Against the Facebook ‘Metaverse’

I n their haste to “move fast and break things,” Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and his ilk have broken plenty of things: public discourse, family ties, the mental health of thousands of teenagers. But it wasn’t enough. Now, the technologies of his ambitious new “Metaverse” threaten to break our very humanity.

Late last month, Facebook released a video announcing that it would be changing its name to “Meta” and shifting its focus to a new project called the “Metaverse.” The Metaverse contains elements of both VR (virtual reality) and AR (augmented reality). The former describes a purely digital world through which users navigate while remaining physically stationary. Think Ready Player One, or even Fortnite. Augmented reality, on the other hand, consists of virtual elements layered on top of physical reality. Put on your AR glasses, and you might see a glowing path leading toward your destination or watch the statue of General George Gordon Meade on Pennsylvania Avenue come to life and recite biographical information in the first person.

Of the two, virtual reality is the more overtly dystopian. It fully disincarnates the user, placing every aspect of his reality in the hands of omnipotent Silicon Valley overlords. Meanwhile, the real world goes to pot. Some people think that’s a good thing. Here’s what former Bloomberg columnist Noah Smith had to say:

Think of the classic movie American Graffiti. George Lucas depicts his memories of a 1950s world where young people have fun, hook up, and get social status by driving around in cars all day and all night. This is hugely resource intensive. Nowadays, kids can have fun with their friends by chatting, sharing stories, and playing video games online. They can use Tinder to hook up instead of cruising around. And they can get social status by accumulating Facebook likes, TikTok views, and Twitter follows. Thus, young people have been ditching cars for smartphones. That means less gasoline burned, less steel and aluminum used, and so on. But more fun ultimately to be had.

Yikes. I can only assume Smith — or should I say Agent Smith? — watched The Matrix and thought the machines were the good guys. Think of the Nebuchadnezzar’s carbon footprint!

At first glance, augmented reality seems less threatening. Many of us have fond memories of Pokémon GO, a game developed by software company Niantic. In Pokémon GO, the game world is the real world. Players acquire power-ups at physical landmarks and achieve in-game goals by taking walks. During the summer of 2016, my friends and I spent many a night hopping in the car, blasting the Pokémon theme song, and driving out to nearby towns we’d never visited before to catch a few of the elusive creatures and battle with other players. There was a real sense of community in shouting “Woo! Team Mystic!” at complete strangers 50 yards away and hearing them respond in kind. As one popular meme has it, the summer of Pokémon GO might be the closest we ever get to world peace.

Clearly, I was using the product as intended. “We ask the question: what if technology could make us better?” Niantic CEO John Hanke wrote in a recent blog post. “Could it nudge us get us off the couch and out for an evening stroll or a Saturday in the park? . . . Collectively, could it help us discover the magic, history, and beauty hiding in plain sight?” Pokémon GO certainly had that effect, but its AR features were rudimentary. As the technology advances, can we really trust Zuck and Hanke to continue leading us to green pastures?

Catching Pokémon was just the beginning. Hanke envisions a future in which users can choose from thousands of “reality channels.” Walk down the street, and you’ll see some people living in an Indiana Jones world, puzzling out virtual inscriptions on sidewalks and running from boulders only they can see. Others, battling Thanos in the Marvel Augmented Universe, throw punches at thin air. Some people, Hanke suggests, “might even appear transformed into the guise of their in-game persona.” You can imagine those people demanding to be addressed and treated as the animalesque avatars with which they identify more closely than their own bodies.

Does that sound like a techno-utopia? It sounds more like a psych ward.

I see many potential benefits to augmented reality. I also fear that it’ll end up cluttering our peripheral vision with ads and marginalizing anyone who refuses to adopt the new technology. Ultimately, though, the best argument I can offer against it is that it’s unreal. What we call reality exists at the point of intersection between our perceptive powers and the physical world. It’s the fine-tuned product of millions of years of evolution. It’s a large part of what makes us human. For theists, it’s also divinely ordained. I don’t want that reality tampered with by tech bros who pride themselves in breaking things. Yes, there are truths (both spiritual and scientific) that we can access only by stepping outside our perceptions, but to write those perceptions off as mere appearances is to fall into Gnosticism, the favorite heresy of all post- and trans-humanists.

Alternate and virtual realities appeal to us because real reality has become unreal. The world has been emptied of magic, but fear not. Niantic and Meta are here to fill it back up.

In The Discarded Image, C. S. Lewis describes modernity as the product of a “great movement of internalisation, and that consequent aggrandisement of man and desiccation of the outer universe.” The angels, demons, sprites, and saints that once populated the cosmos are dismissed or psychologized. The world, once charged with God’s grandeur and governed by eternal law, is reduced to molecules in motion. The selves that inhabit that world are reduced to specimens in an environment. We can say nothing of the objective duty of the father or the objective beauty of the waterfall, only of the entirely arbitrary feelings the newborn’s cry and the cataract’s crash inspire in us. Even those feelings become raw material for technocratic manipulation.

The modern self is reduced to, as Walker Percy put it, a “voracious nought” that seeks “to nourish and inform its own nothingness by ingesting new objects in the world but . . . only succeeds in emptying them out.” Having erased the real world (and damn near lost ourselves in the process) we’re on the cusp of empowering Silicon Valley to project a new one onto a now-blank canvas. Historian Mircea Eliade writes that the disenchanted universe is “an inert thing without purpose or significance.” That purposelessness threatens to abolish our very humanity, and the Metaverse will not save us. It cannot restore the great cosmic dance. If it does reanimate the inert world, it does so only in the sense that a scientist uses electrical current to produce muscle spasms in a corpse. The mountain view isn’t enough. Throw on your AR glasses and apply a pastel filter or add a virtual yeti. Ah. Much better.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We could re-enchant the world ourselves. Go to a local Orthodox church and try to see it on its own terms. “St. John the Baptist” isn’t just the building’s name. The saint himself, a deified human who preached the Gospel in hell itself, looms invisibly over the onion domes. The icons you see inside are not mere representations but windows to heaven. The saints they portray are really there. Kissing the wood and paint is like pressing your lips to your lover’s with a thin curtain in between. Look down into the chalice. The “eternal fountain hides and splashes / Within this living bread.” Glance at the babushka next to you. You’ll see an eternal soul destined for godhood and guarded by the same kind of bodiless power “that moves the sun and other stars.” This is true augmented reality, or rather, it is a reality that has no need of augmentation. Someone who saw the world like that would laugh Zuck’s illusions to scorn.

That’s certainly not how I see the world. It may be that no one has been able to see it that way for centuries. “Saints and poets maybe.” Supercharging reality with meaning once again will be an arduous task that carries its own risks, but failing to do so will cost us far more. St. Paul wrote that God created the world in such a way as to make “His invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature” clearly perceptible in nature. The Metaverse would be a world reflecting the invisible attributes not of YHWH, but of a new god: Mark Zuckerberg. “For we are all his children.”