On finishing the novel, I immediately started in on Pessoa: An Experimental Life by Richard Zenith. Admittedly, a 1,000-page tome about a spectacularly odd writer whose life, Zenith admits some 700 pages in, was “uneventful”, isn’t for everybody. And it confirmed my suspicion that Pessoa’s importance lies less in the quality of his writing than in the extraordinary novelty of his inner world. It seems ultimately fitting that Pessoa is interred next to de Gama, the first European to reach India by sea. Although in his 47 years on earth he rarely left his beloved Lisbon, he was an intrepid voyager of the inner cosmos, a discoverer of new worlds within the fathomless depths of the self. In the vast yet claustrophobic matrix of our online era, where identity is a febrile, paranoid play of masks and veils, his strange life story feels strikingly modern — and singularly poignant.

Pessoa is best known in the Anglophone world for his work of world-weary philosophical fragments and melancholy reveries, The Book of Disquiet, and for his unique mode of authorship. The aforementioned host of heteronyms each produced work in a distinctive style, and each bore a unique biography, character, ideological outlook, and even signature which Pessoa — like a child who never outgrew his imaginary friends — practised writing in his notebooks. Outwardly unassuming and diffident, Pessoa was a literary volcano that never stopped erupting — poems, essays, fictions, fragments, dialogues, and polemics spewed forth from his restless pen. But when it came to publishing, let alone self-publicising, he was hesitant to the point of self-effacement. In the final stretches of Pessoa: An Experimental Life, we find him still agonising over whether to publish a book at all (Mensagem, the only book of Portuguese poetry he published in his lifetime, appeared the year before his death).

He left behind a vast archive of work, much of it stored in his famous trunk, and much of it in varying states of incompletion. Pessoa was a champion unfinisher: project after project was started and then abandoned, or existed only on the many lists of future works he drew up for his gang of heteronyms to one day get round to. “None of it got written except for a brief opening paragraph,” reads a typical sentence in Zenith’s book. While some literary biographies dazzle with drama, Pessoa’s is remarkable for everything he didn’t do: have sex, publish much of anything, go anywhere. Norman Mailer he was not. Pessoa’s “experimental” life could no less accurately be called ineffectual — until you recall where his tomb now rests, and then it seems he wasn’t so ineffectual after all.

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The key events in Fernando Pessoa’s life can be listed in a few lines. He was born into a comfortably bourgeois Lisbon family in 1888, which later relocated to Durban in South Africa. They returned to Portugal in 1905 after the better part of a decade and, for the rest of his life, Pessoa would never travel further from Lisbon than its nearby seaside resort towns Estoril and Cascais. As an adult he mostly made money writing business letters for various firms, and in a farcically inept venture, he established a printing and publishing press, Ibis, which quickly went out of business. He had a low-energy dalliance with a young woman named Ophelia, but eventually he spurned her affections. Almost certainly he was a closeted homosexual who died a virgin. Throughout his adulthood he hung out with fellow literati in Lisbon’s cafes, drank increasing volumes of wine and brandy, and wrote incessantly.

So much for the outward life. Uniquely, Pessoa: An Experimental Life begins with a “Dramatis Personae” of figures who existed only in its subject’s imagination. Pessoa distinguished his heteronyms from conventional pseudonyms: “Pseudonymous works are by the author in his own person, except in the name he signs; heteronymous works are by the author outside his own person. They proceed from a full-fledged individual created by him, like the lines spoken by a character in a drama he might write.” Pessoa had no wife or children and few close friends, but he dwelled in a clamorous psychic world of prolific literary companions who argued against, formed alliances, and otherwise engaged with one another. The three most important heteronyms were the Whitmanesque (and bisexual) Álvaro de Campos, the stately classicist Ricardo Reis, and Pessoa’s acknowledged “master”, Alberto Caeiro, who wrote serene bucolic verse and believed “that things are exactly what they seem to be”.

As Zenith quips in his prologue, “one could say that Portugal’s four greatest poets from the twentieth century were Fernando Pessoa”. Each was as fully imagined as the characters a novelist invents to populate his fictions, only the novel the heteronyms inhabited was the life of their author, Fernando Pessoa. And like a novelist dreaming up his characters, Pessoa experienced that strange necromancy of channelling voices that seemed to exist somehow beyond himself, that were more than their creator. Pessoa occasionally found himself writing better than he could write — achieving, through the schizoid ventriloquism of being possessed by his heteronyms, poetic effects that seemed to him beyond his own capacities. No stranger to mystical cosmologies, Pessoa toyed with the idea that his heteronyms were actually existing selves, conscious entities dwelling in a multitiered universe. At least to his own mind, Pessoa’s pursuit of writing unlocked hidden levels of the cosmic architecture. He was given to asking himself such deranging ontological questions as whether his alter-egos were his inventions, or he was theirs — whether he was nothing more nor less than “a series of dreams about me dreamed by someone outside me”.

