(Guillermo Gutierrez Carrascal/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
The metaverse is going to change everything. And it’s already here. But what the hell is it?
In 2021, it seemed that every major technology executive took a stance on the metaverse, a new concept for the internet. Mark Zuckerberg went so far as to change his company’s name from “Facebook” to “Meta” and massively reorient its research spending towards a 3D virtual reality future. And yet, the concept of the metaverse remained notoriously inchoate.
Matthew Ball’s new book, The Metaverse: And How it Will Revolutionize Everything, is an admirably clear and thorough introduction to what the metaverse is, what technologies will build it, and why we are heading there. What it isn’t, especially, is persuasive. If you came in sceptical that the metaverse is the future, you’ll find little to change your mind. Ball’s description of the kinds of thing you will do in the metaverse sounds very similar to what you would expect a virtual reality booster to say: entertainment! games! interactive education! socialising!
What this fails to convey is what the future will feel like. The engineers and entrepreneurs building the metaverse are understandably excited. They know we are on the cusp of something profound. But by putting the focus on the technology and on the obvious, but trivial, use-cases, they sell themselves short.
You can’t derive the meaning of the internet by explaining how “the TCP/IP protocol” works. Similarly, while hardware challenges will greatly shape the metaverse, understanding them better does not convey how it will reshape society.
For that, we can turn to science fiction. Early in Ball’s book, he provides a gloss on Neil Stephenson’s vision of the metaverse in his 1992 classic, Snow Crash: “A persistent virtual world that reached, interacted with, and affected nearly every part of human existence… a place for labor and leisure, for self-actualisation as well as physical exhaustion, for art alongside commerce.”
If you just encountered this definition in the wild, out of context, you would be forgiven for thinking that it was just talking about the internet. Because the metaverse is actually just the next stage of the internet we have today, made possible by some important breakthroughs. In simple terms, it’s an internet you can make a life in.
To understand what this means, think about the evolution of the internet so far, helpfully summed up in the transition from the world wide web (Web 1) to the social internet (Web 2) to the metaverse (Web 3). To get on the world wide web, you used a modem to dial up on a computer with a hefty cathode-ray-tube monitor (mine was in our family’s humid basement). You conversed and played games with people whose “real” identities were a mystery, and whose virtual identities were often ephemeral, tied to specific message boards or multiplayer games. Everything was free because information on the internet wanted to be: pictures, music, video clips, pirated movies, all shared with peer-to-peer networks like Napster or BitTorrent.
The world wide web, in other words, was a series of exciting destinations, which you surfed, one site after another, by memory, hyperlink, or bookmark. The internet was a place — a place to goof off, explore new ideas, chat with friends, and otherwise escape the monotony of everyday life. And when you were done, you left. You “went offline”, which was the default condition because being “online” meant sitting on the family computer in the basement hogging the phone line.
At least, that was true for most of us. But from the beginning, there were those who found that they could be themselves online, that their online life was more real and true than the one they had offline. Intellectually curious teens in rural communities, would-be artists working dead-end jobs, gay kids in the Deep South — all of them preferred the “social virtual reality” of multiplayer roleplaying games, chatrooms, and internet communities to what awaited them in “the real world”. They weren’t outliers or nerds. They were pioneers.
Fast forward to Web 2. You logged on from a computer, as likely now to be a laptop with wifi as a desktop, and then from your smartphone. By this point, the internet went everywhere you did. And the internet mattered, because it wasn’t a destination you visited like a tourist. The internet became something you were on. Your life was somehow entangled across a small number of platforms that were increasingly personalised, and where you shared your real identity because you wanted to connect with real people.
The important thing social media did was create a “killer app” for the internet, for everyone. Not everybody played video games or had niche hobbies or craved the convenience of online shopping. But everyone cared about their friends and family and experienced Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO) on their social scene.
So whereas in Web 1 users had their offline and online worlds, in the Web 2 era, the two dimensions increasingly merged. Instagram might be fake, but the plastic surgery women get to improve their pictures is very real.
But even as the internet today shapes and channels how we socialise, communicate, learn, work, and entertain ourselves, there’s still, for most of us, something unreal about the goods it can deliver. The internet is where we spend much of our time, but with a logic and a rhythm determined by which platform we are on. We code-switch depending on whether we’re using Twitter or LinkedIn or a video game or email. For anything that really matters, where power or property is concerned, the internet still seems like a dream.
