The metaverse: not heard of it? That's good news
Back on planet earth, desperate problems need serious and urgent solutions
First, he came for you and your friends (via, let’s remember, what was originally a crass, women student rating app), with an alleged mission to bring the world closer together. Now Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, has announced an even bigger ambition: to build Facebook into a unified and interconnected digital world.
Before all your eyes glaze over, a very simple explanation of what tech geeks, as ever, wish to over-complicate. I owe the following details to Tortoise, the ‘wise up, slow’ down news outlet I strongly recommend you all sign up for.
First, what did Zuckerberg mean when he told employees in June that his goal was to ‘transition’ Facebook into a ‘metaverse company’? To Zuckerberg, it’s a ‘successor to a mobile internet’ (that is, smart phones and 4G+) where ‘instead of just viewing content – you are in it’.
Facebook users would feel as present in the metaverse as if they were in the real world. If you wanted to see a friend, for instance, you could pop up as a hologram on their sofa. If you felt like working in Costa, you could conjure up your workspace through your VR headset. (All this is very ‘gamey’ and you’d be dead right to associate it all with gaming, but on a vastly increased – and precious energy sapping – scale.)
Of course, as with many ‘innovations’ the first question to be asked is WTF?
And the answer is, banally, to make Mr Zuckerberg even more money than he already has, sloshing around his billionaire life. What did you think all the confected fuss emerging from Facebook is about? (But as my wife would say: it’s not about you, you’re not the target audience.)
That audience is already half-way to swallowing the red (or is it blue?) pill that comes with living too closely to all this dangerous hype. Incredibly, 75 per cent of 8-12-year-old children in the USA are addicts of Roblox, an open-ended virtual world of games. In short, get ‘em hooked early and you have them for life. The Jesuits had it right: ‘give me the child for the first seven years and I’ll give you the man’.
The metaverse, then, stripped of its mystique, contains nothing more than a tawdry commercial trick to keep folk spellbound – and paying through the nose for it, you may be sure of that – while the real world burns to a crisp, courtesy of the climate emergency.
Like the Matrix films, fine nonsense, but worth a fortune, according to one over-excited enthusiast, who writes ‘based on precedent, however, we can guess (I particularly like his use of that word, guess; it’s all a guessing game) that the Metaverse (sic) will revolutionise nearly every industry and function. From healthcare to payments, consumer products, entertainment, hourly labour, even sex work (no, me neither)’. The collective value of these changes will be in the trillions [of dollars]’.
The discerning among you will note that he does not define what the metaverse is. Searching through tediously long articles by the same author, drooling in his excitement, I could not find any coherent explanation of the metaverse and, frankly, I am not surprised.
Here is another commentator: ‘But the challenge of building an “embodied internet” is not just a technical one. A metaverse would raise huge and separate questions about how such a virtual space would be governed and how its contents would be moderated. It’s an audacious project for Facebook, which is already facing a regulatory storm around how it normally works.’ Quite.
While extolling the wonders of a Matrix-style future virtual world for us all to drown in, the pundits for the metaverse utterly fail to notice what a cluster-fuck their current models represent, in terms of content, regulation, and the damage being done to human beings trying to live routine if often mind-numbingly boring lives.
Outside the wonders of virtual reality, there is, well, just reality.
A growing part of that reality, for too many people, is the continuing malign influence of Facebook and its ugly neighbours, Twitter, Instagram, Tik-Tok and the rest, providing a cacophony of shrieking mobs a platform. Those anonymous hordes seem to be determined to silence anybody who doesn’t agree with their bigoted, unmoderated language of hate: out of control, largely unregulated, so far, and seemingly beyond the power of any terrestrial laws.
What is most dangerous about these anti-social media publishers (for that is what they are), is that they give users a false sense of being empowered, of being in some way democratic, when in fact users are just pawns in the games of the rich and powerful.
Ironically, Trump is a classic example. His use of Twitter revealed far more about him and his thinking than any hidden microphones in the meeting rooms of the White House could have done. How Putin and Xi must have laughed, along with the Fat Boy of North Korea. But this is true of anyone who tweets, or who has an extensive Facebook page: it’s giving away more than you think, principally to those who wish, for nefarious purposes, to hoover up data, to manipulate individuals, families, groups, nations.
The only sure way to stop this ongoing process in its tracks would be to shut down these publisher/platforms for good (and for the public good). It has been suggested, by a number of eminent academics, by politicians (in private), by technicians, by the likes of you and me. Especially me, having won a small victory against Facebook finally to get it to delete (not suspend) any data it held on me.
A second way, more possibly, is to start to regulate them properly, and internationally, not just through nation states. It is no accident that their meteoric rise has been inside the jurisdiction of the USA, with its fiercely defended First Amendment which, inter alia, enforces the freedom of the Press.
There is a paradox here: I argue, with many, and against Facebook, for example, that it is not just a platform on which everyone else publishes. However, it claims freedom to act in the way it does because it says it is not a publisher, when it clearly is.
But, were it to concede that is was (currently unlikely), then it would unquestionably fall back on the First Amendment to defend its continuing in the same way: including that of allowing the most appalling material to be published (like the anti-vaxxer lies about Covid19).
We need to be clever here – and subtle. The nature of the technology that powers the internet, the very nature of that entity, requires a re-think about regulation and freedom: individual, collective, corporate. It also requires a reset in the relationship between the individual and the state, and of the state and supra-national corporate bodies, of which Facebook is a prime example.
There is, in the internet, a huge opportunity to rebalance the power of each and every one of us against the over-mighty, centralising nation state. (It is why the communist government of China, now acting more and more openly like Stalinist gangsters, is so fearful of a free and open internet.)
It ought not to be beyond the wit of men and women, operating in an environment where they are in possession of all the pertinent facts, to devise a regulatory system that both allows the maximum freedom of expression with equal power to curb unreasonable behaviour. As has been said many times, our freedoms do not permit us to shout ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre, unless the threat is real.
The reactions of anti-social media to events is crude and out of control. The organisations are as good as completely unaccountable. But, by regulating these giant corporations does not have to mean curbs on the freedom by any of us, as individuals to make fair comment. At base, it is worth remembering, however, that the anti-social media giants are in the business of making a profit – from their users. If nothing else, consumer legislation ought to apply to them as well.
This Week: Tim has been reading Tono Bungay, one of H. G. Wells’ best novels, a brilliant commentary on many aspects of life during Edwardian times and still relevant today. The title refers to a highly successful patent medicine and the ‘swindle’ of its promotion and sale. The product is worthless. Take a good look around; watch tonight’s tv adverts. Plus ça change.