It frankly sounds like the stuff of nightmares, and a wet dream for the elites who would like nothing more than a population pinned down and plugged into a virtual landscape. A new world were people’s troublesome personal agency can be entirely nullified by having it play out in a land of make believe which bends to their wims and keeps them placated – slaves to their own superficial desires while their bodies grow flabbly and weak.
Forget the ‘climate catastrophe’ – its this reality waiting in the wings that scares me a great deal more.
Agreed. The thing I worry about most is the total and complete manipulation of information. Reality will become extinct. Heck, we are almost there even without Web 3.
Reality snd truth in general are now commodities and owned as such. Hence there is your truth and my truth and his truth. And my reality and yours etc.. Then there is corporate truth, political truth and MSM truth. Amd whatever yer havin’ yerself!
So the distortion is already here and has been for some time.
I think metaverse is a great invention, that will bring a lot of opportunities. However, it seems that some people in the comment section are not as fond of it. You can read an article on how to benefit from metaverse (especially useful if you are a business owner).
Richard Parker
1 year ago
Reminds me of the second Red Dwarf book, “Better Than Life”, whose eponymous “total immersion video game” spawned legions of “game heads”, submerging themselves in an alternative existence with no problems or stressors. Of course, they neglected their hygiene, neglected to eat, frequently died horribly… but they were happy.
Didn’t think I’d live to see anything remotely like Grant-Naylor’s imaginings becoming reality but now I’m starting to wonder. The rise of the hikikomori in Japan should have been a warning already, I suppose. Think I’ll go out for a walk…
I’m also reminded strongly of E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops, looking more incredibly prescient with every passing year, yet written in 1909!
Andrew Horsman
1 year ago
What better, kinder, way to deal with the “problem of over-population” could there be than to persuade the masses to give up on “unsafe” real life, with all of its potential for messy, uncontrolled procreation, and to “live” in a virtual world, in a virtual “community”, with virtual boy/girl/whateverfriends, in which there is no unchosen obligation to be who you actually are?
This is demonic. Perhaps some people will be gulled into it for some time, but the human spirit is way too strong for it to take over permanently. And, after all, someone’s still got to clean the toilets. The sooner the elites pushing this stuff realise that they, nor anyone, can control everything the better it will be for everyone.
Im glad you used the word “demonic”. As a scientist /tech guy Im reluctant to admit this, but over the last two decades ive been increasingly coming to the view there may be spiritual influence on the digital realm. Hence mention of prayer in my original comment. There’s lore going back a thousand years and more that certain spirtual entities especially hate matter, suggesting they’d be happier interacting digitally. Unherd writer Paul Kingsworth has wrote about this years back.
That said, due to the vicotory gained on a Roman cross 2,000 years back, if there are any malign eneties at work in digital, there’s almost certainly benevolence too. Hence each one of us can help with prayer. I’d dissent a bit from your first para in that I consider its partly literally true. If one takes a few days to review worldwide anti Loneliness intiatives this last 50 years, one would find that litterally millions of people have tried to help. Much work has been non accademic, but there have been tens of thousands of studies, hundreds of systematic reviews, and even several umbrealla “review of systematic reviews”. All finding that despite all that effort, theres no good cost effective & repeatable real world way to intervene against loneliness. (Though some lonely people do very much benefit on an individual level.) And if anything, the problem of Loneliness is getting worse, with new and arguably more intense forms becoming a common experience (the incel phenomena.) I’m not saying theres proven digital solutions either,and it would be madness to rely on digital solutions alone. But digital is arguably looking more promising. To bring this back to the sprititual, the main reason *some* males get years of deep contemenent from relationships with sexdolls and even fully digital AI girlfriends is maybe projection of their own anima. But there may be some connection with the divine femine too. (Focussing on men as annoyingly Ive seen much less evidence that lonely women benefit as much from this sort of digital solution.)
Maybe the hatred of the material is associated with those malignant entities’ obsession with fire? After all, when things are burnt they cease to possess their own identities; there is a solidarity and a oneness in their ashes. The inferno is all consuming and it knows no rich, no poor, no black, no white, no living, no dead. In that sense, it unites.
What I find fascinating is that the people most committed, knowingly or not, to a materialist worldview seem not to want to live in a material world at all. They seem quite happy to disappear into a gnostic metaverse. Mary Harrington has written about this on these pages with far more acuity than I could ever hope to achieve.
