Welcome to the metaverse (JOHANNES EISELE/AFP via Getty Images)
In 1950, sociologist David Riesman declared that we were The Lonely Crowd. In 2000, political scientist Robert D. Putnam told us we were Bowling Alone. If the metaverse promises us one thing, it’s that we will not be lonely.
Meta (formerly Facebook) and Microsoft (having recently purchased online gaming giant Activision) are enthusiastically talking up the “metaverse” — a world of virtual reality-enhanced social interactions that will be more real than reality. It will capture the nuances of offline interaction in massively fulfilling virtual experiences and then monetise them. With JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs declaring it a trillion-dollar market, the metaverse, if it succeeds, will be a constant presence in our lives.
If this is, as some say, a chilling vision of the future, it’s not for the Huxleyesque reasons usually given. If the worry is that people will be drawn away from real life into an online world provided by high-tech devices, that horse has already bolted. Meta’s talk of an “immersive” metaverse belies the fact that we are already well and deeply immersed in online life.
“Self-expression” and “meaning” are already so heavily intertwined with online activity that adding a headset isn’t going to make a difference, even if the prospect of thousands of loud, angry Twitter users being more immersed is terrifying.
While the metaverse will further the internet’s shift away from text and photos toward VR and video, it is not a revolution, or at least not the one Meta portrays. In the metaverse, people will do things together, share their experiences, and fight with each other, just as they currently do.
The new parts of the metaverse are commercial. Compared with online life today, there will be more things to buy and more money to be made. Personalised avatars, virtual pets, online concerts and shows, digital real estate, and fashion made of pixels instead of fabric: Meta, Microsoft, Verizon, and other giants all hope to serve as brokers for all these, in much the same way Amazon is the middleman and guarantor for its Marketplace transactions. If America were not still so squeamish about sex, one could add teledildonics to the list.
For those inclined to doubt that people will pay for a pair of metaverse trainers, recall that virtual goods in games like World of Warcraft and Pokemon are sold and traded for significant amounts of real-world cash. In the wildly popular Roblox online world, pre-teens eagerly programme and share games, virtual clothes, and virtual houses to earn an imaginary currency, Robux, with a real-world exchange rate set by the Roblox parent company.
Some gamers have invested thousands to purchase spaceships for the online game Star Citizen, even though the game has yet to be released — the virtual spaceships are themselves funding development of the game. And we now have “Decentraland”, a 3D virtual world in which you can own “land” and “objects” in the same way one can offline, thanks to the blockchain technology of NFTs, which immutably declares who owns what.
So far, virtual goods in games have been confined to their online universes — you could spend $7,000 on a World of Warcraft elf, but you couldn’t take it out of the game. NFTs remove that limitation, allowing one to proudly declare ownership of a virtual hat across the entire metaverse. This Brave New World may not be more immersive than the current internet, but it will be more acquisitive, more possessive, and more status-conscious.
Viral competition has already proven to be a moneymaker: at one point, Facebook drew 30% of its revenue from Zynga’s Farmville and its clones, games that exploited social competition to encourage users to pay for virtual crops. Roblox and Decentraland are blueprints for how Meta and Microsoft hope to turn the whole world into Farmville. Just as the internet monetised personal information to better target advertising, the metaverse will monetise online interaction by having your friends do the advertising to you. Who wants to be the last on their virtual block to have a virtual mansion?
The result will be the monetisation of identity, something already visible in the burgeoning industries of paying for instruction on how to be patriotic, how to be anti-racist, how to be Christian, how to be eco-conscious. The metaverse seeks to make money off of less-loaded aspects of identity by fostering intra-group solidarity through purchases. As sociologist Erving Goffman wrote, “To be a given kind of person, then, is not merely to possess the required attributes, but also to sustain the standards of conduct and appearance that one’s social grouping attaches thereto.”
In the metaverse, everyone can potentially be a seller and advertiser in addition to a buyer, yet the power will chiefly lie with the companies. They will exert significant influence over group standards of conduct and will have a greater ability to steer those standards in profitable directions. (The metaverse will also offer malicious actors far greater ability to pervert those standards, but that is a whole different can of worms.) In the run-up to the 2020 election, Meta (then Facebook) restricted all its users from forwarding private messages to more than five people.
The goal, evidently, was to stop “harmful” content, probably political, from exploding across tight in-groups within Facebook’s user population. Such blanket restrictions are indeed effective by their very nature, but imagine what they would mean in the metaverse: private online groupings could be prohibited by their hosting platform (Meta or Microsoft, say) from sharing particular content, encouraged to share more innocuous content, or simply barred from interacting in certain ways.
