How to Save the Metaverse (and Why)

Turn it inside out

Ah, the Metaverse. Apparently, everyone wants to move there, and you can even buy real estate in one of its flagship locations, Decentraland. This virtual, online universe is seemingly so important to humanity’s future that one of the biggest tech companies in the world, Facebook, rebranded itself as Meta to promote it.

The Metaverse’s current population? 400 million if you ask Meta; but they’re counting every person who has touched a smart contract that’s linked with the metaverse idea, either deliberately or in the course of doing something else. That probably includes you, even if you’ve never visited the place by strapping a set of VR goggles to your face and staggering around your living room. Those 400 million Metaverse citizens are not all off somewhere partying together; as of September 2023, the number of people ‘visiting’ Decentraland each month was 3.8K—this for a company valued at $500 million.

If you disregard all the people who ‘touched’ the Metaverse in some abstract, transactional way, who’s actually been there lately? I really want to know—because the vision of the Metaverse is as an alternate universe, a virtual playground of unlimited extent, as imagined in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash, Ernest Cline’s Ready, Player One; and in William Gibson’s Cyberspace, the Matrix or (going back to the dark ages of 1982 and Tron, “the Grid”).

In short, the Metaverse is another of those science fiction tropes from the 1900s that the tech bros are stuck on. The rest of humanity has moved on, but the concept remains central to Meta’s plans. Why is this?

Stuck in the Past’s Future

Part of it is that today’s innovators seem to have inherited all of their ideas from last century’s science fiction. They’re trying to make the visions of the 1900s real. My previous example of this was Elon Musk and his attempt to make real the full spectrum disorder of household robots, Martian colonies, brain-computer interfaces, and AI—all dreamed of in the 1940s and 50s. It’s not that these ideas are bad (neural interfaces that can free locked-in patients would be wonderful). They’re just tone-deaf to the new needs of the current generation. (Electric cars are great but don’t really address climate change; e-bikes and public transit have a much bigger impact; so where is the Tesla Bus?)

The Metaverse is similarly atavistic. Back in the 80s, it was cool to think of being transported into a digital realm of infinite possibilities. It would be a great escape from a world where the most sophisticated technology most people used was the shopping mall’s bank machine. That was well before digital technologies were retooled as a vast wealth-extraction system for the super-rich. I mean, I remember the 80s. Back then, we got salary raises. Today, we get credit cards: rented money. Back then, we used cash. Now, we’re cashless and no longer notice the transaction fees attached to every purchase we make.

But worse than that, we’re already exhausted from being on Zoom calls all day and are spiraling into a collective anxiety disorder because when we’re not online at our desks, we’re doom-scrolling on our phones. I don’t know about you, but I’m finding it hard to read new articles on my phone; anything that isn’t poking my panic buttons to feed the engagement algorithms is an attempt to sell me something. Does anybody really think the Metaverse is going to be different? It’s going to be engagement-driven, just like social media, and that means it will be, as Marshall McLuhan prophesied, a true global village, namely a claustrophobic neighborhood where gossip rules over fact.

If I were the paranoid type, I might be inclined to think that the Metaverse was intended as a distraction—the waving hand that we focus on while the other hand steals our wallet. (But to believe that, I’d have to imagine that the wallet hasn’t already been stolen. I’m afraid that ship has sailed.)

Maybe that’s not what’s going on here, but the nagging question remains: as far as our real lives are concerned, just what is the Metaverse for?

Metaverse as Apocalypse

I’ve talked before about how there are two kinds of apocalyptic imagery: negative, and positive. Society, city, garden, and sheepfold: these are the four components of apocalyptic imagery. When you apply negative apocalyptic imagery to the online world, you get The Matrix, in which individuals are isolated, society is a simulation run by demonic AIs, and people physically exist only as livestock in factory farms and slaughterhouses. The Matrix inverts all of the standard images in a manner typical of the negative apocalypse, an inversion that’s mirrored as well in today’s rhetoric about the rise of AGI.

The Metaverse, on the other hand, directly, deliberately frames itself using the imagery of the positive apocalypse. We’re asked to imagine a true global society where the Ascended believers of Facebook live in an idealized online city/garden. There, the only AIs are angelic, and we are protected—safe within the fold.