My sense is that loneliness and alienation are not aberrations that a well executed intervention (pharmaceutical, social, or otherwise) could ever hope to fix. Rather they are the inevitable byproduct of industrial societies that believe in progress of one form or another, in which people are valued not for who they are but what they can produce, or at least what image they can project.
As to the men who find satisfaction and emotional sustenance in AI “girlfriends” – good luck to them, I am not in a place judge. But has their ability to relate to other people has been so damaged by the toxic dehumanised environment in which they have grown up, and in which they are now living their biologically adult lives, that they can’t position themselves in relation to their peers. That is, that they haven’t actually left psychological childhood at all and living with lines so blurred they can’t make them out anymore? Is this the way in which the metaverse “wants” to drag us, so that we never actually leave the childish things behind and grow up to be fully functioning, sovereign, and independent men and women – with all of our glorious flaws, imperfections, and capacity to do new things?
Thanks so much for the excellent reply. I’ll respond in turn to your 4 paras. #1 Maybe. I dont know much esoteric lore regarding malign entities. I know a bit more about the light side, and generally fire is regarded as the top of the 4 lower elements (i.e. above air, earth & water, though below spirit.) This is why gold is such a prominent colour in royal ceremonies and the like as it symbolises fire and the heavens. If you’re suggesting there may be an ancient & malign spirit behind Woke, I’d agree that’s possible, one of my teachers (Scott Mannion on his Youtube) certainly thinks so. As with near everything on this earth though, the good and bad are mixed together, identity politics are surely in part divinely inspired too. “No Greek nor Jew, no male nor female, no slave nor free” and dozens of other passages…
#2 Yes I also love MH. Just the sort of insight & eloquence the times call for.
#3 Agreed, though Loneliness was with us right from the start. The very first specific -ve mentioned in the Holy Bible. Possibly intended to motivate us to fill that God shaped hole by reaching out to Him. Though not something most could do easily, hence the gift of that love (Eros) most similar to divine love. (Gen 2:18) But yes, the problem has intensified for the reasons you say.
#4 I’m not sure, but sadly cant disagree. Maybe a consequence of Meta is people will be less able to progress as the Apostle advised, and (in as much as 1 Cor 3:13 applies to the earthly realm) it will become less easy for “fire to try every man’s work”. Definitely interesting times we live in..
R Wright
1 year ago
I still am not quite sure what the difference is between this imagined immersive future and what has already been available to us for decades. People have built entire separate lives on platforms like VRChat, Second Life, IMVU and Habbo Hotel, heck even basic sites like old style internet forums and 4chan which have their own cultural mores and quasi-languages. To me it just sounds like marketing hype. Human beings have been creating their own fake worlds and inhabiting them using the internet for three decades.
those are as different to the Metaverse as Tom Hank’s basketball ‘Wilson’ was to a real human friend.
1970’s cheap weed and a couple hits of LSD
This stuff coming will destroy who ever joins it.
Jon Walmsley
1 year ago
‘A revolution in human consciousness’? I think someone’s consciousness has taken a downwards turn, not an upwards one if their assessment of where Web 3, as they call it, is going to lead us. There will undoubtedly be good and bad mixed in, but I have little confidence that the metaverse as a concept is going to better human life in general when it – like most new-fangled technological innovations – fails to address the root psychological and spiritual deficits most of us continue to suffer from.
Jason Highley
1 year ago
A world where oligarchs who already own everything in real life get to control the scarcity of fake stuff that they drip to the masses to exploit and commoditize every last ounce of living out of them?
No thanks. I’ll take nature made in God’s image over nature made in man’s image any day.
Adam Bartlett
1 year ago
Great article on a fascinating subject. Though challenging to know what to think unless you have hundreds of hours to research. Many of the engineers who have put tens of thousands of hours into this are extremely optimistic. They expect Web 3 to be benefit everyone, but if anything the common people more than the elite. They see tech like blockchain & tokenisation as being at the heart of web 3 and as being designed from basic principles to resist centralised control. So in that view web 3 gives folk more economic agency and options, in addition to the cultural / aesthetic & choice elements discussed in the article. Certainly I think it will be very life enhancing for some.
I’m worried there will be a risk of economic benefits being excessively captured by the tech savvy. And despite the engineers vision, possibly by private sector elites, at the expense of government & hence public power. Even more so I’m concerned web 3 might accentuate anti real world trends, as detailed in the excellent recent unheard Mary Gaitskell article “When did physical approach become scary?”. Still, may turn out to be a big net benefit for the world. I’ll be praying that turns out to be the case!