Yet group affiliations are strong, and aggrieved groups have a way of sticking together against the powers that be. Online life, above all, offers one the chance to pick their tribe, their gang, their comrades. Offline we are limited geographically in our affiliations, but online, you can scour the world for your crowd. The explosion of conspiracy theories, extremism, and a general distrust of any elite opinion is not a consequence of individual bad actors online, but the simple ability, brought to us by the internet, to find people who share and reinforce our opinion, no matter what that opinion may be. The metaverse will supercharge these trends. Where people formerly congregated in Facebook groups, Reddit groups, or blog chats, they will now find cozy virtual spaces in which they can be welcomed.
Offline life will not be more “real” than the metaverse, merely less affirming. There will be even less need to congregate with those who disagree with you in the slightest if, by going online, one can not only exchange words with identically-minded individuals, but can gain all the reassuring benefits of human interaction with them.
There’s a cost to pay as well. The price of group homogeneity in any regard (ideological, cultural, demographic) is a far greater rejection of deviation. Urbanisation and immigration may have caused melting-pot tendencies in the last century, but the metaverse offers previously unthinkable possibilities for undoing the heterogeneity of modern life, separating us out into monocultural strata in which every hobbyist subculture, every sub-Marxist movement, and every sexual fetish can easily find mutual affirmation. Individuality will dissolve into the unified mindset of one’s chosen monocultures. Once having joined a stratum, members will naturally play down their differences in favour of their commonalities, to the point that they forget those differences.
The result will not be a melting-pot but a disconnected patchwork. Conformity will no longer be a meaningful concept because we will be able to conform to anything. You can pick whatever social norms you’d like to follow, but having chosen them you will follow them to the utmost. No group will feel big enough to be confident of its dominance; each group will police its boundaries rigidly, forming a kaleidoscope of what anthropologist Mary Douglas defined as latent groups. Each will feel threatened by some number of others, just as the Left and the Right are both equally convinced today that the other is winning.
In the metaverse, we will not be alone. But some of us will wish we could be.
David Auerbach is an American author and former Microsoft and Google software engineer.
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Subscribe“The reaction of the French government — threatening to switch off the 90% of Jersey electricity which comes by cable from Normandy — was vastly over the top.”
If someone threatens a small Crown Dependency with that, and with cutting off food and medicine via-blockade, then that is serious. I’m fed up of all the “calm sensible people” (TM) waiving that away. Threatening to cut off electricity deserves all the breathless hype the papers can muster. Jersey did NOT deserve that threat.
We shall have to liberate them , like the Falklands-perhaps a flotilla of boats from England like Dunquirk?
We have yet to avenge the capture of H.M.S. Blazer in 1993.
I gather her Commander was exonerated at his Court Martial.
Rumour has it he had asked for permission to ‘open fire’ but was all too predictably denied by the supine incumbent of No 10.
Agreed. Surely the actions of a civilised, normal country would be to invoke the legal dispute procedures that are set out. Instead the French take direct action. In what way is France’s action any different from Putin’s Russia – in Putin’s case threatening to cut off energy supplies to Ukraine and mounting a blockade?
Thanks for this analysis of the fishing dispute in Jersey, I only wish our broadcast media offered such clarity.
Back in 1993 under perhaps the feeblest PM since records began there was a very similar humiliating incident that received very little coverage at the time.
A confrontation with French fishermen led to the capture of our Patrol Boat,
H.M.S. Blazer.*. Her crew were confined below decks, she was towed into Cherbourg harbour in triumph and her White Ensign ceremonially burnt!
The intervention of the French Navy finally secured her release.
How Nelson,Hawke,Rodney and others too numerous to mention must have “rolled in their graves”!
Let us hope History is not about to repeat itself.
(* the eponymous Jacket, beloved of Cricket Clubs etc, takes its name from a previous H.M.S. Blazer)
Tell the Frog eating chancers that the same should apply to the waters of Saint Pierre and Miquelon!
An excellent idea, thank you.
Cheese eating surrender monkeys?Don’t we love to hate foreigners?
Particularly the Scotch!
Well mainly Nicola Braun Sturgeon ..&her Stasi acolytes
Scotch. That’s a drink. Single malts are the best!!!
Actually a lot of them live in London and are key politicians , civil servants , secret service etc etc. I did suggest that SNP take over London ( a sort of Khan-Sturgeon principality like Luxembourg)-and join their fellow country-men and leave Scotland alone.
“The noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees, is the high road that leads him to England !*
(* Dr Samuel. Johnson , no relation)
It is a term coined by Homer Simpson, but it did catch on a bit over here despite us having plenty of our own derogatory term for our historic enemy . The antipathy between England and France goes back over a millennium
Yes though we also keep our anti-Dutch expressions, as far as I know both countries are now friendly. Hitchens also seemed to enjoy the latest installment of that long running drama England versus France. However they are allowed to get away continually with bad behaviour. They allowed their fishermen to behave in a threatening way & did not send their navy. That is reserved for escorting people who prefer our benefits to theirs across the channel.