You might think this version would appeal to individuals, as a kind of virtual heaven. It really doesn’t seem to, and I think that’s related to the fact that we miss one another’s actual presence. Zoom is a lonely place, as are all the Metaverse’s digital alternatives. We also miss going out into nature; hell, after Covid, we miss going out at all. The last thing we need is another technological barrier between ourselves and the natural world. Even the Augmented Reality version of the Metaverse is going to be another billboard spoiling a view that needs no augmentation.

But you can bet the Metaverse appeals to capitalists. I mean literal capitalists: people who own capital. The reason is that, much as the tech bros hate to admit it, the authors of the Limits to Growth report were right: you can’t have infinite economic expansion on a planet with finite resources. Capitalism requires growth, and if we are forced to honour the planetary boundaries so eloquently displayed in Kate Raworth’s Doughnut model, then traditional capitalism has to… stop.

This being an unacceptable (not to mention unimaginable) answer to the question of how to live in the real world, is it any surprise that the preferable answer is to create a virtual world that has no such limits? Look at Decentraland. You too can own virtual real estate! Heck, anybody can! Unlike Earth, Decentraland has infinite geography to expand into. All you have to do is convince users (and investors) that your virtual people, places, and things have real monetary value, and capitalism’s resource constraint problem goes away. (Of course, space development can theoretically do the same thing, but its entry price is much higher.) The way that you attract people to your new world is by filling it with supernormal stimuli—as the U2 song puts it, with experiences that are “even better than the real thing.” (For a great primer on supernormal stimuli, check out Deirdre Barrett’s book, Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose.)

With supernormal stimuli as your accelerator pedal and the Metaverse as the road, for Capitalism, the spree can now go on forever!

sure why not

I don’t actually have a problem with Capitalism being bound in a nutshell, like Hamlet. What I do have a problem with is human beings checking out of real life en masse just when the planet needs their help the most. Entering a virtual world means deliberately turning away from the real one. You may have personal reasons for wanting to do that; fine. But there is no excuse for millions or hundreds of millions of people to abandon reality. That would be an obscenity.

Making the Metaverse Real

There is an alternative. Consider how the Metaverse is framed as a separate world using traditional apocalyptic imagery. When we frame a new domain such as advanced computing interfaces in apocalyptic terms, it’s natural that the assumptions and connotations that go with the frame come along for the ride. Religious and philosophical traditions use such imagery to posit an alternative reality—call it Heaven, separate spheres of being, or the multiverse if you want. The point is, that other realm is not this one, specifically and intentionally not this one: it’s better.

If the Metaverse is a separate world, then entering that one means leaving this one. But what if the door to the Metaverse led back here—to the real, living world, just in metaphorical guise?

This is how we save the Metaverse: we change this one foundational metaphor. Instead of it being an exit, an escape from this world, we design it as a place where our real-world problems still exist but are transformed into entities on a human scale, that we can understand better cognitively, and cope with better both practically and emotionally. Make the Metaverse into a space we enter by choice to wrestle with our personal and collective demons, emboldened and assisted by companions both human and AI.

In enactivist terms, the current vision of the Metaverse replaces the causal loop that goes from our minds to the outside world, with a loop that goes from our minds to a Punch and Judy puppet-show version where Meta, Google, OpenAI and Apple are pulling the strings. In my version, we keep the loop that connects us to the real world, and build a parallel, one-to-one model beside it that is gamified and dramatized. In that secondary world, we get to test the personal, real-life choices we have to make but may be afraid of or be unable to work through on our own.

Putting it another way, picture an open-source version of the Metaverse where you own all the data about yourself. This version is a mirror image of your real life, but transformed into a Hero’s Journey. Rather than the supernormal stimuli that feed the doomscrolling algorithms of social media, you would have exagerrated but manageable versions of the people and situations of your life. They exist to amplify your confidence and ability to act in the real world. This Metaverse might be a fantasy world, but the fantasy is a tool for empowerment.

Is such a version of the Metaverse possible? I believe that it is; in fact, I and a team of visionary experts and entrepreneurs have spent the past couple of years designing a service that follows these principles. We’re days away from a major announcement, so watch this space!

The door is opening (though slowly). It’s our choice whether it opens onto a fake playground that only gives us temporary relief from our sorrows; or whether, on stepping through it, we find ourselves back where we started—but with superpowers and allies.