Martin Johnson
1 year ago
So, Web3 = The Matrix, even down to the monsters who run it behind the curtain.
Warren Trees
1 year ago
There is a great example of the money motive here in this very article. When you click on one of the links, it takes you to an article published by the Wall Street Journal, which only gives you a peek at the first paragraph before requiring one to subscribe before being able to read the entire article. I never do so, by the way. If zapping me with ads is not enough revenue generation for the site, then I’m not interested.
Liam O'Mahony
1 year ago
I’m kinda addicted to Unherd: does that mean thet got me too?
Last edited 1 year ago by Liam O'Mahony
Michael Coleman
1 year ago
I’m left wondering if Askonis has tried a recent VR headset like Oculus Quest 2 or similar? You can call the fully immersive experience of VR “Web 3.0” as if it were just another increment in the evolution of the internet but this significantly downplays the significance of the transition. The key difference is that with sufficiently powered VR most normal people lose awareness of their place/status in the “real world” .
The currently technology allows for this in a limited way – the technology is a critical piece of the experience so Ball’s need to explain the tech is essential (Askonis’ tcp/ip analogy fails massively).
Lastly, Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One (book first then movie) are must read/sees for where we possibly are headed.
Oliver Gover
1 year ago
Wasn’t there a film about this with that guy from Bill and Ted?
Brian Villanueva
1 year ago
What I notice is how the 30 year transition from Web0 (real life) to Web1 (text) to Web2 (video & pictures) has resulting in a gradual increase in loneliness, anxiety, depression, addiction, and a decline in meaningful human contact, while enriching the educated, technophilic, managerial class.
This makes me suspect what will happen as we transition to Web3 (immersive virtual reality) as well: the baby of a ménage-a-trois between Gattaca, Brave New World, and the Matrix.
Last edited 1 year ago by Brian Villanueva
frigus amarum
1 year ago
Old hat; article, behind the times.
ron kean
1 year ago
In Jerusalem in Israel there’s a touristy place that offers those masks where the screen is 4 inches away from your face. Put on the mask and it’s like walking around inside the Temple that existed 2,000 years ago. You can look in one direction and see the Levites singing. The Priests were with animals. The doors were huge. You can go to the top of the walls for a birds eye view. Very immersive.
polidori redux
1 year ago
“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.”
I call it out as bullsh!t. You are not surfing the web, you are not inhabiting an alternative reality in the metaverse -.You are sitting in you mother’s spare room typing.
It frankly sounds like the stuff of nightmares, and a wet dream for the elites who would like nothing more than a population pinned down and plugged into a virtual landscape. A new world were people’s troublesome personal agency can be entirely nullified by having it play out in a land of make believe which bends to their wims and keeps them placated – slaves to their own superficial desires while their bodies grow flabbly and weak.
Forget the ‘climate catastrophe’ – its this reality waiting in the wings that scares me a great deal more.
Agreed. The thing I worry about most is the total and complete manipulation of information. Reality will become extinct. Heck, we are almost there even without Web 3.
Reality snd truth in general are now commodities and owned as such. Hence there is your truth and my truth and his truth. And my reality and yours etc.. Then there is corporate truth, political truth and MSM truth. Amd whatever yer havin’ yerself!
So the distortion is already here and has been for some time.
I think metaverse is a great invention, that will bring a lot of opportunities. However, it seems that some people in the comment section are not as fond of it. You can read an article on how to benefit from metaverse (especially useful if you are a business owner).
Reminds me of the second Red Dwarf book, “Better Than Life”, whose eponymous “total immersion video game” spawned legions of “game heads”, submerging themselves in an alternative existence with no problems or stressors. Of course, they neglected their hygiene, neglected to eat, frequently died horribly… but they were happy.
Didn’t think I’d live to see anything remotely like Grant-Naylor’s imaginings becoming reality but now I’m starting to wonder. The rise of the hikikomori in Japan should have been a warning already, I suppose. Think I’ll go out for a walk…
And I thought Orwell’s “1984” was amusing when I first read it.
There is also the fact it will literally be Satan’s Playground.
I’m also reminded strongly of E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops, looking more incredibly prescient with every passing year, yet written in 1909!
What better, kinder, way to deal with the “problem of over-population” could there be than to persuade the masses to give up on “unsafe” real life, with all of its potential for messy, uncontrolled procreation, and to “live” in a virtual world, in a virtual “community”, with virtual boy/girl/whateverfriends, in which there is no unchosen obligation to be who you actually are?
