Chapter 8: The Metaverse Cometh
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Late in June 2021 Mark Zuckerberg announced a new direction for his
company, Facebook. Within the next decade or so he plans to offer customers a metaverse, a space “beyond social media” combining
various existing initiatives in virtual reality to create a completely
immersive virtual space where people can interact, work, play and visit
new places both real and imagined.
This is the next step
technology is taking in the unstoppable Enframing process. What
Baudrillard called “hyperreal” is already passe. We are entering a
stage in the evolution of consciousness where people can participate in an
aggregate of realities, the meta-real. As I said in the last
chapter, reality is becoming fungible.
According
to an amazing interview in The Verge, Zuckerberg believes that this will not be an extension of the internet as we know it today. Instead,
according to Zuckerberg, “it's about being engaged more naturally.”
What he means by “naturally” is, of course, an accommodation to the
techno-Enframed influences prevalent in consumption and convenience.
Zuckerberg:
“One of the reasons why we’re investing so much in augmented and virtual
reality is mobile phones kind of came around at the same time as Facebook,
so we didn’t really get to play a big role in shaping the development of
those platforms. So they didn’t really develop in a very natural way, from
my perspective. People aren’t meant to navigate things in terms of a grid
of apps. I think we interact much more naturally when we think about being
present with other people. We orient ourselves and think about the world
through people and the interactions we have with people and what we do
with them. And I think if we can help build the next set of computing
platforms and experiences across that in a way that’s more natural and
lets us feel more present with people, I think that’ll be a very positive
thing.”
Think of Generation Alpha, still being born. If
Zuckerberg hits his estimate of having this reality available in the next
ten years then we will have many millions of teens and younger persons literally being reared within virtual and augmented reality. They
will be the first generation where there is little distinction between virtual and real – it will all be
equally real.
Right now, the biggest roadblock to making these
virtual spaces available is computing power itself. Which, given the
progress being made in that area, seems like a temporary challenge.
The most likely device to deliver these virtual and augmented experiences
will be either a pair of glasses and/or a headset, which means the
miniaturization of computing power not possible today. Yet, work on
such glasses has been on-going for many years already and breakthroughs
have already occurred.
Zuckerberg: “But once you have that, so
you have those glasses and you have your VR headset, I think that’s going
to enable a bunch of really interesting use cases.
“So, one is
you will be able to, with basically a snap of your fingers, pull up your
perfect workstation. So anywhere you go, you can walk into a Starbucks,
you can sit down, you can be drinking your coffee and kind of wave your
hands and you can have basically as many monitors as you want, all set up,
whatever size you want them to be, all preconfigured to the way you had it
when you were at your home before. And you can just bring that with you
wherever you want.
“If you want to talk to someone, you’re
working through a problem, instead of just calling them on the phone, they
can teleport in, and then they can see all the context that you have. They
can see your five monitors, or whatever it is, and the documents or all
the windows of code that you have, or a 3D model that you’re working on.
And they can stand next to you and interact, and then in a blink they can
teleport back to where they were and kind of be in a separate place.”
Although
Zuckerberg would likely oppose it, there is no technological reason why
that these “separate places” cannot be the personalized algorithms I
discussed previously. Somewhere within Gen Z or Alpha is the next
“Zuckerberg” who will capitalize on the commodification of self algorithms
as personal interfaces.
Of course, if you “teleport” in this
fashion, there is no reason you can't put yourself into any number of
virtual spaces that are only possible in a rudimentary way today via
various gaming platforms. What will happen to something like Second
Life which currently has about one million active users and features its
own virtual economy? This technology will enable environments like
that to become even more realistic and accessible. In that sense
“use cases” will mean something far beyond the work-related functionality Zuckerberg uses as an example.
Of
course, Facebook wants to create a metaverse so that it can get away
from needing, as it desperately depends upon today, to run on an Apple
or Microsoft platform. The metaverse is effectively creating a new platform
to fit Facebook in to. But there is nothing to stop other companies
from capitalizing on whatever innovations happen in Zuckerberg's
enterprise. Or maybe even beat him there.