BoJo needs to tread water carefully, Les Malouines was the original name of the Falklands after their discovery by St Malo seafarers and having been mistaken for English tourists in a St Malo bar many years ago during the battle for the Malvinas the name Thatcher and L’Exocet were muttered loudly for us to hear to the embarrassment of the Patron .
There is a growing tension in France against Macron over extreme acts by Islamic groups including the beheading of a teacher and the burning of another Catholic Church…France is one of the oldest Catholic Churches in Christendom, and there are many retired military who are watching Macron with great anxiety to see if he has the bottle for the battle…I wouldn’t risk a war over a few whelks !
Besides and possibly of greater import, Britain has dispatched an Aircraft carrier to the South China sea and needs to act carefully and consistently so that the CCP cannot find excuses for their oft repeated designs on Taiwan
“Britain has dispatched an Aircraft carrier to the South China sea “
Utter cobblers. Our new toy is going for its first trip. It is going to many places on the way and when it gets to the far east it will spend a short while exercising with old friends – ever heard of the Five Powers Defence Agreement? then it will turn round and come home again.
I wouldn’t want to count on New Zealand any longer. PM Jacinda Ardern and her cabinet seem to be fans of the CCP.
I stand with the French over the Islamic beheading though. Islam is in the Jihadi holy war phase with the whole non Islamic world and especially the West. The global Umma has been called for and funded by the House of Saud’s vast oil wealth.
I attended school in St Malo a few years before the Falkland Islands dust up but even then was very careful to identify as an American rather than a Brit. I was in Buenos Aires about 6 months after the dust up and again made sure that I was identified as American.
Wheras the 3 (?) million French people who live in Britain will have nothing to fear.A few years ago a young French woman came to Britain to visit a relative-unfortunately she was murdered by a lorry driver. To catch him the police stopped every lorry ( so they can be efficient when they try) and apprehended him. Contrast to muder of a school-girl in France , whose death didn’t interest their police -the case was later solved by an American policeman on holiday there.
I think Jersey should be as nice to the French as the French have been to the UK in the past.
What’s the fishing equivalent of burning live lambs in their transports?
Burning live lambs? Could you please expand I must have missed that one.
I’m not sure how many instances there were but at one point French farmers set fire to transports carrying lambs (might have been adult sheep).
Sadly you are correct!
Apparently in 1990, 219 lambs were burnt alive when angry French farmers highjacked a British lorry and set fire to it.
Perhaps we shouldn’t have bothered to save them from Adolph &Co?
Well we have been at war with each other for the best part of thousand years
My favourite meat, roast lamb.
And poured away Spanish wine on the French border-the French know how to have a good argument & who thought we would be at war with them so soon?
Burning lambs reminds me rather of
Oradour-sur- Glane.
It was an awful thing to do & I didn’t mean to trivilize it.
No you didn’t!
I was just musing on the barbarity of that species of African Ape, now known as Human beings. ,
I’m feeling rather hysterical as its odd to live through history & I rather suspect we are in for a big war somewhere-too similar to the 1930’s.They seem to want to use Ukraine as the excuse, then possibly start war with Russia?
“But, surprise, surprise, it was agreed on 24 December …”
Subtle use of the passive voice there, John. Who was pushing for this in the negotiations? My money is on the Commission, and more fool the French for agreeing.
Cod War I, II, and III need to be taught in history books as they were some of the world’s most earth shaking Wars. They re-drew all the world’s maps. They changed the world for ever. USA, and UK used this issue to finally fix maritime law for the new world. It was infact cod being the issue, but it was not really about cod at all, it was carving up the world’s oceans into finally a just system using cod as the cover..
They were not actually about cod, they were about establishing the 200 mile Zone.
“An exclusive economic zone extends from the baseline to a maximum of 200 nautical miles (370.4 km; 230.2 mi), thus it includes the contiguous zone.[4] A coastal nation has control of all economic resources within its exclusive economic zone, including fishing, mining, oil exploration, and any pollution of those resources. However, it cannot prohibit passage or loitering above, on, or under the surface of the sea that is in compliance with the laws and regulations adopted by the coastal State in accordance with the provisions of the UN Convention, within that portion of its exclusive economic zone beyond its territorial sea. Before the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea of 1982, coastal nations arbitrarily extended their territorial waters in an effort to control activities which are now regulated by the exclusive economic zone, such as offshore oil exploration or fishing rights (see Cod Wars). Indeed, the exclusive economic zone is still popularly, though erroneously, called a coastal nation’s territorial waters.”
Well stop paying it! I stopped over 20 years ago. Actually I never started, one way and another, even though there was a time when I liked and respected the BBC.
Boats under 12 metres don’t need “satellite gear” they can fit an ordinary AIS Class B transponder for a few hundred euros. It’s not difficult and the prices have come down since I did it on my (sailing) boat over a decade ago.
Anyway, judging from the tracking sites during the “lunch party” to St Helier, they’ve all got AIS anyway.
AIS is much more helpful than radar as it gives you more info. about the target vessel.