This is demonic. Perhaps some people will be gulled into it for some time, but the human spirit is way too strong for it to take over permanently. And, after all, someone’s still got to clean the toilets. The sooner the elites pushing this stuff realise that they, nor anyone, can control everything the better it will be for everyone.
Im glad you used the word “demonic”. As a scientist /tech guy Im reluctant to admit this, but over the last two decades ive been increasingly coming to the view there may be spiritual influence on the digital realm. Hence mention of prayer in my original comment. There’s lore going back a thousand years and more that certain spirtual entities especially hate matter, suggesting they’d be happier interacting digitally. Unherd writer Paul Kingsworth has wrote about this years back.
That said, due to the vicotory gained on a Roman cross 2,000 years back, if there are any malign eneties at work in digital, there’s almost certainly benevolence too. Hence each one of us can help with prayer. I’d dissent a bit from your first para in that I consider its partly literally true. If one takes a few days to review worldwide anti Loneliness intiatives this last 50 years, one would find that litterally millions of people have tried to help. Much work has been non accademic, but there have been tens of thousands of studies, hundreds of systematic reviews, and even several umbrealla “review of systematic reviews”. All finding that despite all that effort, theres no good cost effective & repeatable real world way to intervene against loneliness. (Though some lonely people do very much benefit on an individual level.) And if anything, the problem of Loneliness is getting worse, with new and arguably more intense forms becoming a common experience (the incel phenomena.) I’m not saying theres proven digital solutions either,and it would be madness to rely on digital solutions alone. But digital is arguably looking more promising. To bring this back to the sprititual, the main reason *some* males get years of deep contemenent from relationships with sexdolls and even fully digital AI girlfriends is maybe projection of their own anima. But there may be some connection with the divine femine too. (Focussing on men as annoyingly Ive seen much less evidence that lonely women benefit as much from this sort of digital solution.)
Maybe the hatred of the material is associated with those malignant entities’ obsession with fire? After all, when things are burnt they cease to possess their own identities; there is a solidarity and a oneness in their ashes. The inferno is all consuming and it knows no rich, no poor, no black, no white, no living, no dead. In that sense, it unites.
What I find fascinating is that the people most committed, knowingly or not, to a materialist worldview seem not to want to live in a material world at all. They seem quite happy to disappear into a gnostic metaverse. Mary Harrington has written about this on these pages with far more acuity than I could ever hope to achieve.
My sense is that loneliness and alienation are not aberrations that a well executed intervention (pharmaceutical, social, or otherwise) could ever hope to fix. Rather they are the inevitable byproduct of industrial societies that believe in progress of one form or another, in which people are valued not for who they are but what they can produce, or at least what image they can project.
As to the men who find satisfaction and emotional sustenance in AI “girlfriends” – good luck to them, I am not in a place judge. But has their ability to relate to other people has been so damaged by the toxic dehumanised environment in which they have grown up, and in which they are now living their biologically adult lives, that they can’t position themselves in relation to their peers. That is, that they haven’t actually left psychological childhood at all and living with lines so blurred they can’t make them out anymore? Is this the way in which the metaverse “wants” to drag us, so that we never actually leave the childish things behind and grow up to be fully functioning, sovereign, and independent men and women – with all of our glorious flaws, imperfections, and capacity to do new things?
Thanks so much for the excellent reply. I’ll respond in turn to your 4 paras. #1 Maybe. I dont know much esoteric lore regarding malign entities. I know a bit more about the light side, and generally fire is regarded as the top of the 4 lower elements (i.e. above air, earth & water, though below spirit.) This is why gold is such a prominent colour in royal ceremonies and the like as it symbolises fire and the heavens. If you’re suggesting there may be an ancient & malign spirit behind Woke, I’d agree that’s possible, one of my teachers (Scott Mannion on his Youtube) certainly thinks so. As with near everything on this earth though, the good and bad are mixed together, identity politics are surely in part divinely inspired too. “No Greek nor Jew, no male nor female, no slave nor free” and dozens of other passages…
#2 Yes I also love MH. Just the sort of insight & eloquence the times call for.
#3 Agreed, though Loneliness was with us right from the start. The very first specific -ve mentioned in the Holy Bible. Possibly intended to motivate us to fill that God shaped hole by reaching out to Him. Though not something most could do easily, hence the gift of that love (Eros) most similar to divine love. (Gen 2:18) But yes, the problem has intensified for the reasons you say.