And now, we’re on the cusp of Web 3. The metaverse is just our name for the final evolution of the internet, where the borders between “the real world” and the digital dissolve. The real world will still be out there, but now it will have to compete with other appealing realities. And it’s not clear that those lacking “reality privilege” — who wake up not to a spacious, light-filled apartment but to trailer homes or cramped high-rises — will prefer “meatspace” anymore. In fact, if you know where to look, it’s already clear that they don’t.
As I’ve been attempting to chronicle in an essay series at The New Atlantis entitled “Reality: A Post-Mortem”, the many worlds of the metaverse are not first and foremost alluring VR environments, but bespoke alternate realities made possible by a sheer abundance of information, stories, and people willing to play along. An internet is coming where every community will have the tools to build compelling narrative worlds of their own, big enough to live inside.
The ability to dwell in a virtual world isn’t the product of sophisticated computer renderings but of the human mind. Whether you’re absorbed with massive multiplayer games like Minecraft or Fortnite or prefer discourse-themed video games like Twitter or The New York Times, there will be a compelling reality for you. Want to live in a world where Donald Trump is secretly plotting with the military to arrest a ring of Democrat pedophile lizard people? You can go there today. Believe wokeism is destroying common sense and liberal institutions? Welcome to the Intellectual Dark Web! Fantasising about what how freakin’ awesome it would have been if Ruth Bader Ginsburg had had superpowers? She-Hulk is streaming now on Disney+.
But while the proliferation of alternate realities is plain to see, in what sense is this a metaverse, characterised by the clashing and commingling of these realities? On the one hand, both online and off, our public life is increasingly defined by where and when alternative realities meet. On January 6, you had a mix of MAGA protestors, Alt-Right trolls, and die-hard QAnon believers live-streaming on Twitch as they stormed the Capitol. These streams were then turned into raw data for liberal online volunteer groups with names like “Deep State Dogs” to trawl through and identify insurrectionists to the FBI.
But the existing methods will pale in comparison to what emerges when payment rails, world-building, crypto-property, and other metaversal infrastructure are up-and-running, as Ball shows. For whatever reality appeals to you most, you will have the tools to invest your time and money, build a community and institutions, produce or purchase valuable property, and otherwise live a life that seems meaningful to you. Whether or not this life is in 3D virtual reality, the meaning and the value of it will be irreducibly entangled with the metaverse.
And that’s why Ball’s book is so important. Beneath the hype and the gizmos lies a revolution in human consciousness. “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” — in the metaverse.
Jon Askonas is assistant professor of politics at the Catholic University of America and a non-resident senior fellow at the Lincoln Network.
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SubscribeA clever riposte, but also, I think, wrong in its central premise: that the creative class have underperformed relative to how another class might have done. I yield to few in my admiration for the postwar settlement; I’m not sure there’s been a happier fate in all of human history that to live through the first thirty years after World War II in democratic Western Europe. But surely we need to remember that this situation was a product of a particular era with particular demographic and social determinants. A steadily increasing population with relatively few dependents created the condition for growing prosperity; and the conditions for growth were also produced by the fact that people in 1945 had hardly any consumer goods, even those which discharged what most of us nowadays think of as fairly essential household functions, e.g., washing machines, refrigerators, telephones. The problem in recent decades is surely that most of have most of what we need; that’s the main reason economies in developed countries have stagnated. Witness the desperate efforts to keep us consuming – i.e., companies selling us ever more advanced models of mobile phones every two years, when we all lived quite cheerfully without any mobile phones at all a quarter of a century ago. What was the last invention that really implemented a dramatic improvement to our quality of life?
Secular stagnation is the norm for highly developed countries. Whether it’s the creative classes or others who achieve it, we need to find ways of living with low-growth economies. Japan’s done so with the minimum of social disruption during the last thirty years, so maybe that’s where we should start learning. In turn, the rest of the world will end up having to learn from us.
Did Japan really dodge a bullet through xenophobia? I don’t think so. Their population demographics are now dangerously skewed toward the elderly. It now has the world’s oldest population. Another 20 years of steady state and they are in deep, deep trouble.Young people are essential to any country. If you cannot create them organically then you have to acquire them. As we in the UK did through immigration. Without the young any country will eventually run out of road. Japan is way out front of those countries set to find out just what that means.