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Such cases of innovation in literary form facilitating metaphysical discovery are rare but not unheard of. In the mid-Seventies, a few decades after Pessoa’s death, the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick underwent a dramatic cosmic revelation (or psychotic breakdown, depending on one’s point of view) that prompted him to declare: “My novels and stories were, without my realising it consciously, autobiographical.” Dick spelled all this out to a dumbfounded science-fiction conference audience in France in a speech with the unbeatable title, “If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others” (it reportedly took his listeners a while to realise Dick wasn’t merely detailing the plot of his latest novel). In the wake of his awed intimations of what today’s physicists tentatively call the multiverse, Dick became avidly interested in religious, esoteric and Gnostic thought, trying for the rest of his life to make sense of his shattering visionary experience.

Pessoa was likewise fascinated by such subjects as would come to preoccupy Dick. He wrote hundreds of poems and pages on esotericism and was fluent in the practices and theories of astrology, seances, Theosophy, Hermeticism, Kabbalah, secret societies, alchemy, and magic. Among the phases of literary influence he passed through was one spent in thrall to the Symbolist movement seeded by Charles Baudelaire, whose doctrine of “correspondences” — “whereby we who walk the world are said to pass through ‘forests of symbols’ that give us ‘knowing looks’” — was indebted to the mystical philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg. At the age of 42, Pessoa enjoyed a brief but mutually enriching friendship with the notorious magus and tabloid-favourite Aleister Crowley — a.k.a. the Great Beast 666 — after Pessoa wrote to him offering astrological advice and attaching some of his poems. (Their relationship fizzled out after Crowley visited Lisbon, recruited Pessoa to help him stage his own suicide, and then scarpered to Berlin.) Habitually staying up till the small hours drinking brandy and working on his texts, Pessoa wrote like a warlock-alchemist bent on transforming self and reality.

The cosmological conclusion Pessoa drew from his reading and writing was that there exist multiple levels of reality, and our grossly material, earthbound lives are but shadows of our true being on a higher, more brilliant plane. Although he took a keen interest in his nation’s political life, Pessoa became ever more hermetically devoted to the search for hidden mysteries and secret knowledge — gnosis. A letter he wrote to a young literary acquaintance in the final year of his life offers as clear a statement as any of Pessoa’s spiritual beliefs. In it, he professed his faith in “the existence of worlds higher than our own and in the existence of beings that inhabit those worlds”, and posited “various, increasingly subtle levels of spirituality that lead to a Supreme Being, who presumably created this world. There may be other, equally Supreme Beings who have created other universes that coexist with our own, separately or interconnectedly.” He suspected himself of being guided by higher forces, a mysterious Master or Masters hidden behind the veil of material reality: “Emissary of an unknown king, / I carry out hazy instructions from beyond.” When, like W.B. Yeats (to whom he also wrote letters), Pessoa began conducting experiments in automatic writing, one of the “spirits” who seized hold of his pen told him: “You are the centre of an astral conspiracy.”

Genius, in other words, was a matter of destiny — and Pessoa’s destiny, he believed, was to win in death an immortal glory that would invert his obscurity in his own lifetime. When he was not yet 40, he wrote in a letter to a newspaper (typically left unfinished and unsent): “I feel younger every year because every year I am nearer to having never achieved anything in life… I have never made a real effort after anything, nor applied my attention strongly except to futile, unnecessary and fictional things.” For all his idler’s defiance, Pessoa was not untouched by the sadness of life unlived, of having done little with his existence other than daydream and scribble. In one of his reveries, Bernardo Soares, the heteronym that authored the scraps that make up The Book of Disquiet, recollects in one of his reveries the sense of mystery and wonderment he felt as a child on attending Mass. Soares confides to his diary an admission that, in light of Pessoa’s gnostic intimations of exile from divine origins, is doubly moving: “What I am would be unbearable if I couldn’t remember what I’ve been.”

Pessoa’s greatest outpouring of writings on esotericism occurred between 1931-1934, ending the year before he died. Acquaintances remarked on how, towards the end of his life, preoccupied with mortality, he gave off an otherworldly, mysterious, sage-like impression, as if he was only half here, half already in the beyond. Pessoa’s great Argentine contemporary, Jorge Luis Borges, admitted in old age that he found himself impatient with the mundane concerns of daytime, eager to get back to night with its far more serious business of dreaming. Pessoa — a writer who, had he not existed, Borges might have dreamed up — was likewise a man whose commitment to inaction, dreams, fantasy and the imagination went against the grain of modern life.

Ultimately, the Scottish poet and aphorist Don Paterson was not wrong, I think, when he remarked that the idea of reading Pessoa generally trumps the actual experience. The chief subjects of The Book of Disquiet, tedium and weariness (tédio and cansaço in the Portuguese language which, Pessoa once suggestively observed, has “no bones”), are hardly the most exciting or fertile of literary themes. Still, amid a culture frenzied with productivity and achievement, it’s refreshing to spend time in the company of so orientally inclined a writer, for whom “Action is a disease of thought.” Although Pessoa’s inner world was far richer than the abject Metaverse Mark Zuckerberg and his cohorts would have us live inside, aren’t we all, with our multiple online selves and our crowded-lonely worlds of techno-fantasy, living Pessoan lives now? His posthumous renown as Portugal’s great modern poet notwithstanding, it may be that Fernando Pessoa’s real achievement was only secondarily at the avant-garde of literature, and primarily at that of selfhood.

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.

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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.

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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+.

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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.

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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.