Against Meta

M ark Zuckerberg has bet the farm on a form of virtual reality, changing his company’s name to Meta and investing $10 billion in the development of the Metaverse, or what he calls Web 3.0. Individuals and companies are already colonizing the Metaverse, buying virtual land in the hopes of making real money. Companies are scrambling to get into the Metaverse and begin selling those people exclusive virtual clothes. Republic Realm spent $4.3 million on digital land in the Metaverse. They created a digital yacht that someone bought for over $600,000. J.P. Morgan thinks the Metaverse is a $1 trillion yearly opportunity — meaning that it would bring in almost twice as much revenue as Walmart, the largest company in the world by revenue.

The initial way to transport yourself to the Metaverse is to wear a virtual-reality headset — basically, a visor with a smartphone a few inches from your face, with headphones. That is, the way to do this is to strap on something that plainly looks like a dystopian prosthesis or torture device. Instead of the shiny black screen merely being a distraction in your hand, the headset completely alienates you from your immediate surroundings.

Just for my personal taste, this is all a bit too far. At some point in my adolescence, a friend who played guitar explained to me that he gave up video games because it just meant spending time building up skills and achievements that had no meaning outside the game or to anyone else. The guitar, as a discipline, gave my friend an outlet for artistic expression, and he was able to bring real joy to people in the real world with it. Becoming a guitarist not only changed the way he thought, but physically changed his hands over time.

His warning about video games sank into me, and I’ve never been able to devote more than a few minutes playing them since. And now, years later, I’m already resentful enough of the screens in my life that the promise of whatever is in a VR screen holds no interest for me. Not enough to get over the physical sense of disgust.

In the pandemic, I just spent two years in which Zoom and other technologies replaced too many of the social events I long to be at. I also was made to wear a garment that effaced me.

This marks me out as a person possessing “Reality Privilege,” according to one Meta board member. Marc Andreessen, a man with whom I’ve chatted once or twice across social networks, gave an interview last year in which he explained the rationale of building a better life in the digital world.

A small percent of people live in a real-world environment that is rich, even overflowing, with glorious substance, beautiful settings, plentiful stimulation, and many fascinating people to talk to, and to work with, and to date. These are also all of the people who get to ask probing questions like yours. Everyone else, the vast majority of humanity, lacks Reality Privilege — their online world is, or will be, immeasurably richer and more fulfilling than most of the physical and social environment around them in the quote-unquote real world.

The Reality Privileged, of course, call this conclusion dystopian, and demand that we prioritize improvements in reality over improvements in virtuality. To which I say: reality has had 5,000 years to get good, and is clearly still woefully lacking for most people; I don’t think we should wait another 5,000 years to see if it eventually closes the gap. We should build — and we are building — online worlds that make life and work and love wonderful for everyone, no matter what level of reality deprivation they find themselves in.

The strangest thing about this is that neither Zuckerberg nor Andreessen has ever cited some sort of consumer research to show that “the vast majority of humanity” longs to escape the physical world, through a face prosthesis, to a world where nature’s comforts are absent, a world entirely curated and controlled by enormous unaccountable corporations.

In other words, Facebook — I mean Meta — will do better than God Himself, and actually rescue the wretched and poor from their fates here on earth. The physical infrastructure around you is already suffering from decay and underinvestment, so let’s abandon it for the seamless cartoon strapped to your forehead. As fertility continues to decline, family life is already disintegrating, so let’s furnish you into a land of billions of avatars. You can meet and interact with any of them, and then they can block you, or get a viral digital mob to report you to the controllers of the Metaverse, who will then put you in their equivalent of digital time-out.

Another technologist, speaking to me almost a decade ago, also saw something like the Metaverse coming, but he had a slightly more sinister take on its purpose. He said that a version of entertainment so immersive would eventually come down the line, and it would simply swallow up the vast majority of “useless people” in its mouth. There would be less crime and disorder. They would breed less. It was a vision of Big Brother giving the proles something that entirely erased their way of life, making them as politically inert and harmless as ice cubes preserved in a tray.

Conservatives have always stood against utopian visions. We opposed New Socialist Man as a figmentary creature. He would never come into being. And so we will inevitably oppose New Meta Man.

The fact is, the Metaverse is not some benevolent service to the Reality Disprivileged — it is an attempt to improve upon the digital experience that technologists have already created, and which they too already fear and resent. They want to improve life for the Zoom class. The whole project is powered by the promise that it will give corporations power to prey upon people’s wallets, without returning to them anything of real value. It will be lifted up by the vision of the political elite who hope to further push-button control of a passive population of alienated individuals.

The good news is that we have the means to stop such a project. Certainly simple disinterest or disgust with the product may stop it. The likelihood that a handful of people who can barely handle criticism for their news-feed curation will be able to outdo Nature and Nature’s God seems remote to say the least. And even if its creators can spit on the last 5,000 years of material life and create their fantasyland, with its attempt to dehumanize us, we Americans also still have a Constitution — long-lived, battered though it may be — that gives us ample power to resist those powers who long to dominate us.