#4 I’m not sure, but sadly cant disagree. Maybe a consequence of Meta is people will be less able to progress as the Apostle advised, and (in as much as 1 Cor 3:13 applies to the earthly realm) it will become less easy for “fire to try every man’s work”. Definitely interesting times we live in..
I still am not quite sure what the difference is between this imagined immersive future and what has already been available to us for decades. People have built entire separate lives on platforms like VRChat, Second Life, IMVU and Habbo Hotel, heck even basic sites like old style internet forums and 4chan which have their own cultural mores and quasi-languages. To me it just sounds like marketing hype. Human beings have been creating their own fake worlds and inhabiting them using the internet for three decades.
those are as different to the Metaverse as Tom Hank’s basketball ‘Wilson’ was to a real human friend.
1970’s cheap weed and a couple hits of LSD
This stuff coming will destroy who ever joins it.
‘A revolution in human consciousness’? I think someone’s consciousness has taken a downwards turn, not an upwards one if their assessment of where Web 3, as they call it, is going to lead us. There will undoubtedly be good and bad mixed in, but I have little confidence that the metaverse as a concept is going to better human life in general when it – like most new-fangled technological innovations – fails to address the root psychological and spiritual deficits most of us continue to suffer from.
A world where oligarchs who already own everything in real life get to control the scarcity of fake stuff that they drip to the masses to exploit and commoditize every last ounce of living out of them?
No thanks. I’ll take nature made in God’s image over nature made in man’s image any day.
Great article on a fascinating subject. Though challenging to know what to think unless you have hundreds of hours to research. Many of the engineers who have put tens of thousands of hours into this are extremely optimistic. They expect Web 3 to be benefit everyone, but if anything the common people more than the elite. They see tech like blockchain & tokenisation as being at the heart of web 3 and as being designed from basic principles to resist centralised control. So in that view web 3 gives folk more economic agency and options, in addition to the cultural / aesthetic & choice elements discussed in the article. Certainly I think it will be very life enhancing for some.
I’m worried there will be a risk of economic benefits being excessively captured by the tech savvy. And despite the engineers vision, possibly by private sector elites, at the expense of government & hence public power. Even more so I’m concerned web 3 might accentuate anti real world trends, as detailed in the excellent recent unheard Mary Gaitskell article “When did physical approach become scary?”. Still, may turn out to be a big net benefit for the world. I’ll be praying that turns out to be the case!
So, Web3 = The Matrix, even down to the monsters who run it behind the curtain.
There is a great example of the money motive here in this very article. When you click on one of the links, it takes you to an article published by the Wall Street Journal, which only gives you a peek at the first paragraph before requiring one to subscribe before being able to read the entire article. I never do so, by the way. If zapping me with ads is not enough revenue generation for the site, then I’m not interested.
I’m kinda addicted to Unherd: does that mean thet got me too?
I’m left wondering if Askonis has tried a recent VR headset like Oculus Quest 2 or similar? You can call the fully immersive experience of VR “Web 3.0” as if it were just another increment in the evolution of the internet but this significantly downplays the significance of the transition. The key difference is that with sufficiently powered VR most normal people lose awareness of their place/status in the “real world” .
The currently technology allows for this in a limited way – the technology is a critical piece of the experience so Ball’s need to explain the tech is essential (Askonis’ tcp/ip analogy fails massively).
Lastly, Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One (book first then movie) are must read/sees for where we possibly are headed.
Wasn’t there a film about this with that guy from Bill and Ted?
What I notice is how the 30 year transition from Web0 (real life) to Web1 (text) to Web2 (video & pictures) has resulting in a gradual increase in loneliness, anxiety, depression, addiction, and a decline in meaningful human contact, while enriching the educated, technophilic, managerial class.
This makes me suspect what will happen as we transition to Web3 (immersive virtual reality) as well: the baby of a ménage-a-trois between Gattaca, Brave New World, and the Matrix.
Old hat; article, behind the times.
In Jerusalem in Israel there’s a touristy place that offers those masks where the screen is 4 inches away from your face. Put on the mask and it’s like walking around inside the Temple that existed 2,000 years ago. You can look in one direction and see the Levites singing. The Priests were with animals. The doors were huge. You can go to the top of the walls for a birds eye view. Very immersive.
“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.”
I call it out as bullsh!t. You are not surfing the web, you are not inhabiting an alternative reality in the metaverse -.You are sitting in you mother’s spare room typing.