He will by no means have a monopoly on
virtual reality. Every other major technology company is driving
toward the goal of what is labeled in the industry as “co-experience
platforms.” And, having billions of Facebook users worldwide (not to
mention how many people use Google and Apple and Amazon), will only speed
the adoption of virtual spaces and virtual experiences among ordinary
human beings.
As you read this today, Generation Alpha is
already immersed in the virtual world known as Roblox. Roblox is a perfect current example of the power of Enframing. The platform is
geared toward children to assist them in creating their own games and
playing various games with others in a virtual online space. A
downloadable app, in 2019 the company was valued at $1 billion in its iOS (not including Android) version alone.
With
the COVID-19 pandemic, millions of new young users were driven into this
virtual space throughout 2020. This helped to push the total iOS revenue valuation to well over $2 billion in just one
year. 20 games within this platform have been played over one
billion times each with another 5,000 games played over one million times
each.
This represented an unprecedented amount of time
spent by children in virtual realities – thousands upon thousands of
hours. Again, this is an unstoppable force. Alpha Gen is being
raised within immersive platforms like Roblox with plenty more to
come. Roblox is currently only the third-most popular immersive reality game
behind the even more phenomenally successful PUBG and Honor of
Kings.
We
don't have to invent anything, everything required already exists for
humans to crave and have a virtual experience. In 2019, a man from Australia set a
world record by playing Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 continuously for 135 hours. Though the average time a person spends immersed in video
gaming is about 7 – 8 hours a week, roughly 10% of all video gamers spend
more than 20 hours per week online.
Today there are
literally millions of people worldwide who spend the majority of their free time engaged with a virtual reality. As VR becomes more realistically
immersive, it will become more ubiquitous. More and more people will
chose to “teleport” to visit their friends and do activities with
them. There is no political or racial or religious demographic that
can possibly do anything about the fact that more and more people will crave VR. It is unstoppable.
Of
what is coming soon, Andrew Bosworth of Reality Labs, the Facebook VR
group, recently posted online: “Today Portal and Oculus can teleport you
into a room with another person, regardless of physical distance, or to
new virtual worlds and experiences. But to achieve our full vision
of the Metaverse, we also need to build the connective tissue between
these spaces -- so you can remove the limitations of physics and move
between them with the same ease as moving from one room in your home to
the next.”
Technology wants to “remove the limitations of
physics” for human beings. I want to stress again that this is not
the dystopian horror show religious and cultural critics proclaim.
This is simply strange. Genuine transformation is always strange.
Sure, there are all sorts of possibilities for abuse and
undoubtedly much of that will occur despite the best of intentions.
But, for those of us living into a world of constant becoming,
the metaverse is precisely the space within which to express ourselves in order to achieve the next stage in the evolution of consciousness.
Nietzsche
had a strange concept of “eternal recurrence.” No matter what, you will
live your life exactly the same way over and over forever. It is a
disturbing idea. Did he mean it literally? Was it a
thought-experiment? Scholars disagree. Nietzsche also believed
in amor fati, the love of fate. By this he meant, come what may,
resilience and inspiration are proactive affirmations of life. In
fact, amor fati is one of the first instances of living into life.
Loving
fate and being fated to live your life over and over forever in exact
detail demands that you readily come to terms with your life and your behavior.
It is, in fact, a powerful lesson in embracing each and every moment of
your life, regardless of how joyful or painful, whether or not recurrence
is true. Understanding these bizarre concepts turns out to be a key
to living a richer life.
But, to some extent, the metaverse
says Nietzsche is wrong. You are not condemned, so to speak, to a
single, eternally repetitive life. The metaverse will give us
multiple lives, replayable or not. The love of fate becomes something not
singular but as fungible as reality in the Modern.
Nietzsche
might go sleepless worrying that this multiplicity will trivialize our lives instead of
inspiring an embrace of every living moment. But, in truth,
this only amplifies your affirmation of life through the sheer power of
its expansive experience, like beholding a great vista from a mountaintop.
Broadening the spectrum of experiences cheapens neither the experiencing nor the experiencer. Experience becomes more varied and certainly strange within the metaverse but it also weaves an unimaginable tapestry of richness inaccessible today. It will be transformational, our crowning way forward into the dawn of the Modern.
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