It is a good point…if robots don’t come galloping to the rescue there could be a pretty rushed, and therefore possibly chaotic, charge to get in young people from elsewhere, and that would take some managing….
But immigration is only a temporary answer to this.
and what about when the immigrants get old?
Very well said. And the last thing the non metropolitan areas need is to be more metropolitan, with all their endless BS and stabbings etc.
sham meritocracy = low productivity.
Peter, the simple answer is that peak science and technology happened in the mid twentieth century. As scientific progress has slowed and big tech has used “intellectual property rights” to take control of the little progress that persists, it has become harder to be creative and innovative.
I genuinely don’t understand this worship or condemnation of either the metropolitan, middle class or working class. People are people. I have met people from metropolitan areas who I thought were very good, productive members of society and I have met people from there who were absolutely vile. The same goes for people from rural areas, middle class or working class. The same goes for culture, I have met good/vile people who have conservative cultural views as well as those who had liberal views. And also how do you define them? I have lived in both Rutland and London. Does someone from Rutland who goes and lives in London suddenly become ‘metropolitan’? Does someone from London who decides to live in outside become working class? I have never thought class or culture to be good predictor of a person’s character.
When have we ever had a creative Liberal or Socialist?
Those who can’t *do*, waffle on and on and on about *doing*.
The fashionable whiney, dimpling about how much of a waste of time meetings are doesn’t happen when you’re putting a new roof on a building or replacing the central heating…you have the meetings walking from the door to where the work’s happening…..
You don’t have a weekend away at events camp to sharpen the company focus when the company business is making stuff…the focus is sharpened a hundred times a week at all levels.
There is one very easy way to level up…just go to Sunderland and see the Nissan plant (which Nissan say is the best outside Japan and right up with the best in japan) , see the cluster of companies around it (that also sell to Mercedes, Audi etc) and find a report on how Margaret Thatcher’s government got them to come, become established and go on to become a globally improtant car manufacturer in a country where car manufacturing had fallen off a cliff just a decade earlier.
Then rinse and repeat in Nth Tyneside, Teesside, Yorkshire, Lancashire, Manchester and the Midlands……. manufacturing these days is digital, computerised, AI , robotic intensive…and demands high levels of creativity at all levels…. Maidstone and Andover if you like…
Going
on the assumption that freedom and risk-taking are vital to creativity, an
already risk-averse culture, coupled with the knowledge that nobody is more than
one wrong thought, tweet or misstep away from losing their livelihood, might have something to
do with the lack of creativity.
The creative classes have been up themselves for decades, ever since singers decided to call themselves recording artists.
Very well stated, but I think that you need look no further than the central banking structure that has been imposed on the reserve currency of the globe. Capital is now tightly held and innovations that require its use (most all) are only sanctioned for development when the fruits of said innovation can be identified and gleaned in advance of production. It is essentially the fully developed model of Mayer Amschel Rothschild.
“So why are the results so disappointing? Whether in economics, politics,
the arts or the sciences, this is an age of stagnation in which the
exceptions (because there always are some) prove the rule. And, make no
mistake, the creative class ” broadly defined ” is the ruling class. The
failures in our nation, and of the western world general, are their
failures.“
I think that’s too broadly defined to be useful. If the “creative class” are the ruling class, then their ruling class is surely the financial class.
“I’m lamenting the fact that the knowledge economy of the 21st century has done so little with the big advantage of a wider talent pool. The same could be said about the massive expansion of higher education ” not to mention the vast store of knowledge made available through the internet.“
Perhaps it’s intrinsic to the new technologies themselves, and their ownership.
“The creatives have dazzling global cities in which to work, live and
play. Unlike previous eras, they can continually interact with one
another wherever in the world they go. And they’ve been unshackled from
the stifling social conventions of the past ” free to be who they want
to be. And what’s more they’re constantly celebrated for it, their
cultural status elevated as that of the working class has fallen.”
So what’s wrong with spreading those benefits to all? That was the thrust of the Times article. Social democracy is not incompatible with social liberalism – in fact they tend to go together. And the real problem is that talented/educated people simply leave socially conservative towns – so how are you going to stop this?
Yes, when did everyone get so pathetic