards a genuine future.
This is why every aspiring tech company needs an impossible dream; why Bezos has to go to space; why Musk has to colonize the Martian waste; why Bill Gates has to sterilize the third world; why Google needs to provide worldwide internet access; why Facebook needs to populate our brains with advertisements. These are not just tax write-offs (though they are that), and they are more than infinite tasks to occupy bored men with far more money and power than purpose. They are marketing feats used to obscure our increasingly obvious technological and cultural stagnation.
The genius of the Metaverse is in allowing its not-there-yet to be seen as dystopian; in advertising itself as a horror. Facebook went live with an obviously silly, derivative, and badly designed rehash of the Sims, Wii, and Second Life, when they could have designed something more slick, more addicting, and more enticing (when in doubt, add porn). By doing this, they signify that the present plateau is not a plateau—but they also anesthetize our reaction against it. Revealing a dystopian future that we might one day have lubricates the present dystopia that they already maintain. Meta intentionally stinks to cover the already foul odor of Facebook. The real utility of the Super Bowl ad was in producing a unanimity of repulsion toward a possible future which makes the present peachy by comparison. We were all allowed to smirk at Metaverse: “Oh, we know better—to live like that would to be a slave.”
Facebook is not funding the future, it is funding its own overreach: it spends marketing money on a dystopia that will never arrive, normalizing the dystopia which already has arrived, prancing out a Worse World to distract from a Bad One. It is difficult to explain why the digital avatars of the Metaverse are without legs, except as a hyperbolic signifier of the actual immobility of the “online person,” presented horribly, so that we can imagine it as a future crippled humanity, rather than a visual commentary on the already crippled humanity that lives, moves and has its being on that hospital bed we call “the internet.”
In fact, the world is not progressing—it has been built. Like the American road system, an infrastructure has been put in place which can be destroyed or fiddled with, but which is no longer genuinely open to a future beyond itself; beyond the constant maintenance of the traffic it creates. We are at rest, and the rest is bad. The solutions that remain to “social media” are ascetic, not technological. The innovation of the Metaverse is being noisily sounded to drown out an increasingly persistent call of the Spirit, not to something bigger, better, or slicker—but to the desert.